king talk

When updating our computers to the latest version of OS X, we discovered that Apple included a brand new version of Quartz Composer, their visual programming environment. We were positively surprised that they ditched the cheesy old interface in favor of a more refined and more professional looking theme.

This sparked our interest and we spent some time playing around with the tool.

structures-1 flickr set

structures-1 on vimeo

structures-2 on vimeo

structures-3 on vimeo

We are working on something. It’s about presenting information and we are confident that it will rock quite a bit.

More to come this fall!

UPDATE: Woah, vimeo totally crapped the quality of the video! Just try out LogoSpace and see for yourself.

Some of you might recall our little AR-Pong, where we explored color tracking. Now we created this little experiment with motion tracking. What’s happening is that the logo follows the motion on the screen, while newly born particles always flock towards the center of the motion. It’s not a multi blob tracker (it only detects one center of motion), but it’s a nice thing to play with.

We’ve been using a modified Version of Justin Windles tracker and some stuff from Allen Chou.

You can try it yourself – provided you have a webcam – right here.

»I am a huge fan of space! It is my favorite endless empty void.« Just like Stephen Colbert, who coined this phrase, I like space.

That’s why I am especially happy to report that Chandra, a space telescope is now celebrating its 10th birthday. Since 1999 it has been collecting beautiful images of nebulas, supernovae and other phenomenons beyond the imagination of a standard human like me.

What I find most interesting is, how the tiny particles that form those nebulas interact with each other in terms of gravity, radiation and other forces. I think artists and designers can learn a lot from those interactions. As a matter of fact, without knowing it my favorite piece of the wireframe experiments I did a couple of months ago looked quite a bit like Cassiopeia A (image above), a picture of a supernova taken in 2004.