king talk

I think you’ll know the crazy japanese guy who stimulated his face with electronics. It’s Daito Manabe, a very experimental guy who likes to play around with himself, but he and his partners (Alvaro Cassinelli and Yusaku Kuribara) have more stuff to show…

»scoreLight« is a prototype musical instrument capable of generating sound in real time from the lines of doodles as well as from the contours of three-dimensional objects nearby (hands, dancer’s silhouette, architectural details, etc). There is no camera nor projector: a laser spot explores the shape as a pick-up head would search for sound over the surface of a vinyl record – with the significant difference that the groove is generated by the contours of the drawing itself. The light beam follows these countours in the very same way a blind person uses a white cane to stick to a guidance route on the street. Details of this tracking technique can be found here.

Sound is produced and modulated according to the curvature of the lines being followed, their angle with respect to the vertical as well as their color and contrast. This means that  »scoreLight« implements gesture, shape and color-to-sound artificial synesthesia; abrupt changes in the direction of the lines produce trigger discrete sounds (percussion, glitches), thus creating a rhythmic base (the length of a closed path determines the overall tempo).

via Ishikawa-Komuro Lab

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.

Hello, my name is Sebastian. I’m in the 13th and last grade now, so I had to see what my future could look like. For that I spent one week as an intern with the team of envis precisely and now I’m really glad that I did this, because it showed me that interaction design could be the right area for me. Not only were the topics interesting, but the working atmosphere was also very comfortable.

During this week I learned a lot about designing. Creating sketches and prototypes for sharing your ideas to the customer. I also took part in a presentation of such a prototype, which showed me what a interaction designer has to consider to achieve the customers wishes. Moreover I got introduced to programms like v4, with which I already could create small patches at the end of the week. For example I made a patch, using a webcam to interact with.

And that’s result of my webcam based patch: With different markers (fiducials), different pictures are maped on the monitor. At the end of the week they introduced me to Arduino and I reviewed a workshop kit and a tutorial book which will be tested in the next weeks of my holidays …

Golan Levin, an artist and engineer, uses modern tools – robotics, new software, cognitive research – to make artworks that surprise and delight. Watch as sounds become shapes, bodies create paintings, and a curious eye looks back at the curious viewer. Golan worked as an academic at MIT and a researcher specializing in computer technology and software engineering, Golan Levin now spends most of his time working as a performance artist. Rest assured his education hasn’t gone to waste, however, as Levin blends high tech and customized software programs to create his own extraordinary audio and visual compositions. The results are inordinately experimental sonic and visual extravaganzas from the furthest left of the field.

Many of his pieces force audience participation, such as Dialtones: A Telesymphony, a concert from 2001 entirely composed of the choreographed ringtones of his audience. Regularly exhibiting pieces in galleries around the world, and also working as an Assistant Professor of Electronic Time-Based Art at Carnegie Mellon University, Levin is unapologetically pushing boundaries to define a brave new world of what is possible. His latest piece, Double-Taker (Snout), is installed at the Pittsburg Museum of Art.

Great project openFrameworks project by Pleaseletmedesign, Zach Lieberman and Stef van Campenhoudt! Four color markers on a Toyota iQ are tracked and dynamically converted into paths. Afterward, the images are turned into a real typeface (that can be downloaded) using FontLab Studio.

It reminded me of BMWs commercials for the new Z4. Apparently, drawing stuff with cars is en vogue now.

via Fubiz