This is a video of the latest updates for the pixeltag project. So far I’ve had to be satisfied with screen grabs or photos from the interactivation studio, but I’ve taken the leap and made it safely into videoland – or should I say vimeoland.Enjoy!
Archive for February 2009
cartopol
Right now I’m feeling happy to exist in such a rich community of developers, designers, engineers and innovators working in the field of interactive media.
First of all I’m struggling to figure out the simplest way to map hue changes to the jit.lcd object in the Pixeltag project, but we’ll come back to that because there are more fun things to discuss in the meantime!
In the midst of pondering the application of hue data to the colour of the oval object in the program, I realised I didn’t have a clean way of getting to the hue data from my input device in the first place! The wii nunchuk dishes out y,m data in the range of 0.0 – 1.0 ~ useful ~ but nowhere near the polar coordinates called for by jit.hue’s ‘hue_angle $1′ arguement.
That is – until I did a bit of research on the conversion between cartesian/polar coordinates and discovered that it’s as simple as the following procedure;
Point at (x, y)
Origin at (xo, yo)Then let
dx=(x-xo)
dy=(y-yo)then distance of (x, y) from (xo, yo) is r at an angle of theta, given by
r=sqrt(dx*dx+dy*dy)
theta=atan(dy, dx)*pi/180 (theta in degrees)
But of course~!
So first I tried to use some fudged expr object [expr atan($f1\,$f2)] but it wasn’t working and I threw my hands up in despair! I dug a little deeper in to the atan~ function in max/msp, and came across the cartopol~ object and it’s help file – which does exactly what I need it to, all wrapped up in a single object. Fantastic!
So now I can convert up/down x/y data input from the wii nunchuk joystick to polar degrees for a jit.hue object to use! awesome.
The point of this post is to express my gratitude to the rest of the community of thinkers who posted bits and pieces of the solutions we discover for our problems. Without such a rich resource to mine through (and it does take some digging) we would all need to know everything about everything before achieving something others have done before us. Why reinvent the wheel if a solution has been made already?
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Pepsi energy fields
In case anyone missed this..
For the full breakdown.Hilarious! [Via Supercolossal]
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Get your blog on
Postopolis is happening again this time in LA as opposed to NY (where it was held two years ago). The lineup is about as solid as you can get, as according to BLDGBLOG;
- —David Basulto from Plataforma Arquitectura and ArchDaily (Santiago, Chile)—Jace Clayton from Mudd Up! (New York City, USA)—Régine Debatty from we make money not art (Europe)—Bryan Finoki from Subtopia (San Francisco, USA)—Dan Hill from City of Sound (Sydney, Australia)—Geoff Manaugh from BLDGBLOG (San Francisco, USA)
In other news, there is talk of Postopolis coming to Sydney sometime this year, which would be fantastic to say the least!
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Undersea Cablescape
This image caught my eye this afternoon;
[Via Digg]Digging a little further brought up this image also;
[Via The Guardian]I’d looked into this some time ago, noting the interdependance of continents on single connection points for their data resources, and this is a good example of that. The bottom image describes two separate incidents in which human sea activity disrupted data cable connections and resulted in major network shutdowns to entire regions. Whilst these events may occur fairly infrequently (I’d be interested to see some stats on the number of incidents in the last 30 years, or possibly just as interesting, stats on how frequently repair crews are scheduled for ‘routine maintenance’), the above images highlight an inherent weakness of the physical internet.Some thoughts come to mind;
- Geographical regions as physical storage, or ‘plug-and-play’ Australia?
- How do you actually lay/repair cables spanning entire oceans?
- Is it possible to target a country’s umbilical data cord, in an act of piracy or terrorism-by-proxy?
- What kind of intercontinental landscape has been created under our oceans? If raised, would this undersea network be visible from space?
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Ihardlyknowher Flickr Viewer
Ihardlyknowher Flickr Viewer , originally uploaded by jason.mcdermott.Above is a screenshot of my flickr viewer made possible by ihardlyknowher, a flickr-API application developed by Justin Ouellette, who also happens to have been behind the very cool muxtape and (worked at) vimeo. The site description reads;
‘If your Flickr URL is flickr.com/photos/yourname,find yourself at ihardlyknowher.com/yourname’
Ihardlyknowher is a very simple, minimal interface for viewing a Flickr users’ photos, with options to switch between large and small photos for varying bandwidths. Also available are a flickr user’s sets. It succeeds where the Flickr interface doesn’t – it just makes it simple and easy to view a set of photos without any extraneous branding or annoying GUI elements getting in the way.Seems like a breath of fresh air after being continuously frustrated by the Flickr interface (aside from the already mentioned GUI, something’s not quite right I just can’t put my finger on it..).
