something in the way

Following yesterday’s interview with Kyle McDonald on FaceOSC, his custom webcam + tracking application that can make music with your face, here’s another face-controlled music demo. This one uses Ableton Live for jamming. I should add, since I somewhat obscured the fact, that this isn’t Kinect: it works entirely with a built-in webcam, which means it’s completely free to try and you don’t have to tote any extra hardware, so long as you have a laptop with a built-in cam. More on this technology as we watch it evolve…

Love strutting your stuff to that sassy barista at your favorite Starbucks? Starting today, you’ll be able to swipe your iPhone, iPod touch, or BlackBerry at almost all Starbucks locations to pay for your coffee (or delicious reduced-fat Cinnamon cake). The program had been piloted in California and many New York stores and allows you to use the Starbucks Mobile Card iPhone app to add your Starbucks Cards, track rewards, and also reload your cards from your phone. How easy is it to use to pay that Trenta Caramel Frappuccino? Just tap “touch to pay” in the app, hold it up to the scanner at the register and you’re off and running. Or slowly reconsidering ordering a 31oz blended coffee and beverage. Going to give it a go? Let us know, alright?

Read [BlackBerry] Read [iOS]

In a collaboration between SimpleGeo, who makes location data easier to access, and Stamen, who does all kinds of wonderful with maps, announced Polymaps today. It's a free and open-source JavaScript library for image- and vector-tiled maps using SVG.

Polymaps provides speedy display of multi-zoom datasets over maps, and supports a variety of visual presentations for tiled vector data, in addition to the usual cartography from OpenStreetMap, CloudMade, Bing, and other providers of image-based web maps.

Because Polymaps can load data at a full range of scales, it’s ideal for showing information from country level on down to states, cities, neighborhoods, and individual streets. Because Polymaps uses SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) to display information, you can use familiar, comfortable CSS rules to define the design of your data. And because Polymaps uses the well known spherical mercator tile format for its imagery and its data, publishing information is a snap.

The above is map using Flickr shapefiles. Here's a map of pavement quality in San Francisco.

Here's another showing unemployment.

As you interact with the maps, you'll notice they feel very polished, and they work how you would expect. You can zoom in and out and pan in all directions with your mouse, or you can use your scroll wheel and keyboard arrows.

There are a few reasons why Polymaps is a big deal, but mainly, it makes online mapping so much easier and lets you do so much more than your standard marker maps. Also, it's in JavaScript, so you don't have to deal with compiling and many of the complexities that come with Flash and Actionscript. Plus it's free and open-source.

This is customizable sexiness right here. I can't wait to finish my dissertation, so I can really play with the library.

Check out more working examples and source code on the project page or download Polymaps on github and get started right away.

iPhone developer Jason Ting has a hot app. He is the first to market with an application that will activate the iPhone 4’s built in LED camera flash, turning your smartphone into a flashlight. Now, while the flashlight application itself isn’t all that exciting (although it was downloaded over 9,000 times in one day) this next bit of news is. Ting boasts that he grossed just under $1,400 on 9,300 ad impressions with a 11.8% click-through rate. Fourteen hundred dollars in one day!? Yikes. The high click-through rate can partially be credited to iPhone users who were curious about the new iAds system; clicking through to see how the system worked. Whatever the reason, Ting has an extra $1,400 in his pocket.Read

Eloi of playmodes sends in this beautiful, extended (20 minutes) projection mapping performance, for the Ingravid Festival, in Figueres, Spain.

Telenoika Audiovisual Mapping @ Ingravid Festival, Figueres 9/2009 [FULL] from Telenoika on Vimeo.

Created by Telenoika, this performance is a tour de force of established projection mapping techniques and styles: Virtual lighting, 3D augmentation and distortion, edge highlighting and surface painting.

Mixed with lovely sound design, they’ve also added some nice new touches: The “light bulb generation” at 4:12 is lovely, as is the subsequent thunderstorm and electrocution of the building.

What this piece really does, that I’m excited to see more of, is establish a narrative. We’ve got our basic projection mapping building blocks now. Clever people will think of new, cool stuff to do, but while that’s going on, it’s time to start using these techniques to really tell some stories. Not just about things happening to the building or space, but inside it.

Another exciting development is that the “warping and video player software” was developed in OpenFrameworks [on CDMo] by Eloi, and he will be sharing it soon. In the meantime, you can check out some of his other development on the Playmodes Blog.

Elsewhere:
Playmodes/Eloi on Vimeo.
Telenoika on Vimeo.
Ingravid Festival

Wish granted!

Think 3D in the browser will never catch on? Think again. The folks at Google Labs have built an incredible-looking 3D API called O3D. It does just about everything you want, and then some:

• It’s multi-platform: Mac + Windows + Linux.
• It can render to both OpenGL and DirectX render pipelines.
• You can write your own vertex and pixel shaders. You have to use O3D’s own language for doing this, but that actually enhances compatibility, as frustrated shader coders may already know. (See the FAQ)
• It’s a scene graph, so managing complex 3D scenes isn’t a chore.
• It has powerful built-in functions like viewports and pickers (plus custom pickers), so you can actually get something up and running in a reasonable time.
• It has an import workflow with COLLADA, an open standard for 3D assets (and which, incidentally, has support in Google’s own SketchUp).
• You code in JavaScript, using the powerful V8 engine (developed for Chrome).
• Gears lets you run offline.

There are already some complaints about “another standard,” but to me, putting together a whole package here and employing other, lower-level standards (JavaScript, COLLADA, OpenGL, DirectX) makes a lot of sense.

http://code.google.com/apis/o3d/

I expect the folks working on Java and JavaFX are busy thinking about the fact that Sun just got bought by Oracle – something I’m hopeful, at least, ensures Sun’s future and is ultimately a good thing. But I hope someone on those teams is starting to get the message: 3D isn’t just something that’d be “nice to have.” It’s essential. And while even most developers likely don’t have a clue about things like custom shaders, having access to customize the graphics pipeline is likewise something ultimately benefits all developers – even if they just wind up relying on someone else’s code. I really do hope this is a priority with the coming development of Java and JavaFX, which could have the power to do these sorts of things. (Heck, Java could even benefit from the code Google just posted.)

On the proprietary side, this to me is a big blow to Microsoft’s WPF and Silverlight and Adobe’s Director. Unlike those products, O3D looks simple, powerful, flexible, open source, and directly programmable with JavaScript.

That’s not to say there aren’t some questions here – and the Java/JavaFX comparison is especially relevant:

• Another plug-in: You do have to install a plug-in to work with O3D, something that actually isn’t necessary with JavaFX (when it finally does 3D) or right now with JOGL and Java3D.
• Mobile, or just desktop? My big question I have is what this means for mobile. I’d love to have O3D work with OpenGL ES on, say, Google’s own Android platform.
• Not Just JavaScript? It would be nice if eventually you could use other languages like Java to program O3D.
• Sound? Oh, yeah, that. 3D sound is an ideal complement to this sort of scene, and the browser may be a bit constrained in that respect. I’m curious whether O3D might eventually include an audio API. (And yes, that’s where something like Director is still unparalleled.)
• Making it actually work: Okay, there’s also the fact that I haven’t successfully installed it just yet. Working on that.

(I’ll try to get answers to those questions.)

Oh yeah, and then there are details like the necessity to write your own custom shaders just to add more than one light to a scene – I think this will initially appeal only to folks with some real 3D experience.

But am I excited? Ohhhhh, yes, indeed. O3D itself looks fantastic, and I think this is a sign that 3D times ahead are going to be really fantastic.

And as long as you have the plug-in working and a browser in full-screen mode, you could literally set up an O3D project as a performance / installation tool. O3D visualists? Absolutely. Enjoy.

• Pinguino Processing Library: Pinguino_01.zip
• Authors: Stéphane Cousot, Jean-Pierre Mandon, Douglas Edric Stanley
• Hardware: Pinguino, Jean-Pierre Mandon

Last week, Stéphane Cousot wrote a basic library for communicating between Processing and Pinguino. While you’ve probably heard of Processing before (since you’re reading this blog) you’ve almost certainly never heard of Pinguino. It’s one of the roll-your-own projects that we are developing here at the Aix-en-Provence School of Art in order to fill our own needs. It is loosely based on the Arduino platform, most of all its philosophy, but redesigned around PIC microcontrollers with integrated USB. In other words, it’s our in-house Arduino.

The project is in its first year of development and experimentation, and a lot remains to be ameliorated, most of all the editor and the installer. But as in the past we have found that the best way to mature our technologies is to use them in our own work as if they already work (or at least as if they will work), we figured that we would just jump in head first and start developing all the various pieces, even while we’re in the middle of building crazy festivals like the next Eniarof. So while Stéphane is here for Eniarof, I decided that it would be best to put him to work on developing a Processing Library to connect up directly with the Pinguino circuits various projects are building for their attractions.

Jean-Pierre developed the original solution using the libusbJava wrapper to libusb. This is not a virtual serial port, but direct communication with the USB bus. Stéphane then took this solution and built the basic library that we will use to further develop the communication protocol between Processing and Pinguino. One of Jean-Pierre’s original ideas for his platform was to build a default mode that would allow Processing, Pure Data, Python or one of the many other languages and environments we use, to directly command the Pinguino. There is something similar to this idea in the current Firmata protocol built in to the Processing Core Libraries. But we’re still a long way from getting there. For the moment we just have a simple protocol to get pin states, change pin states and send/receive more generic, or non-pin related messages.

Here is a video of Stéphane running his demo:

And some photos:

For further proof that you can make footage in Blender, here’s an example whipped up by Troy James Sobotka. Troy’s approach is one familiar to a lot of us: grab the simplest camera possible, go shoot something, go make something. I think it’s part of what I find appealing about the world of live visualists - exploration is encouraged. The tools in this case:

• A Kodak Zi6 camera - cost: US$160. (I’m impressed; sure, it’s broad daylight which is ideal for cheap cameras - but it still looks better than what I’ve seen from the Flip.)
• Blender for editing, effects
• ffmpeg for export (no capture necessary — thanks, flash memory camera!)
• Two hours shooting, four hours editing. (Now, if they did it on the day they had a gig, then they’d be a VJ.

I’m not saying you wouldn’t still prefer your fancy pro HD cam and Final Cut, but that’s not the point - the point is, you can make these tools work if you like. And, hey, if I had to choose, I’d save my money there and go buy my favorite VJ software package / more projectors and gear. More details:

The Driblet of an Aphorism: Right Where it Belongs (via)

As a follow-up to why I’m interested in Blender for video editing.