OK this might sound a bit daft, but if we could convert DVD or MPEG (or whatever) on to cine-film then we could use a relatively cheap projector. Perhaps of use to the handcar?
This is related to Cefn’s home-made projector posting.
Now, this may be a false economy (and I haven’t found anywhere that’ll do this), but I think it could be rather interesting. What do you think?
Cheers,
Dave
Wanted to get to the point that we can experiment with different story and game forms for the pipedreams installation.
So I’ve been constructing an emulator which has text input and output for multiple channels (a text emulator for multiple phone microphones and earpieces) to debug story development across multiple channels, based on solicited responses.
Still trying to structure in my head audio interactions which will permit people’s recorded contributions to be fed meaningfully back into the dynamic piece.
The surrealist game exquisite corpse is quite inspiring as a simple structure, but even more fun is this M�bius Corpse game. I’m sure there are a whole load of possibilities.
If anyone has ideas or wants to experiment with this framework for themselves I can arrange to post the source somewhere when it’s properly debugged.
Should be fairly straightforward to use the interfaces defined, test them on ‘recorded’ text and then seamlessly transfer them to the real audio environment if people have games in mind to try out.
Currently the interfaces lay out as below. A text emulated version of all these interfaces has been built to run inside a Swing frame with text color fading out with age so it’s easy to work out what’s going on. Hopefully it should be easy enough that even non-java programmers could pick it up fairly easily.
Game.java
Channel.java
ChannelRecording.java
InputChannel.java
OutputChannel.java
LiveInputChannel.java
LiveOutputChannel.java
RecordedInputChannel.java
RecordedOutputChannel.java
Getting together the gear to build the pipedreams system.
The plan is based on USB VoIP phones and USB hubs both of which are really cheap these days. I think this should give us as many audio channels out of one computer as we want.
I’ve just placed an order for 3 different VoIP phones to see which are the most effective. Wondering whether it might be nicer just to have phones hanging there, instead of pipes.
It’s much simpler to start with, although maybe later could get on with pipes.
Will need to chain together a bunch of USB hubs to get enough ports.
Going to build the game logic in Java and the audio manipulation on JSyn (which is the library behind Processing’s Sonia library). Nice holiday project.
While rummaging around on geeks.com I found this Linksys Wireless-G WVC54G 802.11g Internet Video Camera which could be useful for projects needing a webcam, serves up an MPEG4 encoded stream from a built-in webserver (doesn’t need a computer) over a WiFi network. But it is kinda expensive.
Hi - if you’ve not seen the Powers of Ten movie before - take a look at this.
There’s more to be found at http://www.powersof10.com/ too.
Cheers,
Dave
Hi Everyone,
Here’s the first version of my code to read the PowerBook (or iBook) orientation in Flash and Java: www.davidchatting.com/boiling-frogs/motion/. This is the code Craig and I used to for the powerbook puppet.
Please let me know if you try it out.
Cheers,
Dave
Katya and I had some fun with archived video and after effects. I’m sure she won’t mind sharing this preview.
Joint effort finding the clips off archive.org but Katya did the final editing. My version looked crap. ‘Clean’ is still a work in progress, but hope you like this montage presentation of very strange, but genuine archived clips.
If you are reading this on the website, click here to see the movie
Hello Everyone,
Craig and I have been playing with the PowerBook TiltTop code and we have created our first puppet - see the quicktime.
So in this version you see the puppet being picked-up and then moved to the left and right.
Please let us know what you think!
Cheers,
Dave
Hello - been experimenting a little in processing...
I’ve taken a slice from the left-hand-side of every frame in this 15 second clip from Let’s go to Birmingham. By stacking them up you get a view from the side of the track. See my page on this.
It’s not completely right yet, but I reckon it’s quite interesting - here’s the code - sometimes it doesn’t work!
What do you think?
Cheers,
Dave
People who are looking to build portable or minimal devices as part of digital exhibits (without humming desktop machines hidden around the corner) might be interested in the sub $150 ‘palm-of-your-hand’ linux boards at The Gumstix Website
These are 200MHz-400MHz Xscale Intel Chips plus 64Meg SDRAM, like the desktop computer I was using only a few years ago! Also, expansion boards for audio and other externals are available for not too much cash. Not suitable for really intensive multimedia work, but perhaps perfect for robotics/interactive devices.
I have been playing recently with my PowerBook‘s Sudden Motion Sensor which is supposed to be for protected your hard-disk against “sudden motion” (being dropped!), but there’s a hack for finding out its orientation. So you can find out how much the lap-top is being tilted in any direction - think tilt-top!
People have already done a bunch of neat things with this - like rolling a marble around a course and a tipping version of Google Maps.
However, I wanted to be able to build it into my own applications. The only open source version of this code in C from Christian Klein. I don’t get on too well with C, so I’ve built a Java and Flash interface and will upload it source and all very shortly.
Craig and I are discussing how we can use it to build a puppet in Flash.
Cheers,
Dave
