Cheer, indeed. We know how badly many of you want to get out from behind your laptop and out into a venue once in a while. Here’s a solution: wear your display. And it helps if that display has the insane interactive capabilities that this one does. Marco Tempest of newmagic.com writes CDMo:

A little X-Mas greeting for all of you! Showing of my Photonic T-Shirt. Wearable visuals. Haha…

I’m still working out whether that “haha” is an evil scientist “I’ll take over the world with this” laugh, a laugh at the rest of us that don’t have one of these t-shirts, or a jolly laugh of holiday delight. I’m betting some combination of the three. (Or, as suggested in comments, simply “hahaha, this isn’t actually real.” I take it then as inspiration to make something that does this but actually, you know, works, without needing sly magicians and fakery. I’ll leave it to you to determine what’s going on.) Just watch:

There you are: the party is amazing. Beautiful people everywhere, dancing as though it’s their last night on Earth. Bodies in sweaty, packed mo– [screeching record sound] — erm, okay, actually, you’re stuck behind a computer / VJ gear. Again. We’ve seen attempts to solve this problem before; only Tuesday night, in fact, I saw a DJ/PA set where the musician was wandering the floor with a wireless Xbox 360 controller and headset, manipulating Pd remotely. But here’s one novel solution: pack all your computer VJ tools into a wireless, battery-powered wrist brace:

Belmer Negrillo - On the Body [Project page, videos, technical details]

The basic controls: “pin buttons”, which actually use RFID tags for different commands, plus an accelerometer for controlling visuals with actual motion. Interestingly, the Wrist-Brace controller is designed to be adapted both to the discriminating VJ and the live clubber, so you can simplify the interactions for friends you make out on the dance floor. The project was produced for a class focusing on wearable interfaces called “On the Body” at Italy’s famed Ivrea Interaction Design Institute.

The interface looks great, though it makes me want to build controls into an oven mitt. (Sorry, couldn’t help but make the comparison.)

The title for the product is great: GoDance!

One technical problem not solved by this product: VJs with no rhythm / no coordination. You’ll have to sort out what to do on the dance floor on your own.

Got a preferred solution of your own / seen something similar? Or do you prefer to hide behind banks of hardware, safe from the dangers of the dance floor (maybe that’s why you went into this in the first place)? Let us know.

The V.I.O. POV.1, a mobile, wearable “point of view” camera due later this summer, already looks terrific. It’s got a hands-free camera with wireless remote and on-the-spot editing capabilities. I can imagine it being a lot of fun not only for shooting point-of-view footage, but potentially live/club applications, as well. (CDMo will be watching for the specs when it’s released. If you know of similar cameras we should be watching, let us know.)

V.I.O. POV.1 Camera Site

Demonstrating just how much we live in a new Age of Video, though, the POV.1 is currently more infamous because of an incident on a stranded Delta flight. Delta Connection dispatch evidently kept the flight on the ground so long that passengers were actually becoming ill. (The basic quandary, if you’ve followed the rash of stranded flights lately, is that dispatch doesn’t want to give up a spot in queue for air traffic control, even if it means roasting passengers in the plane.) An employee of V.I.O. took matters into his own hands, and interviewed the flight crew. He was able to be enough of a bother that he got himself ferried off the plane by police, which is apparently the only way to get yourself off such a flight. (Note to self: have ideas for getting arrested handy.) Because he didn’t step into the cockpit, he never violated any rule, and says he gave his interested interrogators a demo of the slick mobile camera.

The video itself turns out not to be all that exciting or well shot, but for what it’s worth, here you go:

This would be a terrific publicity stunt for the camera (hey, I noticed it), if it were not simultaneously such terrible advertising for flying.

In other news: someday, you’ll tell your grandkids about the days before absolutely everything we said and did was documented and uploaded to the Internet.

I want the camera for other reasons. Oh yeah, and I guess I’ll be touring in a bus.

Want to wear your video on your sleeve? Wearaware Design hacked the cradle for the Archos line of video devices in ways that make the device both more practical and more … wearable. How? By eliminating the cradle, an always-worthy goal:

The cradle itself is not necessary for accessing any of the A/V i/o ports at all: the signals pass right on through. The cradle is bulky, wasted space; its octopus of fixed cabling is long, messy, and weighs more than the cradle itself. All the cradle really offers is IR and Serial protocols and a power tap for the meager circuitry. Plus, with a serial-USB dongle, and perhaps a microcontroller you can still likely add them without the cradle.

With less space, it’s possible to wear around your Archos video player around. And since the Archos has video outs, this could quickly become a fabulous VJ/visualist tool. Media artist/designer (or, we’d say, visualist) Ross Bochnek presented his hacks at a Maker workbench over the weekend at Maker Faire:

Archos PMA/AV Series Cradle Connector Cloning (Detailed instructions at at pointlisse.com)
Wearable Computing Hacks (workbench details at makerfaire.com)

Now, I need to see if I can learn from this lesson to eliminate every single unreliable Sony connector I have on my DV cam.

SCART doesn’t seem to be utilized widely in Australia. I’m not sure about the rest of the world, but in Europe it’s the king of interconnects. Maybe that’s the reason that Spreadshirt don’t ship to Australia (or the US), they think that because our cultures haven’t embraced SCART we just won’t get their cool iconography. Well I’ve got news for you Spreadshirt. SCART is underground in the southern hemisphere. You start shipping down to us and you’ll be streetwear before you know it.

European readers: You should buy this shirt, because I can’t.

via qbus

Light Emitting Textiles is a technological theme which keeps reappearing year after year. In fact, a year ago for the Internationale Funkaustellung (IFA) Phillips announced their Photonic Textile Prototypes - rather blocky but undeniably cool flexible LED arrays.

For this year’s IFA, Phillips have upped the ante with: better resolution? Cliched example loops? Come on people, an @ symbol hasn’t meant “super cutting edge technological stuff” for at least eight years now. This is just showing that you’re as out of touch with the cool kids as the corporations who will pay to use this for their marketing.

Motion design weakness aside: I think this would go beautifully with something like the Remote VJs Control, which is way too limited for serious VJ action, but probably just daft enough to work with a fabric-embedded display.

via Processing Blogs