Here are some recent projects from year 2 of the Creative Multimedia course at DKIT. The student groups were each given a toy and assigned the task of hacking it together with a keyboard to create a controller for an original interactive experience made in flash and/or director.
‘Tiny Tag’ by team ‘Play It!’ is a graffiti simulator inspired by Tag Tool. ‘Play It!’ converted the steering wheel toy into their tag controller, allowing you to select a background, then pick your tags and move, rotate and scale them as you please.
Back in December 2007 ABC launched ‘Find 815‘, the second alternate realty game promoting Emmy award winning TV series ‘Lost‘. In the first interactive part of the experience a laptop screen was shown full of fictitious email addresses. One of these was a hotmail address, it turned out it wasn’t registered… so I registered it :) For the next few days I documented reactions to the minor ripple in the expanded Lost universe that is Zeke Klotho Freundlich. So anyways here’s a link to a podcast talking about it, the recording also features some words from the creators of the ‘Adopt a Space Monkey‘ / ‘Aftermath 08‘ ARG.
I hope the story is interesting, apologies to anyone involved with making the ARG that was inconvenienced by my actions… it was all in the name of research, honest! ;) Namaste!
Scarface was talking about his machine gun when he said that, but I´m referring to the little EEE PC by Asus i picked up recently. I know that´s a lame comparison but it´s a deadly weapon in it´s own right. The cheap mini laptop has a 7¨ screen and is about the size of a portable dvd player. Asus and Intel designed it as a response to MIT and AMDs ´One Laptop Per Child´ project, it runs on Linux with wifi and lots of apps preinstalled. So hopefully now I´ll blog a bit more now that my computering isn´t tethered to my desktop machine. The the best site I´ve found for EEE info is eeeuser.com with lots of discussion, reviews and details of how to modify the machine, adding bluetooth, extra ram and lots of other tweaks to boost it´s power. Anyhows… bonus Scarface link here.
I downloaded the Zbrush demo and sculpted this head… 3d on computer is not my forte but I managed this model reasonably quick, was fun to make, the process is very organic - you start off with a sphere and mould it like you would a piece of clay… this head is pretty basic compared to what the pro’s make with zbrush… Beowulf for instance!
I’ve had a short loop I made in LSDJ on the Nintendo Gameboy included as a locked groove (infinitely repeating loop) on the Minimalizm v4 compilation. I always wanted to have some sound I made pressed onto wax, then I found this project and thought I’d give it a go. The venture is funded by the loop creators each agreeing to buy a small number of records. You email on a .wav file of your track as a 4 bar, 133 bpm loop, compilation organisers Noise Vinyl take care of the rest and it becomes part of a 7″, 33 rpm vinyl record.
CDs and MP3s are fine and all, but Vinyl has a charm all of its own, both soundwise and from it’s tangible form and it doesn’t look like it’s going to die out any day soon. In fact, this article from Wired suggests that vinyl will outlive cds commercially… and if there’s a power cut you could always listen to your records on this, though perhaps not at audiophile levels :)
“The Bubbles Of Radio” is an interesting project by students from AHO in Norway where they cataloged different radio frequency types in the style of a nature watch booklet. Each signal type was given a latin-style name, for instance Bluetooth is Nevrotis Dentus Aquarae and RFID is Raptus Arphadus and accompanied by creative illustrations that show them as visible, tangible parts of the environment. Full information including a PDF chart of the visualisations are at Nearfield.org.
Just stumbled across this website from Japan all about robots and found the very impressive walking, fist throwing robot by Vstone called the Black Ox . It stands a mighty foot and a half high, has twenty articulation points and will lay waste to any miniature cityscape or opponent that stands in its way. The Black Ox is the nemesis of Gigantor, from a manga first published in 1956. It’s great to see a fictional character brought to life like this, next step will be a full-scale model :)
A musical creation game from 1986 by Toshio Iwai, who created Electroplankton and most recently the Tenori-On for Yamaha. Octocky was released on the Famicom Disk System, the Japanese version of the 8-Bit NES console. The syncing of music, visuals and gameplay were groundbreaking at the time and it still stands out today. More information and a rom image to run in a suitable emulator are available here. Bonus review here.
Circuit bending is “the creative short-circuiting of devices such as low voltage, battery-powered guitar effects, children’s toys and small synthesizers to create new musical instruments and sound generators.” (Wikipedia). Here’s a little video of some audio glitching that happened during the beginning stages of a project to modify children’s toys into tangible multimedia interfaces.
This article from Sparkfun.com details a really interesting piece of work made with some of their equipment, an electronic version of the Magic 8-Ball game that detects motion through a gyroscope and displays its information on a mobile-phone screen embedded into a custom painted Munny. The DIY aspect of this project is great, as is the end result, an interactive twist to designer toy customisation.
