Konkreet Performer is an OSC music control and performance instrument created by Berlin based Konkreet Labs collective. Instead of faders and knobs, Performer allows you to remotely operate music or visual software on your computer, using interactive visualisations. Any software that allows OSC input can be controlled. These include more traditional music making apps such as Ableton Live (shown in the video) or custom built applications created using Processing, oF, MaxMSP or other.

The heart of Performer is the control object, an abstract graphic element, made out of up to 10 nodes. Combine up to 3 graphical layers to design the look of this object. This object can be moved around as a whole. Zoom, turn, throw, distort and reshape it across the screen. The app also has the ability to save the shape of your objects (and hence the sound that they represent) into 8 snapshots, organised into 8 banks, i.e. 64 slots in total. In addition there is also ribbon controller allowing you to for example control pitch bend while simultaneously manipulating the other sound parameters using the Performer object.

Also coming soon to the Performer is native MIDI Support as well as “Visualiser”, a Mac/PC application that mirrors everything you’re doing on the iPad screen.

Platform: iPad
Version: 1.0
Cost: $24.99
Developer: Konkreet Labs

Previously: Konkreet Performer – “new control instrument for …

Six-Forty by Four-Eighty is an interactive lighting installation designed to reveal the materiality of computation by recontextualizing the common pixel. Composed of two hundred and twenty magnetic pixel-tiles in a darkened room, Zigelbaum + Coelho have created each pixel able to be touched, moved, and modified.

At the start of the day the pixel-tiles are packed together as a display and by the end of the day they will have migrated across the walls in the room. By transposing the pixel from the confines of the screen and into the physical world, focus is drawn to the materiality of computation itself and new forms for design emerge.

The team have developed a new technology that makes the glass in the pixel-tile sense touch as well as send information through your body when you are touching it. They had to create our own composite glass and case for that. In general, each tile can also receive incoming IR data so you can control it with a remote. They are battery powered and can last for up to two weeks on a single charge if they are constantly on. Holding down on the tile will make it pulse. Touching another tile will let you copy the colour of first tile onto the second one. The pixels can only talk to each other through your body, ie combining for example colours to create new colours or touching two tiles at the same time will copy third colour onto the new tile. They also work with a remote allowing you to cycle through colours from distance.

Materials: Injection Molded ABS/Polycarbonate, Glass, Light Emitting Diodes, Custom Electronics, Microcontroller, Embedded Software, Stainless Steel.

The team are publishing a paper with more detailed technical information at the end of the month so do keep an eye on the project’s website.

Designed by Marcelo Coelho and Jamie Zigelbaum, with the assistance of Joshua Kopin. Made in collaboration with the Fluid Interfaces Group, MIT Media Lab.

(Thanks Emilio)

Very first glance at Konkreet Performer iPhone/iPad app by Konkreet Labs, visual OSC controller and visualizer for your DAW / Synth / Drum Machine / Sampler etc.

Konkreet Performer is a control instrument for live music performance. Its unique and intuitive multi-touch interface reconnects the musician’s
actions directly with the music.

Taking full advantage of the possibilities created by the latest multi-touch technology, Konkreet Performer delivers a revolutionary new way to control your DAWs, synthesizers, samplers (anything that receives MIDI/OSC).

More than a studio controller, Konkreet Performer has been designed from the ground up to be a superior live performance instrument,
bringing the dynamic audio and visual connection between the musician and the audience to the stage.

It will be released as an iOS App at the beginning of 2011.

Coming soon for iPad / iPhone / iPod Touch

konkreetlabs.com/​

(Thanks Marc)

The Pirata Boat Race pits two teams against one another to row themselves to victory. With up to ten shipmates split between two vessels, the aim is to propel your boat to the finish line before the other team, using your iPhone as your oars.

The experience is much closer to console gaming than usually found online. The site itself acts as a hub, allowing multiple people to huddle around the screen, snap the QR code on their iPhones and propel their boat via the built-in accelerometer.

To play the Boat Race head on over to piratalondon.com/boatrace and download the free app from the App Store.

(Thanks Pieter)

Platform: iPhone
Version: 1.0
Cost: Free
Developer: Pirata London Ltd

Created by Aircord lab team, same group behind the mobile runner app we wrote about few months back, AI Controller is an iPad application designed to control Box2D physics engine projected onto a building. Controlled by OSC to a openFrameworks desktop application projecting the image, windows layout is mapped to the iPad oF application where you can drag the particles and adjust colour of the projected image. See movie below for demo…

(Thanks Toshiyuki)

Besides the beautiful icon, LiveView is a remote screen viewing application for the iPhone intended to help designers create graphics for mobile applications. The site suggest three good uses:

FOR VISUAL DESIGNERS — Develop pixel–perfect graphics for the iPhone and iPad quickly and easily with a live view of your canvas/artboard while you work.

FOR INTERACTION DESIGNERS — With your iPhone or iPad tethered via WiFi, you can interact with software prototypes and demos running on your Mac to communicate and iterate your concepts quickly.

FOR EVERYONE — If you’ve ever needed to press a button from afar or wished that you could take a piece of your monitor with you across the room, this app may prove useful from time to time.

Inspired by and created to support the vibrant prototyping culture at IUAV.

There are two parts to the application. App that runs on the iPhone and desktop app you can download here. LiveView works very similar to VNC clients and servers except instead of viewing the whole screen you move the iPhone image on the screen to isolate an area you’d like to view on your iPhone. Very nice indeed.

Created by Nicholas Zambetti, one of the Arduino founders.

Platform: iPhone/iPad
Version: 1.2
Cost: Free
Developer: Nicholas Zambetti

(via SwissMiss + image top via)

The team behind DMX Remote app Luminair have just released a new free plug-in for Apple’s Quartz Composer called Pixelnode. Pixelnode enables lighting and multimedia designers to turn Apple’s Quartz Composer into a powerful live media-server, controllable via DMX lighting consoles. Luminair application for the iPhone enables you to wirelessly control, view, record and manage intelligent DMX lighting fixtures, consoles, media servers and other software directly from your iPhone or iPod touch.

Although slightly expensive, Luminair is targeted at lighting and multimedia professionals who work with DMX equipment and since all of the work is computed on the device, user’s don’t need to go through a computer or console to operate, just an Art-Net interface.

Guys at Synthe FX were kind enough to send us a promocode for the iPhone app and we got a chance to have play. If I remember well, Luminair was one of the first if not the first iPhone app in the appstore (Aug ’08) to offer over the air control of hardware. The app interface is as impressive as the images below show and an in depth tool providing multiple levels of control.

Quartz Composer is an application for Mac OS X that provides a visual programming environment geared towards live-performance and installations. We have already mentioned few projects that use Quartz Composer. If you are familiar with the work of vade, you’ll see that endless source of possibilities QC can offer. Whether Luminair is a tool for artists as much as professional lighting designers remains to be seen. For now, the price tag may deter some especially as there is no demo application to download. What is certain is the team at Synthe FX have put a lot of effort to create a very sophisticated DMX lighting control software for a mobile device.

For a full set of features and app capability see the beautifully designed Luminair website.

If you’re looking for DMX support in other environments, here’s an open source project: http://code.google.com/p/simple-dmx/ (via createdigitalmotion.com)

Platform: iPhone
Version: 1.5.6
Cost: $99.99
Developer: Synthe FX

Skål (Norwegian for bowl) is a media player designed for the home that lets you interact with digital media using physical objects. You place objects in a wooden bowl to play back related media on the TV. Skål uses RFID to sense small, batteryless tags inside or attached to physical objects, toys, dolls and figures. You can fit any toy of suitable size with RFID tags and connect it to your own media content.

A bowl sits on the living room table and a range of physical objects can be placed within it. When an object is placed in the bowl related media is played back on the TV. For example a physical Moomin character like Little My will play a sequence from the Moomin cartoon where she is featured. Skål lets you control all kinds of digital media; movie-clips, Youtube channels, Flickr photo streams, home videos, online radio etc.

Skål is designed by Jørn Knutsen, Einar Sneve Martinussen and Timo Arnall. It emerged from Touch, a design research project looking at RFID in products and interactions. Touch at AHO is funded by Verdikt.

SKÅL

See also Immaterials: the ghost in the field