informal dialogue

Are you going to Index tonight? It’s the end of year show for the UTS Architecture school, with work being exhibited from all 5 years.  Go check it out!

I’m heading down to Melbourne tomorrow for the 2009 OZCHI conference with Frank Maguire, Bert Bongers and Dan Hill, to attend and present (with Frank) some research work we’ve done recently.  I’m looking forward to it, one of the add-ons for this conference is a workshop on Street Computing organised by the ubiquitous Marcus Foth.  [...]

I just came across Alex Bamford’s flickr images, via Russell Davies.  His images are lovely, his light fight set is worth checking out.  Take a look for yourself;

Lately I’ve been working my way through an academic requirement for all phd students at UTS, which involves submitting a progress reports on my work each and every semester. These reports are essentially a simple 4-page form but require an appended (also 4 page) report outlining what you set out to do, what you [...]

This is a quick test of HasCanvas for publishing processing sketches in a web browser.  HasCanvas is built on the very nifty processing.js platform, which means publishing processing sketches is about as easy as clicking 1 + 2 + 3.
see for yourself;

For students in the 11217 introduction to construction class;
Here is an example of a simple metronome counter which moves a line up and down a sketch window over a period of time.  You should be able to follow the comments included to see how you might plug your sensors and motors into this sketch to [...]

Here’s a simple example for connecting a PhidgetInterfaceKit 8/8/8 to a computer, using Processing.
You will need to download the phidget21.jar package from the phidgets website, find it in the ‘Programming’ section in the java examples section.  Once downloaded, just use Sketch>Add File… to add the file to your sketch.  Connect via USB and you’re ready [...]

I’m currently preparing for a short piece of processing tutoring in the Bachelor of Architecture course, commencing tomorrow.  The course is a 1st year construction subject, in which the year group is designing modular structures from found objects (read; whatever they can find in large amounts at Reverse Garbage), with a  12-15 unsuspecting students are [...]

I’ve spent a bit more time cleaning up the fluid blobs examples I made last week, this time limiting the Region of Interest and fiddling with the fluid interaction.  Also newly included is a smarter way to interact with the blobs (in the code, i mean), pulling out more precise locational data.  I’ll be looking [...]

Linked below are some early results from a new series of sketches I’ve been working on using Processing.  These sketches continue in a long line of projects I’ve completed recently using simple camera tracking algorithms to infer interesting patterns of movement in urban spaces.
The first example is a calibrated blob tracking experiment, using the excellent [...]

In addition to my involvement with the janus project for the Smart Light Sydney Festival, Joanne Jakovich and I were invited to collaborate with the NSW Department of Planning in an ambitious short term project during the festival.  The Department of Planning, along with Metropolis and D-City had the initiative to setup a small amount [...]

As part of the Smart Light Sydney Festival, May 2009, Tom Barker (Professor of Design, Architecture and Innovation at UTS) and Hank Haeusler (Post-Doctoral Researcher at UTS) were commissioned to design and produce an interactive light sculpture to be exhibited on the light walk in the Rocks.  The piece conceived by Tom was called Janus [...]

Filtration Fields (Joanne Jakovich & Jason McDermott 2009)
Recently Joanne and I were given the opportunity to exhibit in the DAB Lab Research Gallery at UTS, in the Design, Architecture and Building faculty building, as an opportunity to refine and showcase our collective research into realtime responsive architectural environments.

[view from inside DAB Lab Gallery, taken [...]

Just to let you all know, I’m back!  This last quarter has been mad crazy with projects appearing, happening and disappearing again, all with the speed of an international swine flu epidemic pandemic.  I’ve got some catching up to do, so there’ll be a fair whack of documentation and write-ups for all the hard work [...]