The Product, a Berlin-based design studio with a focus on objects, space and interaction, was commissioned by Volkswagen to develop a set of visuals for an interactive musical performance for the premiere of the New Beetle at the 2011 IAA motor show (September 15-25, 2011, Frankfurt am Main). What the client got instead was Soundmachines – a custom-built instrument for performing electronic music by DJing visual patterns on record-sized discs. Honk for ingenuity

Continue reading.... Soundmachines [Arduino, Processing, Objects]

Created by Bartholomäus Traubeck, Years is a record player that translates wood’s year rings into sound. Using a ps eye camera, the grain on the slices of wood is read and converted into music. Includes modified turntable, computer, camera, acrylic glass, veneer, approx. 90x50x50 cm.

Continue reading.... Years [vvvv, Arduino]

[Photo: S.T. Heizmann]

What looks like a time-lapse recording of bioluminescent critters roaming the deep sea floor is in fact a swarm of 9 autonomous UV light emitting robots inhabiting a 1 x 2 meter phosphorescent surface. Created by Mey Lean Kronemann, a Berlin-based media artist with an interest in robotics, these lumiBots (2010-2011) tirelessly trace the fading trails of their peers. An endless pursuit that, much like a computational drawing machine, generates glowing patterns of visual complexity out of a simple system.

Continue reading.... lumiBots [Arduino, Objects]

“All Eyes On You” by Britzpetermann are bunch of varied sized eyes that follow the passers-by. The team used a high quality projector and semi-matt foil to project the eyes on the window. They are rendered by a WebGL frontend using a shader sphere effect. The detection is performed by OpenFrameworks and the Kinect.
An Arduino controlled servo motor, pushing a button on the projector remote, is turning the installation on at 4pm and off at 11pm.

Continue reading.... All Eyes On You [openFrameworks, Javascript, Kinect, Arduino]

‘Monolith’ is the latest project from the London based design studio Signal | Noise. The team collaborated with the Swiss design studio Unit for the french luxury label Hermés, and their new flagship store in Geneva. The theme for the evening was the meeting of handcraft and technology and in the first room they created an iPad application which invited guests to leave their hand print on the evening, wheres the second installation, shown here, included a six metre interactive object that allowed visitors to control strips of light passing through it.

Continue reading.... Monolith [vvvv, Objects, Arduino]

DaDa Box by Jifei Ou is an interactive storytelling object. It adopts the idea of “Collage” from Dadaism and allows a person to generate stories by a simple tangible action: shaking. When the box is shaken, a story contained inside switches its order randomly by sentence, and starts playing to the listener.

Continue reading.... DaDa Box [Arduino, Objects]

Senseless Drawing Bot is a 4-wheeled graffiti machine, with a pendulum arm, arduino and spray cans to create random strokes as it moves up and down the gallery space. See video below.

Created by So KANNO and Takahiro YAMAGUCHI
Metal Works Supported by Hitto ASAI
The exhibition “UTOPIA no OSHIRASE” took place at AKIBATAMABI21, 3331 Arts Chiyoda, Tokyo 9.10 – 10.10, 2011

Continue reading.... Senseless Drawing Bot [Arduino]

NTQ, also known as Near Tag Quality (+), is a DIY graffiti printer created using Arduino, Solenoid and 7 Spray cans. Created by the french branch of GRL (Graffiti Research Lab) this project was developed in 2 month between mid-may and mi-July. The idea is not new but their goal was to build something and opensource it. The single spray system uses a solenoïd valve with a number of transistors to get enough voltage from the low signal issued by the Arduino board. The whole thing costing about 200€.

Continue reading.... NTQ – Near Tag Quality [Arduino]

The Arriflex 16 ST body with UV-light source and motorized zoom lens

Julius von Bismarck and Andreas Schmelas have just open sourced the code of their collaboration project “The Space beyond me”. The project includes an “Apparatus for reviving spaces that are captured in celluloid” and was exhibited at the Transmediale 2010 (Berlin) and several other festivals (right now it can be seen at the Ghent Film Festival in Belgium). The installation is able to construct a representation from celluloid film combining a modified 16mm camera with a UV-light projector. The device projects a film whilst moving in exactly the same way in which the camera operator moved the camera while shooting the film.

What happens, if a projector moves while it is projecting in exactly the same way in which the camera moved that recorded the film, which is now being projected? What happens, is similar to processes happening in the brain when we perceive our surroundings. Virtual rooms or landscapes are composed from flat visual information, constructing a subjective representation of the world.

Continue reading.... The Space Beyond Me [openFrameworks, Arduino, Processing]

Created by Teehan+Lax Labs, Touch Vision Interface is a combination of software and hardware to allow realtime manipulation of content on a remote device via touch interface on a mobile device. Instead of purely using mobile device screen as an input, the user views the remote content and applies the content simultaneously, better know but not necessarily a form of AR.

I can still recall the first time I saw an Augmented Reality demo. There was a sense of wonderment from the illusion of 3D models living within the video feed. Of course, the real magic was the fact that the application was not only viewing its surrounding environment, but also understanding it. AR has proven to be an incredible tool for enhancing perception of the real world. Despite this, I’ve always felt that the technology was somewhat limited in its application. It is typically implemented as output in the form of visual overlays or filters. But could it also be used for user input? We decided to explore that question by pairing the principles of AR (like real-time marker detection and tracking) with a natural user interface (specifically, touch on a mobile phone) to create an entirely new interactive experience.

Continue reading.... Touch Vision Interface [openFrameworks, Arduino, Android]