informal dialogue

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’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 [...]

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 [...]

One of the thorns in my side of late has been my idiosyncratic iMac G5, with it’s incessant desire to switch off at random and interrupt anything I happen to be doing. It’s become such a problem that I’ve actually abandoned it as my home computer and have conceded defeat.
Today I spoke with Apple [...]

The Street as platform – a street rendered in data.
November has been a busy month!
Along with Anthony Burke, Dan Hill and Mitchell Whitelaw, I’ve been running an intensive masterclass studio in the Master of Digital Architecture program at UTS.  The masterclass is based on one of Dan’s earlier posts called http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2008/02/the-street-as-p.html, in which the notion [...]

Here’s the latest update from the Real Perspective show at TAP Gallery.

‘pixeltag’ (2008). from Jason McDermott on Vimeo.
Wicked!

The pixeltag project has progressed once again;
* the interface has been amended slightly to allow for yaw input (not just roll) as the ‘x’ axis data,
* the ‘cursor’ item has been implemented, allowing the user to see where they are about to draw prior to doing so,
* The up/down ratios have been adjusted to allow [...]

The google-verse has recently been expanded to include gapminder software as part of the ever impressive Google Docs platform.
Below is an interactive spreadsheet example of the sophisticated motion graphs now available in Google Docs.
The motion graph is based on the Gapminder software first demonstrated to the world by Hans Rosling in his exciting and highly [...]