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]

Latest by Justin Windle is this ‘Super Recursion Toy’ created using Canvas. He writes:

Revisiting one of my favorite topics – recursion. This canvas based tool allows you to explore branching algorithms & rendering techniques, as well as save a snapshot of your creations. It’s also open source, which is always nice…

Continue reading.... Super Recursion Toy [Javascript]

Created by Kris Temmerman, aka Neuro Productions, WebGL Tadpoles is an experiment with 30 tadpoles relying on inverse kinematic chains and moving in a 3D using Perlin Noise vector field.

Kris writes: And since they aren’t static objects, I have to project the vertices and calculate the normals every frame in JavaScript. In that sense, the JavaScript speed is reasonable. But as always, I was hoping for more. In C++ I can easily render +500 tadpoles with 4 times as many triangles per tadpole …..To get some anti-alias, I render it first in a frame buffer object 9 times the window size (width*3, height*3). So, no complaints about the WebGL speed… for now…

Try it here: webgl/tadPoles or read more at WebGL Tadpoles | Neuro Productions

Made by Neuro Productions
Music: Celestial Aeon Projectx

If you like this, see also Cindermedusae by Marcin Ignac, made with Cinder but WebGL version is in the making.

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

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/

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

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]