Archive for May, 2006
My web host seems to have destroyed my entire database of blogging and are now being fairly useless at explaining how the hell they ended up destroying the many hours of work I’ve put into this site over the past year. The last backup of the site was made way back in febuary so please expect a bit of a mess online while I gather all the individual posts and republish them. Thank you for your patience.
All of you who Blog out there! BACKUP NOW!!!
May 22nd, 2006
Industrial Designer Marcel Neundörfer has designed a urinal that features a pressure-sensitive display screen for some gaming fun in restrooms.
When relieving yourself into this interactive urinal, you launch a mini-game that focuses on a target, with your stream acting as the input device. By targeting a specific area, you are prompted to control a character or object on the screen. In addition, the benefit of this interactive urinal is that people now really focus on hitting the urinal and not outside, as Neundörfer explains:
The reduced size of the “target” improves restroom hygiene and saves on cleanings costs (like the “fly in the urinal” at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport). It also makes a trip to the urinal “fun and games” – more than just a necessary nuisance.
We now wonder why Nintendo spent so much money on designing a freehand controller when every man already has a revolutionary controller.
Story from teamxbox
The You’re In Control (Urine Control)
An MIT project from a few years ago, ‘You’re In Control’ system uses computation to enhance the act of urination. Sensors in the back of a urinal detect the position of impact of a stream of urine, enabling the user to play interactive games on a screen mounted above the urinal.
See Video
Pissoir
Allan Giddy and Steven Greenwood , in 2002 used pre-existing urinals in a gallery toilet sensitised to allow participants (both male & female) to draw using their urine. As the urine passes through a light field it is tracked by computer. The resulting line drawings are traced life-size in real-time on monitors in an adjacent gallery space. The colour of each line drawing is determined by the pH value of the drawer’s urine. Each completed drawing is then uploaded automatically onto a website. This work celebrates the private, intimate, DIY act of urination as a creative activity. It provides all participants with, as it were, a canvas, giving them the opportunity to draw/paint their own works of art. Urine incident upon a sensor is sampled for its unique pH level, giving each participant the chance to leave his/her own colour pH signature for the first time.
via wmmna
May 20th, 2006
Electrical engineering students at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands have created the world’s largest 3D-display. The display consists of 8,000 suspended ping pong balls that each contain a red LED light. It play games of 3D snake, 3D pong, and 3D duckhunt, as wll as displaying SMS messages and simple animations.
4 kilometres of copper wire, 3 kilos of solder, a couple of hundred metres of aluminium and eight printed circuit boards.
May 12th, 2006
LAb[au]‘s installation ‘Point, Line, Surface computed in seconds ‘, (2005) the user creates out of simple interactions a sound and image environment. Interaction is similar to drawing on a plane. A sonic / visual composition is gradually build out of the drawing movements of the user resulting not only in visual objects moving on the screen and the projection but also to sounds moving thanks to the 4 speakers setup and sound spatialization algorithms. The installation is an instrument which like any instrument has its own codes and modalities. The aesthetic work consists here to build this codes, linking shapes [ shapes are “types” or “topologies”, in this case: point, lines, planes,… ] with colors and sounds. Out of this linking is created an aesthetic order producing meaning.
Each created soundscape can be recorded and called back at any moment. The recording takes in account the parameter of time [third axis=z] in the creation of a 3d display of the composition. Each of these times based towers are place on a common grid according to two parameters: 1: the % of density and the % of motion. These two parameters qualify in different manners the audience interaction while confronting it to time/space related parameters of the sonic construct. The common grid slowly creates a geometric pattern of space-time indexed objects_ the sound towers. Here the grid directly refers to Mondriaans synaesthetic ideas of the ‘boggie woggie’, in-between color sound and space, as on indexing parameters, the two dimensional grid. But the simple display of the grid and the isometric towers turns spatial through the topprojection and quadraphonic sound, immerging the user in his individual space of sound & motion as on the common level in a collective space, the installation as the grid indexing, the collective sound database.
May 11th, 2006
More robots… Rough terrain locomotion has mainly relied on rigid body systems, such as crawlers and leg mechanisms. The guys at the Department of Robotics, Ritsumeikan Univ.ersity, Japan are looking at alternative approachs that uses deformation .
Video – 1 – 2 – 3
Locomotion mechanisms consisting of rigid body systems have drawbacks: large weight that may cause impact to humans and difficulty in recovery from their overturning. Recently, mechanisms that can recover from their overturning have been studied but these mechanisms tend to be complicated. Recent research on soft actuators such as shape memory alloy (SMA) wires and polymer gel actuators has yielded positive results. Soft actuators have been used to drive leg mechanisms and soft body robots. Locomotion mechanisms consisting of soft actuators can also be light-weight.
Unfortunately, soft actuators still have drawbacks. They tend to generate a small force, and those that generate a large force need either a high driving voltage over 1,000V, making it difficult to build self-supporting robots, or a wet environment. To overcome this problem, they have employed soft actuators to controllably deform a robot body, enabling it to crawl over and jump on rough terrain. Crawling and jumping using deformation can cope with rougher terrain than rigid body systems can. Additionally, soft body deformation reduces the damage in collision with humans.
May 10th, 2006
The installation ‘ 12m4s ‘ by lab-au is an architectural intervention using visitor’s movements to generate out of its main parameters such as visitor position, orientation and speed a visual ( 3d particles ) and sonic ( granular synthesis) scape.
The installation is based on two tracking techniques such as image recognition and ultra sound sensors, to compute out of the tracked data a space of sound and movement in real-time. Here the different spatial, sonic and visual data fuses to one common construct where on the one hand the image recognition is used to create spatial sounds and where on the other hand the sonic sensors are used to create a visual echograms of the space. These sonic and visual representations of the space display visitor movements and create also a common vector field according to which all these elements evolve.
The result, this ‘particle synthesis’ is projected on a mylar screen fusing projection and reflection while building a common space in between the digital and the body space.
May 9th, 2006
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