It is not entirely unusual for a Canadian wildlife documentary to open with grainy footage of an animal being carefully approached by park officials, but any similarities between Bear 71 and nostalgic Canadian depictions of wildlife end about 15 seconds into the timeline. This interactive documentary opens with a young bear being sedated, hogtied, tagged with a GPS receiver and set free into the wilds of Banff National Park as narrator Mia Kirshner dryly explains that the tranquilizer used to facilitate the takedown was Telazol, developed “by the same people that make Zoloft and Viagra.” From this moment onwards our protagonist is ‘Bear 71′ and as she bounds back into her native habitat the point of view radically shifts to an abstract topographical map – an interface for exploring data and video collected documenting this subject’s movement and activities between 2001-09

Continue reading.... Bear 71 – Interactive Documentary [Flash, Review]

Created by Didier Brun and Sid Lee for Adidas to help them promote the release of their sneaker collection MEGA, the team created a system that would allow dancers to create their own beat or music with their shoes. Although somewhat similar to Nike project by W+K and rhizomatiks, the Sid Lee team have seem to taken the concept a little further making a device like element allowing anyone to pick it up and have a play. The team also built an interactive installation in several Shops in France to allow others to play with the Megalizer.

The system is wireless, placed on each shoe (no cable running on the dancer’s leg, or belt case), efficient at a 6-7 meter range from the speakers. It includes very low latency (max 30ms), handling up to 6 shoes simultaneously. There are two force sensors for each shoe (one for the heel and one for the toe), and a wireless transmitter per shoe to capture the pressure applied on each of the sensors. The first transmitter prototype built was using a BlueTooth chip (class 3). Although the result was satisfactory at half-a-meter distance from the receiver, the latency increased with the distance. At 7 meters, the latency went as much as 1/8th second. Instead a XBee technology was used: with a low power consumption reaching minimum latency at a decent distance.

Each shoe includes A 6-pin dock to connect the sensors and charge the battery, a status LED, switch, 110 mah liPo battery, voltage regulator, XBee chip and a few resistors.

The software includes a server processing the receivers’ inputs (Processing) and an AIR application that interprets the signals, chooses and play the sounds. UI in the flash application is using Keith Petters Minimal Components.

You can read more about the process here including download the Processing server code.

Created by Hi-ReS! and Nanika is a project for the new Hyundai i40, which was revealed at the Geneva Motorshow on the 1 March. Starting on Friday, 25 Feb, users could connect through Facebook (or not) to directly participate in the live light reveal. The web application built in Flash by Theo Tillberg, Mike Tucker and others allows users to animate light over the car and change views. This is of course sent directly to the warehouse where the car is located and video feedback shown back to the users on the site.

In a nutshell, the software written in openFrameworks by Andreas Müller was about finding a way to project a piece of video onto an arbitrary shape of lights. For the earlier project for John Lewis, Andreas hardcoded in 4 rectangles around the model of the house, something similar that was done for Ars Electronica by YesYesNo, but in the new system Andreas represents the surface in 3D space, use that as a view and then get the lights positions within the 2D surface by looking them up in an ortographic projection. Once you have the 2D positions of the lights within the surface, the brightness is calculated based on their 3D position. For fun, Andreas also hooked up OSC control using TouchOSC iPad app allowing him to create swarm like light effect with the setup in real time (see video below).

The official site for the launch was http://www.hyundai-i40.eu
also see hi-res.net and nanikawa.com

Created by Naoki Nishimura, Helvetica Face is a Livetype format font. This new Helvetica family font changes the “typeface” based on the posting of a new “face”. The site allows you to record your face within the font, adjusting the threshold resulting in a new glyph you can download.

While normal fonts which are governed by software rules on how to show the internal form (=data), Helvetica Face doesn’t have this internal information on the form. What is does have is external data given in the shape of a image of your face, and how to show that form is the only rule. For that reason, through the given data, the form continues to change without bounds.

Livetype is a new font format which takes a variety of data and can change the form of it in real time.

livetype.in/face/

NewSpeak is a project created by Immo Blaese for anticensor, the 10th Web Biennial at the Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum. As new words are picked up every minute, NewSpeak will display the opposite meaning (antonym) based on an Orwellian scenario of doublespeak.

The creation of a new over simplified language to limit the expressions and thoughts possible in a dystopian totalitarian regime.

All images and tweets are loaded via public feeds provided by Flickr and Twitter. The full project including screensavers for Mac and Windows can be downloaded here.

Play > newspeak.zonkzone.net

Hypo is a collaboration between Matt Booth and Peter Crawley, where adobe flash was used to generate hypotrochoid designs finally resulting  in stitched prints.

Matt built a small Flash tool for his personal use where he could control the radius and rotation speeds of 3 circles, each sitting within the other. He could then specify the line thickness and colours used in the code and once happy with the the values, hitting play would create the animation. When the animation is finished, Matt saves the designs as a PDF using the print functionality, outputting a vector file which could then be printed at a large scale. Peter then chose 3 designs to work with resulting in the stiched designs you can see below. More outputs can been viewed here.

Matt plans to creating large prints of the other designs and possibly turning it into an iPad app.

Project Page here and here.

Previously: Visualator [Flash, iPhone, iPad] – @CAProjects app by @matthbooth ..

Building on their previous installation at Coffee Kitchen, Kimchi and Chips created ‘Link’, their latest interactive installation for  Design Korea 2010 where people record their stories into a cityscape of cardboard boxes.

Link was created for the event as an interpretation of ‘Convergence’, the theme of the exhibition. The team presented a convergence of complex, fast moving technologies with low, everyday materials. Furthermore, the audience is invited to take part and “can store their memories inside boxes”.

The installation includes a number of different components. To match the projections to the boxes, the team developed iPad mapping application allowing users to interactively match projected images in the room. App was built using openFrameworks and libmysql (see video demo at the bottom of the post). The iPad interface, allowing users to add information was also built using built using openFrameworks with 2-way communication over OSC. Main mapping playback was created using VVVV with custom plugins for threaded video playback / recording (up to 80 videos playing simultaneously whilst 2 videos being recorded), MySQL for database and a total of around 3000 recordings were taken during the exhibition. The team also used Adobe Flash for designing animations.

Hardware included 3 servers, each Core i7 Quad core (8 threads), Nvidia Geforce 460 GTX, 8GB RAM (for caching video playback), Triplehead2Go x 2, 2xPlaystation eye and 6 x 3000lm projector.

See video below including the making of at the bottom of the post.

Project Page

Kimchi and Chips are a cross-disciplinary art & design studio based in London and Seoul. They create installations, products and services that bridge the gap between people and people, people and technology, people and nature. They are Elliot Woods, media artist, technical designer and Mimi Son, user-centred interaction designer and visual artist.

From the makers of Computer Arts magazine, Visualator lets you create simple abstract imagery with your fingertips. Play with colour, shape and form to produce vibrant collages on the move.

The app has launched with two tools - Gradulate and Triangulate and the app is built entirely using Flash CS5.

Triangulate
Triangulate is a simple graphic image-creator that enables you to make geometric designs. You can control background colour, the colour of triangles created as well as patterns that fill either.

Gradulate
Gradulate is a live pen-based drawing system that uses simple physics to drive the pen’s motion, and adds a random element to the creation process. You can control colour, opacity, size of the brush as well as spring which generates springiness of your pen, and how much it bounces and spirals around the screen.

Visualator was created by Matt Booth and Stewart Hamilton-Arrandale. To find out more about it and how to make it for yourself, see the 32-page guide inComputer Arts Projects issue 144.

Platform: iPhone/iPad (Universal)
Version: 1.0
Cost: Free
Developer: Future plc

AV Clash is a Web-based project by Video Jack (André Carrilho and Nuno Correia, with Gokce Taskan) evolved AVOL – AudioVisual OnLine (2007), which allows the creation of audiovisual compositions, consisting of combinations of sound and audio-reactive animation loops. AV (AudioVisual) Clash is composed of 4 audiovisual “objects”, which enable playback and manipulation of four different loops of sound and audio-reactive visuals. Objects can be dragged and thrown, creating interactions (clashes) between them. The sounds in AV Clash are retrieved from Freesound.org, an online sound database. Users can change which 4 sound and animation loops are contained in each of the objects.

Have a play at avclash.com

(Thanks Nuno)

Selected as a finalist at this years IGF (Independent Games Festival), Today I Die, a poem game by Daniel Benmergui is now available for the iPhone. Today I Die takes you on a journey with words to uncover to generate new meanings and resolve puzzles you find along the way. The game is not about winning but a narrative in the poem you uncover.

It’s about the daily choice of waking up in the morning.
No skill playing videogames is necessary! Playing this game can be a significant experience.

The music is by Hernán Rozenwasser (Night Raveler).

Platform: iPhone
Version: 1.01
Cost: $0.99
Developer: Atakama Labs Inc