coolness factor

four player simultaneous WIFI LCD projector. Enough Said. Although clearly, the demo mockup shown above has already exhausted the spectrum of cool things that could be done with this. I mean, it's hard to beat a mixture of various clipart and powerpoint slides. Anyone dare to argue?

Link via gizmodo

gdc image

the only one I have, but so cool it shouldn't matter.

Katamari Damashii

Tracy described this game at GDC's Experimental Game Workshop. It sounded great, and I'm contemplating ordering from play-asia.

of note is the fact that this game is no. 1 on play-asia right now, despite the fact that apparently it sold horribly in japan...

This amusing Japanese game features a ball rolling around an environment that absorbs every object it encounters in its path. Each object sticks to the surface of the ball as if with glue, and as each new object is added, the rolling dynamic of the ball changes to reflects the ball's new shape.

At first, the ball absorbs small objects: lollipops, horseshoes, trash cans, small animals... but as the ball gets larger, the scale increases, allowing a player to absorb fence poles, light posts, road signs, and palm trees. As the ball heads out into the larger world, it can absorb pedestrians, cars, skyscrapers, and eventually, the very countries and continents themselves.

good flash

two more good examples I came upon recently:

Christopher Connock does a beautiful presentation site for his architectural photographs (via archinect).

Popandco is a design / game studio that produces a wealth of great flash stuff -- including the lego factory tour.

Black on Black Album

just listening now to the next installment in the recent craze that is the 'black album remix.' I think the first thing I said when I heard about DJ Dangermouse's Grey Album was that he should've used Metallica's black album which is the best album ever to be named after the color black (next to Spinal Tap (how much blacker could it be)--with Jay-Z's black album coming in nowhere near the top -- think of all the other great albums with black in the title: fear of a black planet, black and white night (roy orbison), and let's not forget Back in Black --> the best AreCeDarCe album after the unfortunate booze related death of Bon Scott. Really, I think Jay Z might only list above the backstreet boys - black and blue. (I had to look that one up)). Anyway, back to the point --> the remix is ok, but what I realized when I listened to this, or the few parts of the Grey Album that I liked, is that it's basically the ruling-ness of the original albums: metallica's black album, the beatles white album. And really, all these remixes do is make me want to listen to the originals. So I'm going to go on record to say that these remixes aren't an incredibly creative (albeit still creative) use of the original source material, but a step in the right direction about educating the general public about the need to redefine the current copyright system, which doesn't allow stuff like this to be legally out there. I may not like these mixes that much, but that doesn't mean that at some point, someone won't create something great from bits and pieces of other records (cough, john oswald, cough).

super mario clouds

super mario bros. --> just rendering the clouds.

nice piece of assembly hack-art.

Link via Architect

post-modem (pre-lan)

postmortem lies in the extended entry.

konstruktsiia

so finally I post the midterm game I've been working on just in time to do a post-mordem on it. stay tuned for that...meanwhile, feel free to play the game here

that was a close one

http://www.reuters.com/locales/newsArticle.jsp?type=technologyNews&locale=en_IN&storyID=4588731

thank goodness they've blissfully ignored location. although the self-learning stream is cool...

thesis_r

some basic stuff:

klima's glasbead --> networked sound installation
Danish Soundscapes --> a web collection of various Danish soundscapes.
the World Soundscape Project --> a project started by Barry Traux to help come to terms with the ambient noise of specific spaces.
Blast Theory --> specializes in location based games.
Janet Cardiff --> media artist concerned with developing sound walks.

Brain Eno's Web --> a space for all things Brain Eno.
Ryuichi Sakamoto's Site--> musican.

Hear&There --> Joey Rozier's SoundSpots project.

machines

Programming is the activity by which the meaningless mechanical activities of the computer are given meaning. To really be able to manipulate the computer as a medium (to make the computer mean anything) requires programming.

Now I’m not saying that tools are bad – Photoshop, Premier, Flash, etc. are certainly useful. And of course I’m not saying that artists who only use such tools aren’t really artists. But each tool encodes (literally) a specific representational framework, a specific way of relating to computation. To only use such tools is to be perpetually trapped in other people’s frameworks, to never truly touch the medium.

link via grand text auto

konstruktsiia

fyi: when debugging and trying to figure out why stuff is extremely slow, make sure to commment out the sound engine first, before it becomes 3:30 in the morning and you are still really confused.

...and you will know me by my train of thought

[noun] is a socio-environmental music tuner that lets users interact with music by moving through the physical space.

headphones & personal urban space

great bbc article on a researcher looking at the uses and effects of headphones and portable music players on the user's sense of the urban environment and community.

Most people who study how humans behave in public look at what is seen, rather than what is heard. There's the visual domination of explaining urban experience," he says, "but if you look at it through sound you get different explanations.

link via Smart Mobs

two steps forward...

screen grab of the current, probably final, look of the the game. rules have been modified a little bit, and the goal has been changed: rather than moving yourself somewhere, you have to move a block of a certain color somewhere. Depending on how the level shapes up, this could be really tough, or really easy, or somewhere in between. Most of all, I think it's just fun to watch the instability of the world.

still having minor issues with some what I believe are memory allocation issues in processing. wierd errors, etc. Overall, there are only 2 or 3 known bugs, which isn't all that bad. Should be able to sqish them tomorrow pretty easily as well.

also finally came up with a nice title: konstruktsiia

the term konstruktsiia comes from the russian constructivist architect/designer lakov Chernikhov, who used the word to refer to not only a principle of architectural composition, but also the construction of arguments through assembling sequences of ideas. this is a nice thought in the context of this game, I think -- you must assemble structures and mental maps simultaneously in order to be successful.

more zml pics

rules

red: grows colliding elements larger ::IMPLEMENTED::
blue: shrinks colliding elements ::IMPLEMENTED::
green: multiples itself when colliding on the x axis ::IMPLEMENTED::
magenta: turns other blocks black and then stops them from moving ::IMPLEMENTED::
orange: deletes most recent element when colliding w/ purple ::IMPLEMENTED::
purple: deletes most recent element when colliding w/ orange ::IMPLEMENTED::
yellow: makes colliding boxes (except green) lose gravity until they undertake another collision ::IMPLEMENTED::
cyan: returns collided elements to their original state ::IMPLMENTED::
black: copies it's state onto colliding elements ::IMPLEMENTED::
white: stops the movement of a colliding element ::IMPLEMENTED::
brown: reestablishes the movement of a colliding element ::IMPLEMENTED::

update 3/5: woo hoo! environment is complete + working nicely. now time to reintroduce the player. I'm watching American Chopper in the background and can't help feel like I just finished the fabrication process, and now I have to get the thing painted and then rebuild.

donny miller

ok, so this is not research related at all, but just a link to some *interesting* illustrative art.

Link via Archinect

This one is my absolute favorite.