Upverter is a web service, similar to GitHub that allows you to discover, share and work on hardware.

Taking full advantage of HTML5, the included editor has all the basics you have come to expect such as undo, redo, rotating, versioning, and sharing designs. Create your schematics on an infinitely large canvas and organize your designs how you want to. Also included is their crowd-sourced part library to choose your parts, or add your own. Get insight into what parts are the most popular and cost efficient.

Here is an embeded drawing of Arduino-Uno:

Continue reading.... Upverter [News]

Lines is based on a writing technique from medieval times developed by monks as a solution to expensive paper and tedious writing. The monks were writing in the centre of the page allowing enough space for others to annotate the pages on the sides, method allowing you to read the story through other people’s writing. The problem arises when 5-6th person tried to comment there would be no paper space left over. As the time passed and writing material became cheaper this technique was abandoned and the techniques we used today were adopted. The team behind the project thought it would be interesting experiment to revisit the techniques using modern technologies, predominantly the “screen” as it has no borders and provides infinite space.

Educated as artists and graphic designers, trained primarily in the logics of print and haptic output, we have grown a great interest in how a transition to screen publishing, and the formats of the new media, affect the way we write, read and communicate. What are the new contracts between author and reader? How are they shaped by old and new forms, and how do new habits in writing and reading affect the way we build and share knowledge?

Continue reading.... Lines [WebApp]

Human Interference Project is a tribute to Jean Tinguely’s Métamatics organized by the Métamatic Research Initiative. The team are creating a collection of hand-drawn mathematical figures governed by a simple set of rules. The repetitive and parameter-restricted character of the drawings draws one one much similar to machine production although in this instance is much about emphasising the human creative expression.

A number of artists were invited to produce a drawing which you can now find on the website. Each drawing was produced by following these five rules:
1. Use a white A4 sheet and a ballpoint pen.
2. Draw a closed shape on the paper.
3. Repeat the shape inside the original shape until there is no space left at its centre. Repeat the shape outside the original shape until it touches one side of the paper. Choose the distance so that you can make at least 50 iterations on the paper.
4. Try to repeat each iteration in exactly the same way.
5. Sign the drawing in its upper right corner in landscape format.

The Human Interference Project forms the basis for the new MRI website, online by May 2011 which will be a communal platform for all material around the artistic and academic research into Tinguely’s Métamatics.

Human Interference Project

/via Luis Blackaller’s blacklog who has also contributed to this project.

Created by Felix Turner Rutt-Etra-Izer is a WebGL emulation of the classic Rutt-Etra video synthesizer. The demo replicates the Z-displacement, scanned-line look of the original, but does not attempt to replicate it’s full feature set.

The application allows you to drag and drop your own images, manipulate them and save the output. Images are generated by scanning the pixels of the input image from top to bottom, with scan-line separated by the ‘Line Separation’ amount. For each line generated, the z-position of the vertices is dependent on the brightness of the pixels.

try it here: http://airtightinteractive.com/demos/js/ruttetra/ or download source.

(To run the demo you need the latest version of Chrome or Firefox)

Created with Three.js

More images generated by this demo in this Flickr set.

Felix also built an audio-reactive version with Processing (video below).

Background:
The Rutt-Etra video synthesizer was built by Steve Rutt and Bill Etra in 1972. It was one of the first devices to allow real-time manipulation of live video and helped instigate the video art movement of the 1970s. Unfortunately Steve Rutt recently passed away. His pioneering contributions to the field of video art will be always be remembered.

Created by Hakim El Hattab, Textify.it turns your photographs into text portraits. The app includes ability to chose between different fonts, text sizes and backgrounds. Other effects include pointilism, mosaic, stitch, bubbles, starstruck, pixelate, binary, snow and dash. In addition you can apply black and white or sepia colour effect to the photos.

The iPhone/iPad version was created using JavaScript/HTML5/CSS3 and uses phonegap as a wrapper which also allows access to native APIs such as photo and camera import.

Try out the online version available at http://textify.it – tested and working in Chrome and Firefox 4.

Platform: iPhone
Version: 1.0
Cost: $0.99
Developer: Hakim El Hattab

Together with a few colleagues at NYTimes R&D, for the last week Jer Thorp has been working on a project called openpaths.cc. The site lets you upload your location data from your iDevice, securely store it and explore it via a map interface. It is an anonymous, user-contributed database for the personal location data files recorded by iOS devices. You can securely store and manage your personal location data, and grant researchers access to portions of that data as you choose.

The project is a direct response to recent announcement by Apple to no longer offer access to location data available in your backup files. Whilst some may think this protects your privacy, the team behind the project believes this data (your data) should be available to you and others who may really need it. Jer writes:

Location data is extremely useful. That’s why Apple, Google, and Microsoft are collecting it. Over the last year, Apple has, intentionally or not, created what is likely the largest locational database ever. This is a hugely, massively, ridiculously useful database. And with this new update, Apple are the only ones who will be able to get their hands on it. I believe that our data should be… well, our data. We should be able to store it securely, explore it, and use it for any purposes that we might choose. This data would be extraordinarily useful for researchers – people studying how diseases spread, trying to solve traffic-flow problems, and researching human mobility.

We are existing a world where data is being collected about us on a massive scale. This data is currently being stored, analyzed and monetized by corporations – there is little or no agency for the people to whom the data actually belongs. I believe that grass-roots initiatives like openpaths.cc can provide a framework for how data sovereignty can be established and managed.

Visit openpaths.cc now to upload, explore, and securely store your iDevice location data before it becomes inaccessible (iOS version 4.3.3).

Created by Emmanuel Pire, Experimental Study on Web Asynchronicity is a project that uses “web time noise” as a way of composition. The noise you will find is not coded with a random function but is actually the network response time and the browser’s imprecisions that create the asynchronicity.

Browsers are smart enough to recognize that it is the same image and will load it only once, and display it everywhere it’s needed (that’s the [1/1]). In case of animated gifs, they will also keep synchronized. If it’s not recognized as the same image, the browser will then load each image separately and of course, not at the same time.

Only ,  and  set the image used. Try it at lipsumarium.com/lab/asynchronicity/

Jean Helfenstein, the name behind Rot.Sketch iPhone app has just launched an HTML5 experiment that allows you to produce spirograph like drawings. In addition you can draw new elements while others are rendering as well as move the centre around which lines rotate.

webapp : http://www.jeanhelfenstein.com/rotsketch/app
+ flickr gallery for more images.

Previously: Rot.Sketch [iPhone, openFrameworks]

Created by Tom Beddard aka subblue, Fractal Lab is a WebGL based web application for rendering 2D and 3D fractals in real-time and the latest in Tom’s research in complex and visually stunning 3D fractal structures. As we already reported few months back,  Tom already created some truly stunning works (see bottom of the post) using the Adobe Pixel Bender Toolkit and working with Photoshop, After Effects and Quarz Composer. This time, Tom’s fractals run in your browser with ability to explore and loose yourself in these magnificent structures.

You will need a WebGL enabled browser, currently Google Chrome or Firefox 4 beta are the best choices, and a reasonably modern graphics card.

fractal.io

also available on github.com/subblue/FractalLab + make sure you pay a visit to Tom’s flickr.

Playing with the  idea, some say a science, that people who have more symmetrical faces are considered more “attractive”, Julian Wolkenstein created this iPhone application and a site where you can split and mirror images of yourself or others.

“Echoism” plays with the notion of your own identity. What do you look like? What are the things that make you look like you – your identifying features? If you are made symmetrical, do you consider yourself more beautiful, less so, or is it just weird? Or is it you at all? Do you have a best side? What is to be said of left and right brain dominance?

The process is a face-to-camera portrait, the image is split into a left and a right section, then one side is horizontally flipped. These images are recombined to create two separate and symmetrical identities of the subject. iPhone applications also lets you upload your image to the website or share on facebook, twitter or send by email.

Echoism.org

Developed by falsebehavinganimals.com

Platform: iPhone
Version: 1.0
Cost: Free
Developer: False Behaving Animals