Photo: Dan Phiffer

Photo: Heather Dewey-Hagborg

On the topic of data visualization in Camille’s post below, I came across this project from the artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg that borders on many interesting areas including our relation to time and place,  visualizations and privacy.

Here’s a summary;

“We can’t help but leave our DNA all over the place. If you drop a chewed piece of gum or a cigarette butt, it might get picked up by artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg. She may mine it for DNA, analyze the results, and generate a portrait based on the data.”

Read a summary at CNET or at Heather’s website: http://deweyhagborg.com/strangervisions/

Google I/O conference started about half an hour ago.
They have a live feed where you can follow the talks.

One more episode of PBS’s Off Book series, this time on Data Visualization.

More at http://www.youtube.com/user/PBSoffbook?feature=watch

Three new videos/talks from Bret Victor. The first one is titled “Stop Drawing Dead Fish” has the following description:

People are alive — they behave and respond. Creations within the computer can also live, behave, and respond… if they are allowed to. The message of this talk is that computer-based art tools should embrace both forms of life — artists behaving through real-time performance, and art behaving through real-time simulation. Everything we draw should be alive by default.

Super inspiring and very nice to see him use bimanual input on 2 tablets!!!

Next videos are coming May 14 and 28, all available at worrydream.com

You might have heard about the Philips Hue? It is a connected light bulb controlled, locally or remotely, from an app on your iOS or Android device.

Lately people have shown interest in the product outside of its ‘commercial use’. The aim of this post is to shed some light (pun intended) on the possibilities of the Hue as well as getting started implementing it in a project.

The Hue is exclusive to the Apple Store and can be bought as a Starter pack or Single pack. The starter pack includes a bridge and three bulbs. A bridge can control up to 50 bulbs, hence the possibility to buy the single packed bulbs. These bulbs needs to be paired to the bridge of a starter pack. This is the way Philips intended its users to go about extending their collection of lights. However, if you for some reason have multiple starter packs, with bulbs connected to different bridges, it is possible to rewrite the pairing through a nifty little software called LampStealer. Note that while the app was made by Philips employees it is not an official Philips software.

The lamps plug into any standard light fitting and the bridge is connected to a local network. Lamps can be spread further away from the bridge due to the fact that they can communicate with each other through the Zigbee protocol. However, long distances may cause delay, since the signal needs to jump between bulbs. The easiest way to make sure the bulbs works is by downloading an app for a iOS or Android device. Play around with the colour picker or surprise the person next to you with a magic trick. While mesmerizing it gets old fairly quickly.

Programming the bulbs requires one part knowledge in setting up a host and one part knowledge of PHP script. If you do not have this knowledge, fear not! Follow these steps to set up an Apache host using XAMPP for OS X or Windows.

The Hue is still a young product. There is no official SDK, but the Hue community have open documentation of the API that can be of help. An example can be found here*. Note that details such as username and IP address have been replaced with “—————————————”.

The .php file is placed in the ‘htdocs’ folder(…/XMAPPP/htdocs/index.php). To test the setup use any browser and point to the URL (http://localhost/index.php).

The bulbs can be controlled saparately or in groups by extending the URL like such:

http://localhost/index.php?l=X-R-G-B-A-T

X = Bulb (X targets all bulbs and 1,2,3 are specific IDs)
R = Red (0-255)
G = Green (0-255)
B = Blue (0-255)
A = Alpha (0-255)
T = Transition (0-10 seconds)

Turning the first bulb Red with half brightness over three seconds looks like this in Processing:

loadStrings(“http://localhost/index.php?l=1-255-0-0-127-3″);

At last, the Hue lamps can come off as expensive light bulbs, but if one trusts the dedicated development team it can be used for “very long”. That is 50 years of very long. If you dream of a ‘connected society’ or just want to play around with behavior of light it is a great opportunity to be on the frontier.

*Credits to Jurriën Gosselink and Niels Laute for providing the php script.

Cool project by Microsoft Research. It’ll be integrated in the XBox 720, which will be presented next month.

Really beautiful mini documentary about animation with sculptures and stroboscopic lights.

Another kickstarter darling in the making. Here’s also a nice interview with the team behind the project.

Be quick if you’re interested in backing one, the cheaper pledges are running out…fast!

A nice showcase of students projects from the interface design programme at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, Germany.

http://dii.io

David Neevel of Wieden + Kennedy has created an email guitar. That destroys the very idea of usability, but in a good/clever way!

Project post: http://blog.wk.com/2013/04/04/wk-open-source-bridging-the-email-typingguitar-shredding-gap-using-technology/

And check more of the Wieden + Kennedy blog while at it.

Interaction 13 keynotes, panels, 45 min talks and 10 min talks are all online.

http://vimeo.com/album/2284438

If you would want to prototyping something using gestural input icw multiple screens, there is now a toolkit for that. Would maybe have been useful during our (1-week) Avaya project last year. IxD12-13 folks, here is another example of “tomorrow’s meeting rooms”.

From the website:

Greenhouse is a creative coding toolkit for spatial interfaces. Greenhouse enables creative coders and engineers to rapidly prototype spatial interfaces: multi-screen, multi-user, multi-device interfaces leveraging gestural and spatial interaction.
Greenhouse is designed to support the creation of interfaces with seamless user interactions across multiple non-adjacent screens. Instead of designing for one large window, you can design for multiple surfaces in space. Because forms of input like mouse/keyboard/and touch are limited when addressing multiple displays, we provide gesture as a means of input. Gesture is inherently spatial, so it’s not only well suited for multi-screen applications, but also perfect for interacting with spatial data.

When :: 23rd Aug – 1st Sept 2013
Where :: Split, Croatia.
Who :: Open Call for Participation
Application deadline :: Monday 15 April, 2013

The UrbanIxD Summer School will be grounded in the emerging discipline of urban interaction design. The Summer School will address the domain of technologically augmented, data-rich urban environments, with a particular emphasis on human activities, experiences and behaviours.

More infor at http://urbanixd.eu/summer-school & http://urbanixd.eu/summer-school-open-call/

Knobs, wires, big bulky panels and analog circuits in the pursuit of the ultimate analog sound.

“I Dream of Wires” (IDOW) is an upcoming, independent documentary film about the phenomenal resurgence of the modular synthesizer — exploring the passions, obsessions and dreams of people who have dedicated part of their lives to this esoteric electronic music machine. IDOW is written and directed by Robert Fantinatto with Jason Amm (Ghostly International recording artist Solvent) serving as producer and co-writer.

Check http://idreamofwires.org and a bunch of videos at
http://sciencewithsynthesizers.com/idreamofwires/videos.html

Duration is a timeline for creative coding. Create live performances, interactive installations, and music visualizations by synchronously composing servos, lighting, and projection. Duration integrates with OpenFrameworks, Processing, Cinder, vvvv, Unity3d, Quartz, and any other OSC enabled environment.

See the website at http://www.duration.cc and download it from Github