beast

of a book.

i'm going to have to buy it now. it's all good.

some bits that i like:

Our windows to the digital world have been confined to flat rectangular screens and pixels - "painted bits." But while our visual senses are steeped in the sea of digital information, our bodies remain in the physical world. "Tangible bits" give physical form to digital information, making bits directly manipulable and perceptible.
- Hiroshi Ishii

Everything that can be digital will be digital.

i wish...

my floor could be made of this stuff...



made with processing and arduino.

wii remote

As previously mentioned i have nicked one of my misters wii remotes to play around with. I want to at least research all the different kinds of possible interactions i can get between people, objects, and the floor.

I've got darwiinmote ORC, and i've got the wiimote chatting to the pooter:


That graph alone amuses me.

i'm also going to be looking at what other people have got working. Here's some wiiball:


and here's some wiipaint:


and some more drawing-ish goodness:

LBP

if you don't like little big planet, you have no soul and are incapable of loving.

most. awesome. hat. ever.

i want one.



the awesome hat is demonstrating an Augmented Reality class developed for flash. I'm not sure if i'll use this in my final piece, but i do want to have a play with it.

it's all coming together

in a way.

I've used everything i've learnt about processing in the past few months to make this code. It imports text from a document (will be replaced with a RSS feed later), splits it into words and looks for a keyword. It also tracks the reddest pixel from a video feed. Once it finds the keyword (in this case, sunny) it looks for the reddest pixel and plonks a big bright sun on the screen.


yes, i'm watching scrubs.

here's the code:


//mushing lasts projects code into this projects colour recognition code to create a program that
//tells you whether it's sunny or not when it sees red.
//background turns yellow

import processing.video.*;
import processing.candy.*;
import processing.xml.*;

Capture video;
SVG yellowsun;

color trackColor;

String[] tokens; //array
int counter;

void setup() {
size(640,480);
video = new Capture(this,width,height,15);
// Start off tracking for red
trackColor = color(255,0,0);

smooth();
yellowsun = new SVG(this, "yellowsun.svg");

String[] lines = loadStrings("feed.txt");
String allText = join(lines, " ");
tokens = splitTokens(allText, " ,.?!:;[]-");
}

void draw() {

if (video.available()) {
video.read();
}

String s = tokens[counter];
counter = (counter +1) % tokens.length;

video.loadPixels();
image(video,0,0);

float worldRecord = 500;

int closestX = 0;
int closestY = 0;

for (int x = 0; x < video.width; x ++ ) {
for (int y = 0; y < video.height; y ++ ) {
int loc = x + y*video.width;
// What is current color
color currentColor = video.pixels[loc];
float r1 = red(currentColor);
float g1 = green(currentColor);
float b1 = blue(currentColor);
float r2 = red(trackColor);
float g2 = green(trackColor);
float b2 = blue(trackColor);

float d = dist(r1,g1,b1,r2,g2,b2);

if (d < worldRecord) {
worldRecord = d;
closestX = x;
closestY = y;
}
}
}

if (worldRecord < 100) {

fill(trackColor);

if (s.equals("sunny")) {
println("sunny");
yellowsun.draw(closestX-100, closestY-100, 100, 100);

} else {
println("not");
}
}
}

i went on a magical adventure

to Hawkins Bazaar, which is a wondrous place populated with students who seem to constantly exclaim "OMGZ i so need one of these" yet never actually buy anything, and spent some pennies on some toys. i have now assembled a magical box of joy.



Magical box contains: wind up toys, noisy putty, bright post it notes, and a very dusty wii remote. it's the player two one so the mister wont miss it. The wii is so very lonely now the PS3 is stealing all my love and affection. more on that later.

Now all i need to do is try to come up with as many ways as possible to get this stuff interacting with a pooter. This is only my demo box of joy, the final box of joy will be much more amazing.

play: part two - Hybrid Toys!

in part two of my little adventure into the world of playing, i am going to look at hybrid toys - hacking stuff to make it fun, in a computery interactive way.



This is a musical pot, by the good people at mediamatic. Inside each flower there is a RFID tag, which controls the pitch the pot resonates, while the big flower has a wii remote inside it which controls the tempo.



This little horsey will spout a recorded message while there is a light source. when it goes dark it shuts up.


I think i need to get some toys in and play around myself.... and some more arduino boards and some RFID tags and nick a wii remote and and and...

play: part one

i've decided to do a series of blog posts about play, because it's what i'm interested in getting people doing. i'm not that interested in trying to find a boring commercial place for my work, so i'm going to justify it's existence by looking at what cool stuff other people are up to.

And although i've already partially defined what i'm doing (an interactive floor), i want to look into as many different interactions i can make between the users and the floor. This all isn't going to be stuff i can necessarily use in my floor, just stuff i like and think is interesting.



this is japanese based interactive music group type thing called d.v.d, causing a bit of a rukus. this performance is called 'flip', and is a pinball game controlled by their drums. i love the chaos in it.



"An audio generating computer and a second one that generates the visuals exchange signals through LAN using OSC. The tracks are played with max/msp. The drum sets are attached with a sensor called trigger and that transmits the vibration of the drums as signals to the midi interface. Those signals are then converted into midi note numbers. That midi data is then sent to the visual PC and creates the actions in the animations generated by processing software." - Jimanica

I want one of these so much it's actually causing me physical pain to watch this video:

tenori-on.
not that i would know what to do with it.

finds big bright red thing right in front of it...

but still seems amazingly clever:



that little red dot is processing going "HEY! that's red!"

Found the code at daniel shiffman's site again. he seems to be the only person in the processing world that tells you how to do things in a simple straightforward way: ie. giving it to you minus the bollocks. YAY.

the lighting in my flat is crap.