Seriously, all the talk about the internet of things, spimes and ubiquitous computing and the result is a scale that sends your weight and BMI to Google and of course your iPhone. Yawn.
It’s in French.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgaaNw5nIBY]
Strange Attraction (try it here) is an random-shape-generator made with JavaScript and Canvas. Done by Jacob Seidelin.
I have been playing around with it and I found some typographic-like shapes (picture above).
Chrome Experiments are projects from people around the world using HTML, Java, etc. Its a compilation of different programs easily accessible with a Web browser (firefox and chrome I tried). (see all here)
I was excited about the new iPad, even if I’m not a fanboy, when they released it today. Initially I thought it was amazing and revolutionary, but now that seen it all and read all the comments (which are very negative) I realize that it’s technically a POS. It has absolutely nothing new, the OS is the same failure as in iPhone, so you can’t listen to music and browse at the same time, you will need to buy a million connectors to get anything connected to it (oh apple, will you ever learn), and there are better machines already that have stylus support in case you ever want to draw on it, like this Asus eee, which is pretty much the same machine as this, but a million times better. But, it has something that the Windows machines don’t have, a viable business model – the App Store. Now newspapers and magazines and book publishers will hopefully, unfortunately, maybe, probably, eventually some day move towards digital content with their own downloadable app subscription, making Berg Boyz’s Mag+ concept happen. It will happen eventually, whether or not this device is the catalyst or not. We have all seen it in Minority Report.
Stumbled across Mikko’s Love-O-Scope project on Boing Boing :)
www.boingboing.net
15 years of Indium (stuff LCD’s are made of)…
Even less, if demand should increase.
We have some exciting news regarding the upcoming SIDeR 2010 Student Interaction Design Conference that will be hosted at UID March 24-26:
The Call for Papers deadline has been extended, and we are now accepting submissions until January 31st. Please visit www.ingredientsingradients.com for details.
We are also pleased to announce that Zachary Lieberman (www.openFrameworks.cc) will be one of the keynote presenters along with Erik Stolterman (Indiana University), and one more presenter to be announced shortly.
The three-day festival showcases top digital artists, web, print and interactive designers, motion graphics studios, and new music adventurous. OFFF dreams about the future, and then writes the code for it.
Amoung the featured artists are the likes of Julien Vallée ,who some of you were lucky enough have to of seen this fall in Umeå, and Daniel Shiffman who wrote the well known orange reader: Learning Processing.
A clever idea and it seems to be working pretty well! It uses computer vision to recognize and run actions/commands.
Sikuli is a visual technology to search and automate graphical user interfaces (GUI) using images (screenshots). The first release of Sikuli contains Sikuli Script, a visual scripting API for Jython, and Sikuli IDE, an integrated development environment for writing visual scripts with screenshots easily. Sikuli Script automates anything you see on the screen without internal API’s support. You can programmatically control a web page, a desktop application running on Windows/Linux/Mac OS X, or even an iphone application running in an emulator.
So, living in Sweden probably has everyone acquainted with a site called The Pirate Bay. Also if you’ve ever been southern or eastern Europe you’re probably familiar with counterfeit products. Now, as I predicted a couple of posts back that this decade will be the decade when 3D printers come out and people design their own stuff. But, there is definitely a market for designed products in the future. But the second but, every design can be downloaded to the printer and you easily print a fake Alessi toilet brush if you want. Surely the design must be protected by all sorts of IPR, but so is music and movies and still people download them like crazy.
Now, if you are a product designer, shed a little tear or rejoice, which ever is your stance on the subject…
…here comes The Product Bay! As soon as the future starts, they will start sharing designs for people to print in their homes!
Recently I discovered an interesting piece of software created by Kenji Kojima called RGB MusicLab. Simply put, you load an image, set a few options and sliders, and it outputs music (and midi files) based on the RGB values from the image. The mapping can be super simple, or quite complex with variations across multiple instruments and tracks. Simple, funny, interesting, weird, valuable (maybe). The software runs on Mac/PC and is (or was, read on) available as freeware
The author of the application has published some basic music studies investigating the relation Colors and Sounds. You can check a few of them online.
Now the bad part. If you try to access the site now, you get to a blank page, with the following message:
Dear people,
I was informed that I had to remove RGB MusicLab from the web site from a person who had a patent that enabling the interpretation of color as music. I have never known it was a patent technology. And I believed it belonged to all humankind. Moreover RGB MusicLab was realized by many other great technologies of anonymous. Though I have to remove it by the US law.
I’m no lawyer or patent guru, but this is ridiculous and totally beyond any level of understanding if you ask me. How come such a basic process can be protected by a patent? Mapping sound based on color values, pixels into music, common! Mr. Kojima is distributing his application for free. He is not abusing someone else’s IP with commercial intent (and monetary benefits).
Anyways, I hope that the software will be available again online soon. I usually have some level of respect for IP and such, but now this is too much.
How do you feel about this? Will you apply for patents like this if you become a successful designer creating new tech marvels?
Some links:
Mac version I have on my computer: RGBMusicLabMac_30
http://lifehacker.com/5438895/rgb-musiclab-turns-photos-into-music
http://infosthetics.com/archives/2007/11/rgb_musiclab_pixels_into_music.html
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb0pMeg1UN0]
Worth watching.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G3wWmtkN88&feature=related]
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/ixda-chicago-local-event direct from Chicago 13th Jan 6pm CST (which will like 1 at night for you).