We have the tools. We have the techniques. Now, what happens when you put technology for tracking physical objects into the hands of artists around the world?

On June 6, members of the CDM community joined in our first “global hackday,” assembling tangible interfaces on tracking tables. Martin Kaltenbrunner of reacTIVision and the reacTable joined us from Vienna, Austria, while Adam Kumpf of the OpenFrameworks-powered Trackmate and MIT Tangible Media Group chatted from Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Much of the day was about saying “hello, world,” and helping each other through getting cameras working, troubleshooting, and the like. But there was an extraordinary variety of ideas even in one day. I can only imagine where things might go from here. I can also see the tools people were developing as being expressive for live visuals and visual performance - and via a really cheap interface, too.

Some of the accomplishments of our first day:

• Endless ideas: Drawing interfaces using objects, a floor tom as a housing, a musical instrument with soda bottles as the interface, a game with blocks featuring the Tokyo skyline, and others.
• Troubleshooting data: Both the Trackmate and reacTIVision projects got lots of feedback about how people were using the tools, where tracking was and wasn’t working, and where people got stuck up. We also compiled lots of information on cameras, drivers, builds, and operating systems. I’m working with Adam and Martin to dig through a lot of this information so we can compile a really practical guide to make it easier for people to create their own projects.
• Special guests: Marco had his augmented magic show and we had the beginnings of an interactive glove. Check out the video highlights to see what the NYC event was like.
• noisepages for networking, and other tools: Livestream video was a bit of a mixed bag; I’m still looking for easier ways of doing that (both on the video shooting side and the streaming side.) Text chat was an easy win, though IRC can still be cumbersome; I’m looking into integrating standardized XMPP chat instead, and providing access via any client or a webpage. But the other big success story was that noisepages worked nicely for documentation; see the fritzcrate and i3games sites for great examples!

Building Communities Around the World

A real highlight to me was getting to hear from Valeria (jalea.tv) and Jose (Estado Lateral Media Lab), visiting New York from Argentina. They talked about what the scene is like in Buenos Aires, and touched on issues of community, learning, open source, and the multilingual world of coding. And they do some really beautiful and hip visual work, both commercial and experimental. We also wound up with a significant amount of the online chat being in Spanish. That to me is a healthy sign - “global” really doesn’t necessarily translate to “English.”

Hackday Results, and the Future

For more documentation, head to our noisepages site:

Tangible Interface Hackday: The Projects (So Far)
http://hackday.noisepages.com/

http://trackmate.sourceforge.net/
http://reactivision.sourceforge.net/

And, yes, this is only the beginning. My suspicion is that a single weekend would be enough to get workable tracking projects going - especially as we iron out some technical wrinkles. But we’d certainly love to do more of this, whether it’s another “official” hackday or simple an open lab with chat and sharing.

To continue this moving forward, you can join the Tangible / Multi-touch Interfaces group on noisepages.com:
Tangible + Multi-Touch noisepages Group

And I’d like to brainstorm how we might proceed, whether it’s a formal event or a sort of online open lab. You can join that conversation on the group:
Let’s make every day a Global Hackday - the event continues

noisepages is still in alpha state, but we’re working aggressively to move forward to beta, and content placed there is safe and future-proof. (Most importantly, I’ve fixed the jpeg library on the server so that avatars work!)

We look forward to hearing from you.

Food for thought. I’ve definitely spent some time in what felt like procedurally-generated architecture — some of which seemed to have some bugs in it, where the algorithm created spaces that made no sense. And yet they were built by human hands… discuss?

Top: from comments, Procedural System Structure, as discovered by Joahnsonn.
http://proceduralcity.com/ as powered by NVIDIA PhysX and OpenGL

Another (stunning) example: Procedural CitySystem.
http://www.procedural.com/

Bottom: Introversion’s engine builds what looks like generic European cities. Lots of discussion on the Introversion forums:
It’s all in your head, Part 7

Wow, it’s Milklovano, from the former Soviet satellite nation you’ve forgotten, recreated in all its gritty blandness!

Wait, actually, Introversion is from the UK…

Wow, it’s Nortchesterhampton, recreated in all its gritty blandness!

Seriously, really quite brilliant work making this function - and it says a lot about what could be generated procedurally for art as well as games (to say nothing of game art).

We already knew Introversion had some serious game design chops from their gorgeously minimal game Darwinia. Now, can we play Darwinia in a city?

Previously:
Evening in a Procedural City, Built in OpenGL

Offf 2009 Oeiras : Ambient Reel from Designflux : Devoted to Motion on Vimeo.

Design Flux and Mark Webster send along this lovely documentary film they’ve done of the Offf festival last month in Oeiras, Portugal. It’s fun to go back to that aesthetic world. It’s difficult to describe the Offf experience: there were sometimes hard-to-hear talks in the cavernous concrete steel mill, crowds of young, able-bodied designer boys and girls from Portugal, Spain, and around Europe packing into lines as if for a rock concert, and an even slightly chaotic sense. At the same time, there was an infectious energy of creativity and enthusiasm - one that clearly should and will be felt more strongly in more events around the world.

The music is spot-on: Byetone’s Death of a Typographer. (Byetone’s label, the uber-hip “designer” music of Raster-Noton, was the musical anchor of Offf, and has since done showcases in Montreal for MUTEK and now SONAR in Barcelona.)

I think we can all agree that there’s really no reason we should be sitting in classrooms and cold corporate conference centers listening to vendor sales pitches thinly disguised as a talk. Culture and technology (and technology as culture) should be, well, a party. It’s doubly comforting now as certain trade show-style institutions are under economic pressure to think that we could all invest in something better.

Now, I’m going to shut up and go edit this huge stack of interview videos and audios I’ve got, which is stuff you wouldn’t have seen even had you been at these events.

This is getting close to the absolute minimum possible for a cheap, fast music video.

2 guys, a camera, a strobe light, and a bottle of Jägermeister.

This contains all of the elements that make the quick, single shot video effective: It’s a unique concept, it’s fast and cheap to make, it will grab your attention and evoke a strong reaction, and it’s very personal. The video is for local Brisbane band DZ, who are grabbing some mindshare and attention despite being yet to release an album.

I spend a large portion of every day watching music videos, and this is the first one to have really captured my imagination since the beautifully animated, high budget “Wood” by McBess. To me, these wildly disparate works of art are both equally valid, and equally effective as music videos. However, the fact that The Mess Up took, conservatively, less than 0.5% of the time to create, means that the artists are free to create more work, and influence more potential fans (also check out their live video, including a fantastic cover of Justice - Phantom Pt. II).

There is still plenty of scope in our industry for detailed, careful, high-budget work, but if it doesn’t have that spark of originality, then you might as well drink a bottle of Jager and throw up on the floor.

Via Aaron Meyers, who’s getting ready for some fun projects at Eyebeam here in New York this week, anyone using a camera for capture, live video, or tracking needs to check out this copious thread on the OpenFrameworks forum:

beginners ~ Sony PS3 Eye

We already knew Sony’s US$40 PS3 Eye camera was a wonder; that’s why we strongly recommended its use in the tangible interface hackday hosted earlier this month. But while we’ve heard some good luck squeezing performance out of the thing on Windows and Linux, the Mac - while reliable - could use more options and performance. Theo Watson, one of the OpenFrameworks team, comes to the rescue with a patched version of the macam open source video driver - halfway down the page. (I hope his changes get rolled into macam?)

You’ll find lots of other tips, not only for the Mac but other stuff, as well.

We’ll keep collecting tips on this camera. Macam experiences, anyone? I’m still trying to successfully build the Linux driver; once I sort that out, I’ll share.