Squarely in the “because you can” category: YouDisco is a research project at New York’s Eyebeam that simultaneously streams up to eight YouTube videos onto a rotating virtual disco ball. Frame rate is … well, impressive given what it’s doing. The project is the work of Jennifer Jacobs at Eyebeam “with the help of Jeff Crouse.”

http://youdisco.jenniferj.net/?id=51

What is interesting about this is that you do get interesting effects on a computer screen when you leave 4:3 rectangles behind, just as in projection.

Along the same lines, though focused on a mash-up of two videos side by side (sometimes to hilarious effect):

http://www.youtubedoubler.com/ (which is, for me, playing Shatner yelling “Kahn!”)

Lots of interesting graffiti and motion and illustration work on Jennifer’s blog, like this piece:

Nurse from jennifer jacobs on Vimeo.

Share, the thesis project of Yannick Assogba in the MIT Media Lab Sociable Media Group, is an interesting idea in coding: it’s basically a peer-to-peer sketchbook for creative code. All of your sketches are synced to everyone else’s sketches, and Share tracks the connections between users.

http://share.media.mit.edu/about

You get more from Share than you would from simply, say, sharing a Subversion repository. Share not only syncs code and changes, but also tracks each time you copy and paste code from elsewhere, so that code snippets borrowed from others can be traced through the people using the system.

Up to 30 people are now invited for an online competition using the tool.

The Share Experiment is an online competition/design-a-thon/hack-a-thon and exhibition that invites 30 participants form to use Share to make new creative works over the course of ten days. The theme of this competition is "Inspired By Pong". Though the final result need not be games, artists/hackers are invited to reinterpret and remix the concept of pong while at the same time being open to reinterpretations and sampling of their own work as it being created. The Share Experiment will run from June 5th - June 14th and we are inviting applications. There will be some prizes awarded to winners (including iPod Touch[es] and Arduino kits) and we have some interesting ideas about mechanics for awarding prizes!

http://share.media.mit.edu/participate (via toxi on Twitter)

What is the Best Way to Share?

It’s a very cool idea, but this does raise some questions about implementation. It’s too bad that Share can’t run as some sort of plug-in; it loses some of the functionality of the bare-bones Processing editor, let alone the capabilities of an IDE like Eclipse or NetBeans. If it used a standard IDE, too, it’d be easier to be “language-agnostic” as the creator suggests. (OpenFrameworks or Flash or Processing, it wouldn’t really matter.)

But as a concept and an experiment, this looks really fascinating. It should be interesting to see how people use the code. And will users in a “competition” do a lot of copying and pasting, or focus mainly on their own work?

Part of the reason I bring up this is that we’re interested on CDM in doing some shared work. “Share” I think would be too limiting; it’s back to the old-fashioned Subversion approach.

So, for instance, we’re organizing a hackday around tangible interfaces in June, the first of what I hope will be many more. We’ll have people working on it in person in New York, but also folks collaborating around the world online. I’ll post more details, but just to kick off the discussion:

http://hackday.noisepages.com

Wish granted!

Think 3D in the browser will never catch on? Think again. The folks at Google Labs have built an incredible-looking 3D API called O3D. It does just about everything you want, and then some:

• It’s multi-platform: Mac + Windows + Linux.
• It can render to both OpenGL and DirectX render pipelines.
• You can write your own vertex and pixel shaders. You have to use O3D’s own language for doing this, but that actually enhances compatibility, as frustrated shader coders may already know. (See the FAQ)
• It’s a scene graph, so managing complex 3D scenes isn’t a chore.
• It has powerful built-in functions like viewports and pickers (plus custom pickers), so you can actually get something up and running in a reasonable time.
• It has an import workflow with COLLADA, an open standard for 3D assets (and which, incidentally, has support in Google’s own SketchUp).
• You code in JavaScript, using the powerful V8 engine (developed for Chrome).
• Gears lets you run offline.

MSAFluid for processing (Controlled by iPhone) from Memo Akten on Vimeo.

We can continue to ponder how to convince Apple to let Memo’s simple but powerful-looking MSA Remote multitouch app on the App Store. But in the meantime, a resourceful developer has tried simply writing a quick app for the Safari browser. This is doubly promising to me. I love full-blown apps, and they typically allow access to some of the powerful sensor and location features of mobile devices. But that’s not to say browser apps won’t also have a place for quick prototyping, live performance, and installation. WebKit browsers are now not only on iPhone and iPod touch, but Palm Pre and Android – and, I suspect, more places soon. This could be a great outlet even for extending functionality of apps.

Anyway, if you’re looking for a quick way of using the TUIO protocol – as Memo is doing with his (App Store-rejected) app + Processing above – Andrew Turley’s app is a quick fix. I’ll be looking at mobile browser development alongside app development, I know, and I imagine all of us will keep praying for the MSA app.

TUIO Multitouch for iPhone: Browser App Hack Replaces Rejected App [Create Digital Music]

touchy feely [Pillowsopher Blog]

And yes, as this is a browser app, it should work on other platforms, too. The disadvantage of Android G1 is you’ll get only one-touch … while we wait for generally-available multitouch capabilities on Android, I imagine more specialized apps with specific platform tie-ins will be more useful.

I may have to eat my words — here’s something I didn’t imagine being possible any time soon. It’s extremely processor-intensive computer vision, happening in a video stream, all with JavaScript worker threads. That is, this is possible because the next version of Firefox, version 3.1, allows for multiple threads processing the video instead of trying to do everything in succession. HTML5 + Firefox 3.1 + some not-terribly-backwards-compatible code = basic vision. It looks like it’s pretty simple frame differencing with a threshold, then a bounding area drawn around the spot that changes.

Video: Christopher Blizzard SoCal Linux Expo Javascript Motion Tracking, by AndroidAppFactory
Mozilla demos impressive Firefox 3.1 features at SCALE [Arts Technica]

And yep, that’s Linux running on a Mac, but you probably didn’t notice that — which is the whole point.

So, that’s it. No more desktop development. JavaScript is the future, and you’ll never need another language. Everything will happen in the browser. Nothing will happen in the browser, and everything will happen in servers. Not real servers - the cloud. In fact, nothing will happen in the cloud. That cloud will just virtualize another cloud. That cloud will be owned by Google. You won’t even have a computer, you’ll just have Firefox. Nothing will happen anywhere: you’ll just sit and think about Google and Firefox. Or a cloud will think about it for you.