Nothing Good Here

Moe B - Gin Sessions

Sat, 13 Aug 2011 03:39:00 -0400

Moe B - Gin Sessions by MillerHooks

Recorded my friend doing some things once. I still really like it. We drank all the gin.

Amazing Animatronics by John Nolan

Wed, 11 May 2011 13:16:00 -0400

I’ve been all about the animatronic aspiration lately. This demo reel right here totally blew my mind.

Why I Like Artistic Programming

Wed, 11 May 2011 09:05:00 -0400

(hyphae - creativeapplications.net)

You can be creative with any task, however I would say that most programmers I know spend their days connecting dots and being innovative for dollars. Recently, I have found exploring artistic endeavors with my programming has not only given me new interest in challenging the borders of my skills, but also has brought back an excitement for programming that I do not feel I have really had since high school.

The entry barrier for creative computing has been massively reduced with technologies such as Arduino, Processing, Cinder. All of these products cater more to artists than serious techies.

Arduino out of the box sometimes sacrifices performance for backwards compatibility allowing people who just want to get it done, to do just that. The platform also gives people who want to dig in deeper the option to do so. It shares a similar IDE with Processing and Processing has libraries for direct control of arduino through the IDE. Instead of your projects being a typical collection of hierarchical files, it is more encouraged to write “sketches,” a short, mostly visually focused endeavor. These simple tools a driving things from animatronic installation to massive lighting and visuals for concerts.

Over at Creative Applications Network they are piling up projects by creative types. Resources like this really blow my mind. Just to see ways that our world is being changed by cheap and accessible digital technology. The toolkit for the digital artist is growing at a rapid pace. 3D printers, Lasers, Kinect/spatial sensing, and powerful small platforms like the smartphone now have massive dedicated communities of hackers, musicians, and visual artists using them.

It’s an exciting time to be interested in being interesting. Make something useless today!

Can I geek out over oddfuture too much? I doubt it.

Sun, 08 May 2011 03:25:38 -0400

Can I geek out over oddfuture too much? I doubt it.

Augmented Reality Sans Gnarly Markers

Wed, 04 May 2011 20:41:00 -0400

I’ve been playing with AR maker tracking for a few weeks and have developed a serious distaste for the markers themselves. They are like shitty QR codes and render the printed material you are trying to enhance pock marked with awful.

Sort of randomly today I stumbled on Natural Feature Tracking (NFT). Which is a more sensical name for something called Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF).

… [SURF is] a robust image descriptor, first presented by Herbert Bay et al. in 2006, that can be used in computer vision tasks like object recognition or 3D reconstruction. As basic image features it uses a Haar wavelet approximation of the determinant of Hessian blob detector.

Vlad Cazan Labs - Natural Feature Tracking (also wikipedia:SURF)

My end goal for this is mobile application, but for ease of prototype I’m jumping into Flash/Flex to see what I can do. Most of the uses in the wild I found for SURF came in Flash flavor, a lot of it utilized a for pay library from a Austrian company called Imagination (http://www.imagination.at). Their AustrianCubes demo for their flash*nft library is amazingly fast and smart. Their installations also totally blow me away. FLARManager has support for both flash*nft and flash*ar.

Now since I’m still in kind of a discovery phase, their one minute demo .swc was not going to cut it. Luckily, there is a less slick and entirely more open implementation of OpenSURF called ASSURF. Within minutes I had the rendered f360 sitting on a Pinocchio poster with hooks to multiple Flash 3D engines. I’m pretty thrilled about all of this.

Moving beyond that, OpenSURF has C++ and C# libs and super academic documentation. So I have high hopes for this really flying on a mobile platform.

This robot catches balls and makes coffee.

Wed, 04 May 2011 18:11:29 -0400

This robot catches balls and makes coffee.

RESTful Rational Arduino

Wed, 04 May 2011 13:50:00 -0400

After spending some time with a few arduinos and a stack of weird shields it dawned on me that writing application specific code to flash to the arduino every time I come up with an idea was stupid.

I spent some time pondering the best way to abstract this, by ponder I mean drink beers, chase girls, and not think about it. Then it dawned on me that addressing this in a RESTful way could keep me from having to flash my arduino ever really. At least in prototyping.

Enter RESTduino and Pyaler.

Pyaler has some really awesome applications that I am fairly uninterested in. The most obvious being home automation. I live in a subletted condo and can flip a light switch by myself usually. I’m fairly certain some sort of awesome use will pop into my head here in the next week or so though. I don’t have a flock of arduinos to manage, but it’s nice to know I could if I did.

RESTduino is similar on a smaller scale and has less dependancies. Currently I’ve been using a Processing sketch to handle OSC (Open Sound Control) signals and hand them over to the arduino outputs. I like this because I can use TouchOSC on my iphone for fast testing/troubleshooting. I’m really hoping to adopt this process to simplify.

I’ll be tearing both of these apart this weekend and really figuring out my stack. Wish me luck.

No Sleep For Ghosts

Tue, 03 May 2011 08:00:00 -0400

Broomshaker by MillerHooks

A track I worked on with Peter Hinson (mewp.net) in ‘09. Figured it was the way to jump off this soundcloud thing.