After much trial and error I was able to get a simple version of verlet integration running for my blobs. After more tweaking, and adding a secondary internal boundary for stability, I was getting somewhere closer to the end result I wanted. As you can see there are still issues when the blobs collide with each other, and when the force applied to the blob is too great it can sometimes fold in on itself.

For this reason I decided to try and adapt some of what I had here and combine it with both the fluid filters I had already come up with, to merge boundaries, and the particle engine to control the position and velocity of the blobs.

Using a tweaked version of the soft body physics blobs (to fix some of the more erratic behaviour) I have so far only added the fluid filters (as shown above). Controlling the position of the blobs using Flint is proving to be a little more tricky and will likely require some reworking of the Verlet integration used. The performance at smaller scales such as above is quite satisfactory, but scaling it up to the large resolutions I will need means the frame-rate dropping to 10fps and below when a large number of blobs are colliding. Hopefully I can regain some of the lost performance by doing as much of the bitmap processing in Pixel Blender as possible, and controlling the particle motion with Flint.

I started by experimenting with the basic behaviours and actions available in FLINT. Combining different actions such attractors, velocity matching, minimum distance, collision and many more allow you to quickly and easily come up with complex particle behaviour and flocking.

I then used some basic filters to create a fluid effect when particles are close to each other, a bit too much like a lava-lamp for what I want, but nice nonetheless! Ultimately I want to create large ‘blobs’ with boundaries that can ripple and respond to collisions in a way that is convincingly fluid-like. I did some quick tests (shown in the video below) to try and achieve this, but the CPU usage is far above what I will have available for this project. Hopefully I can get something similar to this running efficiently enough to work on a Mac Mini. I think I may end up using a combination of what I have here along with an implementation of soft-body physics using Verlet integration, however, that in itself is likely to be rather CPU intensive so I think more research is needed first…

Read Pt.2 of ‘Playing with Partilcles’…

I’ve been going to the ‘This happened…’ events whenever I am lucky enough to get a ticket and they never fail to amaze and inspire. I was a little disappointed, however, to miss a few very intriguing presentations which were made at the new Utrecht This Happened. Thankfully, no more!

The new version of the This Happened website is now online, with videos of all the previous presentations available to watch. Such as this great talk from Werner Jainek of Cultured Code, on developing ‘Things‘. I look forward to seeing what else is in-store for the site, and hope that slides from more events are made available; I remember particularly enjoying Troika’s presentation (http://www.thishappened.org/talks/troika-london-6/) and the slides they showed on the development and construction of ‘Cloud‘, and would love another chance to look over the sides again.

photo by Mr Andrew Murray

The prototype for ‘Cloud’, which now lives in Terminal 5 Heathrow, is currently on display at the Design Museum on South-bank (http://www.designmuseum.org/exhibitions/2009/brit-insurance-designs-of-the-year)(until 14th June) as part of the Brit Insurance Design Awards 2009, definitely worth checking out (for more info on this exhibition, and many others, check out the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year).

I recently updated the firmware on my little Canon Ixus-70 with the CHDK Firmware. This 3rd party firmware provides the camera you install it on with a wide range of new and exciting features. Allowing you to force the shutter speed and ISO to ranges previously unsupported by the native Canon Firmware. CHDK also allows you to run your own scripts on your camera to perform weird and wonderful tasks, some (such as the intervalometer used in the test video above) are truly useful additions to an already handy and nifty little camera. Others… are less so, but interesting nonetheless.

The Best part about CHDK (besides the ability to now play some games on your camera, of course)? The new firmware lives on the SD card, meaning no risk of messing up your camera. If things start to go a bit wrong (user scripts allow you to run into some really neat new ways of crashing the camera and overflowing the memory!), simply turn the camera off and on again. You can set the CHDK firmware to either load auto-magically on boot-up (provided that the card is ‘locked’), or manually load it when you wish to use it. Loading the new firmware still allows you to use your camera as you normally would, it just adds new sets of menus full of goodness for you to explore and play with (very literally if you load up some of the games provided!).

If you have a Canon point and shoot camera and a card reader (which is required to install the firmware onto the card), I urge you to go and install this! Your camera will thank you.

Following the getting started on the Adobe Labs site Marc and I set about trying to setup Alchemy on Linux and OSX respectively. Cue much frustration and cursing! The guide given on the site is actually very straight forward and easy to follow, but (for the moment at least) following the guide will not mean you are ready to start playing with Alchemy.

Unfortunately, the symlinks in the Alchemy bin directory for ‘g++’ and ‘gcc’ ($ALCHEMY/bin/llvm-gcc) will point to the sub-folder ‘llvm-gcc4-ubuntu-install’ in the bin directory ($ALCHEMY/bin/llvm-gcc4-ubuntu-install/bin/llvm-gcc). This may be fine if that happens to be the version you are setting up uses this structure, if not then you could waste a lot of time trying to find out why gcc and g++ silently fail whenever they are run. These symlinks should be changed to match the sub-folder in the bin directory of Alchemy. In the case of gcc this symlink should be changed to:

‘$ALCHEMY/bin/llvm-gcc4-[flavour of os here]-install/bin/gcc

e.g. ‘$ALCHEMY/bin/llvm-gcc4-darwin-install/bin/gcc’, in the case of OSX.

This has been noted (as of 11/20/2008) and the config will be fixed to resolve this issue in the next release. But for now, check your symlinks!

“I asked my friends to grab their favorite things off their desk at work for a quick photo shoot project.” -Nick Campbell

After looking through more of Nick’s (awesome) photography on his flickr I couldn’t shake the feeling that his work seemed strangely familiar. It was whilst looking through more of his portraits that it hit me.

Nick Campbell directed my favourite ever video short!!

Produced by Colin Davis, edited by Josh Bodnar, starring Benny Monson, shot at a unnervingly beautiful 250fps, ‘Bubbles’ is a perfect blend of chilled Jazz and slo-mo frantic bubble popping. Part of the reason I like the video so much, aside from being a sucker for slo-mo footage and Benny’s manic expression, is the way it gives the impression of being shot underwater. The way all the movements of skin, hair, and clothes are slowed down to a crawl, there even seems a similarity between the way skin pales and eyes look ‘glazed-over’ when underwater… probably a mix of how the video is shot and my own imagination.

Check out more of Nick’s work at http://www.creamyorange.com/.

In the March issue of Vogue Dangin tweaked a hundred and forty-four images: a hundred and seven advertisements (Estée Lauder, Gucci, Dior, etc.), thirty-six fashion pictures, and the cover, featuring Drew Barrymore. To keep track of his clients, he assigns three-letter rubrics, like airport codes. Click on the current-jobs menu on his computer: AFR (Air France), AMX (American Express), BAL (Balenciaga), DSN (Disney), LUV (Louis Vuitton), TFY (Tiffany & Co.), VIC (Victoria’s Secret).

The article touches too briefly on the tension between reality and what ends up in the magazines and advertisements. As Errol Morris points out on his photography blog, it is often difficult to find truth in even the most vérité of photographs. Even so, the truth seems to be completely absent from Madonna’s recent photo spread in Vanity Fair that was retouched by Dangin, especially this one in which a 50-year-old Madonna looks like a recent college graduate who’s never lifted a weight in her life.

The uncanny valley comes into play here, which we usually think of in terms of robots, cartoon characters, and other pseudo anthropomorphic characters attempting and failing to look sufficiently human and therefore appearing creepy and scary. With an increasing amount of photo retouching, postproduction in film, plastic surgery, and increasingly effective makeup & skin care products, we’re being bombarded with a growing amount of imagery featuring people who don’t appear naturally human. People who appear often in media (film & tv stars, models, cable news anchors & reporters, miscellaneous celebrities, etc.) are creeping down into the uncanny valley to meet up with characters from The Polar Express. I don’t know about you but a middle-aged Madonna made to look 24 gives me the heebie-jeebies. Perhaps the familar uncanny valley graph needs revision:

Originally by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org on May 13, 2008, 1:14pm

However, is it possible that the internet provides a more productive and participatory platform on which to spend the ‘cognitive surplus’?

This is ACE! This is probably is an internet phenomenon already ”if not, you saw it here first” and I got it from here…

Originally by dom.murphy@taktak.net (Dom Murphy) from The TAK! Design Blog on April 16, 2008, 6:11am

Inspiration is drawn heavily from the 20th century historic propergander iconography; fusing these elements with fragmented ‘Seussian’ inspired comic forms; the artist constructs an alternate reality reactive to his unique, off-centred vision of the world around him.

A show that must be seen to get an insight into Mudwig’s visual state.

Mudwig Dans Solo Exhibition at New Cross Gallery. Opening 3rd April (18:30 – 22:00)

New Cross Gallery | 3 Lewisham Way | New Cross | London SE14 6PP

Originally by mjar from HOOKED……… on April 1, 2008, 7:37am

I found this while looking for a teardown of a Wii Nunchuck remote since they’re cheap and include a 3 axis accelerometer. I mentioned an interface board the other day, but the responsiveness of the interface in this video grabbed my attention. If you like it, you should check out this [via] Nunchuck Arduino RF controlled robot. You can find details on that bot here. The accelerometer itself only runs about $10, but it’s a pretty small SMD part.

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Originally
from Hack a Day

by Will O’Brien

reBlogged

on Apr 6, 2008, 11:08PM

Originally by Will O’Brien from Hack a Day on April 6, 2008, 7:08pm

Originally
from polygonal labs

by Michael

reBlogged

on Mar 17, 2008, 2:13PM

Originally by Michael from polygonal labs on March 17, 2008, 10:13am

Originally
from WE THE ROBOTS

by Chris H

reBlogged

on Mar 31, 2008, 7:00AM

Originally by Chris H from WE THE ROBOTS on March 31, 2008, 3:00am

A couple weeks ago, Mosso changed some stuff and got my buddy Derek and I got to talking about hosting options if Mosso doesn’t pan out. I decided that since I have this perverse hobby, I should document my journey.

So here is my list of hosting providers I recommend and enjoy!

Mosso: This is currently my friends blog and generic client hosting favorite. It is easy to use, has amazing service and hilarious growing pains. I have been using them for about a year – and have been VERY happy with pretty much everything. They currently have some crazy billing issues to work out – but when they figure that out, I would certainly recommend using them. One thing to keep in mind: if you have clients, you can’t do any better than Mosso – they can white label EVERYTHING (including phone support). It is awesome.

MediaTemple: These guys are cool. Seriously. I didn’t really like MediaTemple until I hung out with the dudes. They are doing cool stuff with virtualization and easy scaling. For instance, you could get one of their horribly named (dv) servers for around 50 bucks a month and then if you ever have a problem with the resources or “scaling”” abilities with the virtualized server, you can just go ahead and “seamlessly” upgrade to a dedicated box. This is because their dedicated boxes are just virtualized instances as well as the (dv) servers. So upgrading the box is as simple as copying your server image from the shared box to the dedicated box. You don’t have to change IPs, copy your content or really any of the stupid shit that makes scaling annoying. Now this is of course in theory (and told to me while i was drunk). I have never actually don’t this. BUT – it seems like it should and would work. (if you can shed some light on this – let me know).

FDCservers: FDC servers is interesting. I can’t imagine that they are solid or have good support in times of need. Or that their servers aren’t made from ants and cheese. But seriously. They are cheap, support is good and they are FAST. They have some of the cheapest, fastest servers i have ever seen. Its out of control (and fast and cheap (what a good documentary)). I don’t hesitate to use them whenever I need a fast, cheap server with a FAT pipe. But – I am worried that someday their servers will turn to dust without a warning. But until them – they are my secret dedicated server host.

Webfaction: Webfaction is my new best friend. Seriously. If I wasn’t already married to an beautiful, awesome woman, I would marry webfaction. They have blown my mind. You are able to use ANY web technology you want to use. They have decent resource allotments and they are rather inexpensive. Especially considering they are expecting you to use long running processes like Ruby or Python frameworks or apps. Pretty sweet. If you want a host that allows you to host a wordpress blog, experiment with web.py, run a rails app and allow you to rock out with django – all under the same domain root – webfaction is your host. The secret is that its all proxied. So when you set up a rails app, it tells you the port number to run that app on. Then it maps that port number on the localhost of the box to /railsapp on the public IP. I currently host my blog and homepage at webfaction. I trust them more than any of these others (I am furiously knocking on wood you read this).

Rackspace: Rackspace is obviously not your general needs host. It is probably the best host you can get. But don’t just grab a Rackspace server and think your good. You gotta get the intensive support. Its like having a concierge service for your hosting. Its incredible. If you are a small organization, and don’t want to have to worry about all the nonsense that goes with managing servers, infrastructures, data centers – then give Rackspace a call. They have really helped us (threadless) grow and scale. They are solid.

These are the hosts I use on a daily basis. All of them i recommend. Obviously you wouldn’t use Rackspace to host your not often read blog, and you wouldn’t use webfaction to host your $100MM social network. However, all of these options have one thing in common. They all have decent support and they all seem to LOVE what they are doing. I can’t deal with vendors who offer products that they themselves wouldn’t use. You can’t trust those guys. You can trust all these guys (except FDC – with their prices, they have to be doing something tricky. heh. ).

Originally
from Harper Reed: Tech, Phones, Yo-yoing and Death Metal

by Harper

reBlogged

on Mar 2, 2008, 7:32AM

Originally by Harper from Harper Reed: Tech, Phones, Yo-yoing and Death Metal on March 2, 2008, 2:32am

–TechnoDots from Joa Ebert.

I’m currently working on developing some interactive art tools for a gallery. It’s a project that we’re revisiting after it was dropped a few years ago, all the work we have from back then is in Director, and a little bit janky. So it’s all getting re-done in tasty AS3. I’ve managed to bodge together a simple smudge tool for the time being (needs cleaning up). And I am going through some other tools we have trying to prettify them. While looking for ways to do this I found that the AIF Toolkit from Adobe was released at the beginning of October, how I missed that I don’t know! So I’ve been having a little play around with that, and really wishing that this was available now-NOW-now! as it would be really nice to incorporate some of this in editing tool I’m working on. Alas I will have to wait for Astro, and another project to come along that gives me the opportunity to play around with Hydra.

Smudgeificate!!

Opening Night 9th October - Invite Only. Featuring Artists…. Ben Frost, Hydro74, Bemodern, Mudwig, Si Scott, Airside, Pure Evil, Keith Watts, KozynDan, Mr Ian Wright, Pandayoghurt, Sean Alexander, Slinkachu, John Cossey….

Originals and very limited editions prints will be available. – Also feature magic by Dynamo on the opening night!

Cosh Gallery 69 Berwick St, W1F 8SZ. (Just off Oxford Street).

I went along to this last night, rather enjoyable! Dynamo’s magic tricks were impressive, and when he got his rabbits in on the act it was… the stuff of magic! There was a nice range of artwork on show, a couple of really nice lithographs from Kozyndan (bunnyfish!), more wonderful flourishes from Si Scott, an interesting take on Mickey Mouse with bunnies wetting themselves, and some really great pieces from Mr. Bambi (my favorite that evening). I took a few photos of what I liked the most, if you get the chance to go along to this I’d recommend it. Looking forward to more great exhibitions at the Cosh Gallery!

Kevin and Alex finally made it over to London, along with the guys from the ‘Totally Rad Show’, and Gary Vaynerchuk from tv.WineLibrary.com

Along with the usual beers and mac bashing, there were plenty of fuckups (running out of tape *again*? oops!), heckling, and even a marriage proposal for Alex. No really, it wasn’t even a guy! Though she had to settle for just a hug, cue jealously from all the hardcore digg fans in the room.

It was really great to see these guys in person finally, much funnier than I am used to from the podcast although they seemed alot more sober! Maybe that’s just because we were so far back behind the seething mass of adoring fans. Here’s to hoping they make it back sometime soon for another show!

Cheers Kevin and Alex! *extreme sip*

It was a good evening with a range of different topics discussed. I particularly enjoyed seeing Crispin’s development and prototyping process of the Tengu, taking something from a simple idea and developing it into a real live.. thing! This linked in nicely for me with Massimo’s talk on the development and uses of Arduino and some of the new extendable modules which are out now / soon. My ears pricked up when he mentioned their new project to enable extreme rapid prototyping, requiring very little expertise on the developers side. No more breadboard hell is how he described it, exciting! I look forward to trying it out on some projects when it is finished.

Unfortunately I missed part of Karsten’s talk about the interactive tables made for the London College of Fashion graduate show. Luckily I managed to get a chance to try them out first hand and have a chat about them during London Design Week at Moving Brands, where they had a rather nice get together and natter about the state of new media.

Dee’s talk on the ‘Science of..’ exhibitions was very in depth, alot of text up on screen… I’m more of a visual person so I was worried I was going to start drifting off, but it actually proved very interesting to learn more about it. Having had chance to read through some of the briefs first hand is no doubt why I found the introduction rather slow, but it was really good to get a good overview of the entire process of a science of exhibition, and getting a picture of just how many people are involved (alot more than I realised). AllofUs even got a mention, so yey for… AllofUs!

Rory’s talk was the final one of the evening, explaining how live|work helped to design and organise better use experiences for the Baltic Gallery in Newcastle, again a talk that I was not excited about at first but it was really nice to see the way they empowered the staff of the Baltic, and took on their ideas and experiences.

Overall a very good evening, I would recommend checking it out next time this is on. Now that they are sponsored by tinker.it and can host the evening for free (as long as you signup in time) this is definitely an event to attend if you are at all interested in ‘new media’!

Got My project (mostly) up and running. There are a few problems with it still at the moment; performing a search with more than one word (cannot currently handle spaces, oops!), although the point was to only allow searches for single words no error is returned, just blank results. I also didn’t manage to develop the generative art mixer as far as I was hoping, due to both time and technical limitations. I had hoped to have a reactive cloud of images on the top layer, but due to everything else that is taking place it is not possible to achieve this at an acceptable framerate without switching over to actionscript 3. Despite it not being absolutely everything I had initially hoped for I think it turned out quite well, and is receiving a fair amount of traffic now it is finally up and running!

Once I’ve got this part sorted the rest of the coding should be done by the weekend, so I’ve started on the packaging design now so it will be ready in time! Need to get to work on the video as well.

I’m going to try out laser etching on the CD-face, but if that doesn’t work out then I’ll just use a label.

– UPDATE –

Got the best birthday present ever from Leo, a working project! Spent a while in uni faffing with the PHP and now it will take the search term, grab tags from the first X number of results and order them by most frequently occurring, and then submit these to flickr to get corresponding photos. Huzzah. Leo is awesome, thankyou Leo!!