ConnectingTheDots

Digital Meets Physical Mashups: New Dawn of Sharing

     

After a long posting hiatus, semi-back.  To paraphrase Bre Pattis, "You need to have more than one parent for your digital designs."  I was happily surprised when a series of individuals on Flickr created derivative art from one of my photos.  It was rather amazing to see the creative diversity stimulated from a basic image.  But moreso, there was something special about the social nature of seeing a thread of peoples' derivatives from the same source, and something special about the personal acknowledgements of inspiration. 

 

Similarly, in a fun talk about the future of digital things, Bre shared some anecdotes about the digital to physical mashups (and memes) that he's been noticing on Thingiverse, a place where people can submit and share their 3D designs.  A simple gangsta spawned the Thingiverse community to create  rabbitsta,  yodasta,  ColbertSta,  bobbleheadsta,  chessta -- basically any head imaginable stuck on top the gangsta body to create new sta's. 

Jumping a bit to a slightly different translation of digital meets physical.  Along the theme of thoughts about how we are evolving our culture of sharing, it was interesting to see the story of Jonathan's Card unfold.  It was an experiment in collective sharing of physical goods and virtual currency.  Jonathan made his Starbucks card available for anyone to use or add to for coffee.  Like all things digital and shared on the Internet, unpredictable mashups happened. There was general evidence of generousity as people kept the balance positive, adding and spending $8K within a month. Then came an unexpected mashup, as one individual wrote a script that took and transfered money off Jonathan's card onto his own card (with the intent for the funds to then be donated to a charity, Save the Children).  Unfortunately, the end result was Jonathan's card got shut down, but I suspect experiments in sharing across digital to physical will continue to crop up.      

Fabricating Ourselves

When 3D printing meets Kinect meets humans' love for Polaroid portraits, we witness how Insta-selves could be a future common crowdpleaser.

With custom software developed using openKinect and openFrameworks, Be Your Own Souvenir by Blablablab let people pose and generate action-figures of themselves.  Three kinect sensors captured 360 degree scans of each person.  Meshlab used the combined input pointclouds to create a Poisson reconstruction (cleaned via Blender and Skeinforge) before sent to print. 

Also using Kinect, the Fabricate Yourself project by Karl D.D. Willis captured peoples' forms and turned them into peices of a giant jigsaw puzzle (related paper on interactive fabrication).  

With the price point of 3D printers going down, imagine we'll be seeing more varients on these tangible representations of self.  To my friends designing that mega candy store, I think 3D printing of visitors into candy statues would be a hit. 

Paths Making Sounds

Walkers, subway riders, and drivers often listen to songs as the soundtrack to their journey.  Wonder what it would sound like if my commute actually made music for me -- if my paths formed notes and beats, would i like the song?  

While not music-fying real journeys, Isle of Tune's visual interface makes music from street layouts (placement of roads, lights, trees, houses as the sound elements and movement of cars as the needle). This is the one I made (should have added one more car).  Closer to reality, mta.me turns NYC's subway (1972 version) into a "real-time" instrument.  Each train line generates a string (length determines pitch). Using data from MTA's public API, the trains head towards the end of their line at a speed estimated according to trip schedules (more detail).  The subway's song is actually quite lovely. I especially love the strumming effect.   

Haven't tried it, but those looking to quickly prototype music apps for the iPhone or iPad might want to check out iRTcmix, port of older RTcmix music/DSP language to iOS and a Max/MSP environment.

Pulse of the Nation and Hackability

Delayed hearting of this time lapse video of Twitter data visualizations.  The dynamic "pulse of the nation" was generated from mood coding over 300 million tweets collected over three years, using an ANEW word list.  Patterns revealed included highest level of happy tweets in early morning and late evening; and geographic variations with the west coast showing happier tweets consistently three hours behind the east coast.

A different type of animation below, collaboratively created in three days by three animators using nothing but Google Docs. From skydiving with Google Earth to controlling World of Warcraft with Kinect's sensor, this past year's pulse of creativity has been pretty amazing and encouraged by the hackability of low cost tools.  

Mashup Breakdown

Unlike some of my musical friends, I'm horrible at identifying specific samples from songs.  At least for Girl Talk's All Day (372 song samples), I can look at Mashup Breakdown.  For lots of music meta data to play with check out Echo Nest Remix API. 

Visualizing Dating Data

What would a census based on online dating profiles reveal?  Love the maps Luke Dubois created for his soon to be exhibited "A More Perfect Union" project -- born of post-breakup openness to any kind of mate, willingness to sign up for every major data site, and nerdy info computation curiousity.  Text frequency visualized on U.S. maps uncover amusing geographic variations in characteristics -- how shades of shyness vary across states and how some towns should be renamed "Skeptical", "Hammered", "Compulsive", "Strapless"...  

Agreed: The World is Full of Interesting Things

For some inspiration,Tom Uglow has a compilation of creativity.

100 + examples of projects that pushed at evolving audio, visuals, physicality, and more. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One link to many links through his google doc the creative internet

 

iPad 3D Light Forms

The folks at BERG and Dentsu are exploring screening surfaces and playing with the popular 'glowing rectangles' that inhabit our world. They invented a new photographic/stop-animation technique for making media.  Software models of 3-dimensional typography, objects and animations are created and cross sections of the models are rendered like a virtual CAT scan to create a series of sliced outlines.  Those are played back as movies on the surface of an iPad and extrude 3-d light forms as the iPad moves through space.  That movement is recorded through long exposures (multiple exposures in composite to create a film like the one above). More on the method here. 

Reshaping the World: Shaun White Skateboarding Game

As it does every year, this year's games for change festival left me reinvigorated and eager to build out ideas.  "Good" design is a constant theme for this field that's faced with creating appropriately engaging experiences about tough topics, often with small budgets.  Embracing narrative techniques from other media and creating ambiguity + meaningful choice was advice echoed by many designers. 

Among the many thoughts I'm still mentally digesting is the question of when its effective to design social impact games that are not literal.  Commonly, a game about the environment has players interacting with digital assets that simulate and look like the environment; a game about global conflict puts players in the shoes of archetype political sides.  When is it more compelling to play with the underlying dynamic (e.g. resource management) in a different way? 

With that train of thought, the recent Ubisoft Shaun White Skateboarding game caught my eye (nice write up over at Kotaku). The game world starts in a city controlled by the "Minestry", everything safely regulated, no fun weirdness (the world skaters see and want to change).  In this generic world, by skateboarding the players can express themselves, influence, and physically reshape the world around them.  360 flips and other tricks make stores more colorful, people lose their suits, rails connect to reach rooftops, chunks of the street transform into bowls.  By remolding the world into a skatepark, players eventually overthrow the MInistry.  Subbing out skateboards, players discover their influence tool, test it to greater degrees of sophistication, and see their ability to produce a different world.  

Augmented Realities: Eyewriter

DIY interfaces like the Minority Report mimicking MIT Glove Mouse are fun, but projects like the Eyewriter are truly augmenting peoples' realities.  The Eyewriter is a low-cost eye tracking apparatus (glasses + led + camera) and custom software (open frameworks sourcecode) that empowers people suffering from paralysis to have an expressive outlet, to draw using only their eyes. 

The Eyewriter from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

Re-interpreting Code: Twitter to Embroider & Html to Create Music

  Code is often invisible and (perhaps with the exception of programmers) rarely perceived as beautiful.  Pa++ern and Codeorgan create playful interactions with code, and remind us that codes are human constructed symbol systems that can be re-purposed and evolve over time.  Pa++ern is a programming language for embroidery that can be sent over Twitter.  The code is purposely short, an entire program can fit in the 140 character limit of Twitter.  Moreover, aside from the embroidery generated, the language is designed to make the appearance of the program itself looked pleasing.  On the audio end of things, codeorgan is a Flash app that turns any web page into music. An algorithm translates the text within a URL page into a musical composition.  All my websites sound different; not sure how to interpret that.  

Inspired by our Social, Emotional Web

I have a minor graphic novel addiction.  Aside from a growing bookshelf, a growing amount of minutes are being sucked into illustration blogs.  The increasingly social and emotional public trails left on the web have been a source of creative inspiration for a number of artists -- from lovely visual interpretations of missed connections posts to a museum of humorous takes on celebrity twitters.  It was also on Twitter that a loose collection of Brits with mutual love for the Magnetic Fields decided to add to the images out there by illustrating all 69 love songs.

Smart Grid Augmented Reality

Still feeling the novelty value, finally printed out the GE Solar Panel Marker and tilted around a mini hologram of big technology in my hands.  The marker once pointed at a webcam unfolds a green scene of wind turbines or solar panels.  Limited interactivity beyond viewing at different angles (my blowing didn't succeed in triggering much wind power).  Even more fun is watching the reactions of others trying it.  For the extra curious, they share the FLARTtoolkit source code.

A few other companies have also used webcam based AR in their ads, like the Mini Cabrio (black and white magazine ad displaying a 3D model car).

 

Net-Map: The Process of Visualizing

Especially for those with 100s or 1000s of "friends", it can be challenging to know your network.  Various visualization tools have been created to help people keep track of their universes: from Vizster (interactive sociogram for exploring the community structure of sites like friendster), to more recent Fidg't (using Flickr and LastFM tags as "magnets" to similar members), and the myriad Twitter visualization tools (exploring networks by tweet geography, topic, volume, etc). 

More often than not, these digital visualizations are ready-made by developers or graphic designers; users view or play with automatically generated mappings of their network.

Net-map is a low-tech tool that focuses less on the end product and moreso on the process of creating the nodes and links of influence.  The interview-based social mapping tool has been used in rural communities of Ghana and Chile to help people understand, discuss, and improve situations with multiple-influencers (netmaptoolbox process photostream).

Remixing: Keyboard as Instrument

Am a little biased, but the guys of Eclectic Method are awesome remixers (creators of very danceable and watchable live mashing and scratching of music videos, tv, movies, video games). 

They've been "playing" the news recently, and sharing a tool that lets anyone play sights and sounds from the Inauguration (by tapping your keyboard like an instrument).  

Along the lines of the older remix widget below (also fun to play with) and a nice intro for those who may want to respond to Colbert's Remix Challenge.