Arduino the Cat, Breadboard the Mouse and Cutter the Elephant from hmt on Vimeo.

Media artists and design houses around the world: you’ve got nothing on this group of eight to eleven-year old English girls, bravely exploring interaction design, soft toy hacks, and physical computing using the open source Arduino platform to animate cats, mice, and elephants.

Just how comfortable are these kids with technology? Comfortable enough that a robotic, killer elephant with glowing eyes is “cute.”

Give them a couple of decades, and I think they’ll invent Cylons. I can’t wait.

Thanks to Kyle McDonald and Memo Akten for sending this my way. As Kyle puts it:

Metaphor: "Could you put it in it’s head like a brain?"
The joy of interactive art: "Ah, that’s so cool!"
The joy of conceptual art: "I love diagrams!"
Hacking consumer devices: "We could just attach it to a remote control car."
Developing scripts: "When sensor is deactivated by…"
The frustration of similarity: "My idea was to do a walking dog!"
There is so much here. This is like the entire media art scene rolled into one six-minute video.

Brilliant.

Now I have to sing “I believe that children are our future…”

More information: Seaweed Studio Workshop

They add in that blog post:

It was interesting to see the contrast between the two groups - the younger ones appear to me more cautious to stay within boundaries of what they have previously seen as they worry about many things being ‘impossible’, which for me was quite unexpected. They had less patience with trying to learn the technological parts, although had a good idea of how the flow of action should be for their ideas. Given a slower teaching pace and a more graphical interface, I believe they would have gained much more control over what was happening.

The need for spatial, 3D interfaces is prompting students and inventors to try some creative and economical solutions. Earlier this week, we saw a touch-free, gestural interface built entirely on the principles of electrostatic – yes, as in static electricity. (See the original story, with video.)

Justin Schunick of the team at Northeastern University wrote CDM with more details on the project.

I am the guy who is talking in the video.  We filmed this in our lab today.  We are all seniors in Electrical/Computer Engineering at Northeastern University and this was created for a senior design
competition called "Capstone".  What you see here is a culmination of ~8 months work.

The interface uses an array of copper electrodes to sense a certain change in the electric field created by the device.  The black material covering the electrodes shows how the interface can be hidden beneath surfaces to create a completely invisible interface. It is simple black felt you can buy at any fabric store.  The total cost of this prototype was around $60.00 USD.  [Ed.: Justin notes that that was just an estimate of the parts themselves - let's just say it wasn't pricey. -PK] We created custom software to communicate with our microcontroller with C++ and it enables us to use our device as a new type of XYZ computer mouse.  Think nintendo wii controller without the controller — or minority report without the gloves.  This is a perfect interface for a holographic display.  There are millions of applications and we are just scratching the surface - I am sure you are already thinking of all the possibilities enabled by this device.

And yes, I was right that the whole thing is built around a big felt blanket.

I’m thinking of one possibility – something useful to do with your Snuggie (half sweater, half blanket) after the bar crawl. As seen in the WTF Blanket (NSFW, at least with the sound on, depending on where you work).

In all seriousness, while you probably can’t say this of the Snuggie with a straight face, this 3D interface is truly an awesome use of mundane, everyday technology you take for granted.

More photos:

3D Computer Interface from Free Flow on Vimeo.

During long winters with indoor heat running overtime, I imagine you’ve built up your fair amount of static electricity, and as the sparks fly, wondered why you couldn’t put that power to some good use.

Working with electrostatics, a team of students at Northeastern University in Boston have done just that. For their senior design capstone project, they assembled a gestural interface which allows 3D control just by waving a hand in front of a computer. That sort of idea is all the rage these days. The difference here: there’s no camera, no IR emitters, no markers or physical controllers.

You just move your hand in three-dimensional space, and the control data is transmitted to the computer. In fact, it’s one of the more touchless interfaces I’ve seen since the father of them all, the Theremin.

That does appear to be a blanket underneath their hand. Now, being the glutton for punishment I am, I want to figure out a way to do this in which there are sparks.

More on this project as I learn about it, but it looks like it’s got some great potential. The bottom line to me is that there’s every reason to begin interacting with three-dimensional onscreen interfaces using spatial physical interfaces. Joysticks and mice actually do a reasonably good job, but they don’t cover the entire gamut of what’s possible. Now it’s up to the software to start using that control data.

The Arduino isn’t quite an deal choice for a live generative visual computer – but it can do some gorgeous things with signals. Sebastian Tomczak has a gorgeous hack (as seen via Limor Fried) that manipulates RGB data lines with the Arduino. You connect horizontal and vertical sync signals, then go to town. The Arduino in this case just converts the signal to digital and uses the lower 8 bits of the 10-bit data – a real Swiss Army Knife-style job for the microcontroller.

I’m curious looking at this, though – what other sorts of microcontroller projects might be possible? (Not limiting to the Arduino, either.)

How to: Use Arduino to Generate Glitchy Audio VGA Visuals [Little-Scale]

If you’re unimpressed and want to just stick to software, Anton keeps pumping out updates to his v002 Glitch plug-in pack, which emulates all manner of visual glitches – including, soon, his new optical flow implementation, adapted from Andrew Benson.

Updated: Downloads now available:

Glitch
Flow

What if virtual reality and seamless three-dimensional interfaces arrived, and they turned out to be a lot simpler technologically than you imagined? Well, perhaps you know a technology is within reach when it can not only be implemented, but implemented in a way that’s elegant and lightweight.

The latest in the ongoing YouTube-able head-tracking and 3D-manipulation videos is this creation by Timo Fleisch at the Center of Technology and Art Berlin. He has lots of resources on XNA programming, as well; thanks to a C# library, XNA and Wii mix nicely on the PC. (Less so on the Xbox 360 for obvious reasons, but XNA makes a lovely development framework for 3D on the PC, not just the console.)

http://www.vrhome.de/ [link is incorrect on the YouTube page]

The idea is pretty easy to grasp:

• 2 Wii remotes, basically acting as simple near-infrared-spectrum tracking cameras (which means, in fact, you could substitute something else if you really wanted)
• Head tracking, via emitters on glasses, as first widely popularized in a Wii video by Carnegie Mellon’s Johnny Lee
• Polarized 3D glasses, for 3D perception (and Coraline fans, natch)
• A 4-LED “LED Beacon” which allows three-dimensional manipulation of objects on the screen.

As a performance or interaction interface, I actually find the head tracking to be a bit awkward, especially as you’re still looking at a flat screen. But I love the manipulation via the “beacon.” I think there’s a lot that can be done to make manipulation of 3D spaces and objects more intuitive and more gestural - and naturally, that could lead to some lovely 3D performance tools, too (not to mention making modeling 3D objects less of a pain).

Stay tuned, same VR time, same VR channel.

Found via Veronica Pejril on Twitter.