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Archive for September, 2007

magnetmus

richie hawtin @ metamorphose 2007, part-I

richie hawtin @ metamorphose 2007.
meta-control visuals designed by ali demirel & burak arikan, performed live by ali demirel.
‘processing’ (processing.org) is used to create and perform the visual set.

Author: magnetmus
Keywords: richie hawtin ali demirel burak arikan metamorphose processing
Added: September 20, 2007

Mikkel

Projects online

10 previous projects are now online (albeit in overview-form: one image and a bit of text).

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Innovative Gameplay: Portal the Game

Another interesting gameplay ahead with the game Portal. Innovative gaming seems to slowly overcome the market, although I still think that still most of the commercial games are some kind of bloodless (if you take it literally this is clearly a good thing, but on a meta level this games don’t seem to communicate much). This is very fast opinion though on Portal, in fact I did not even played Portal, but it looks very first person shooter-like, just with puzzle elements and different game mechanics. Nevertheless interesting game mechanics, though.

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Interesting Gameplay ahead: Echochrome for Playstation

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Echochrome: Optical Illusion Gameplay.

Games for playstation with only one color are extremely rare. I simply can only remember Vib Ribbon and Rez that dropped the highlighted grafics and forced all attention to the gameplay. The coming title Echochrome does similar with an outstanding simple gameplay. There is a man wandering in an “optical illusion” landscape. In the game you have to rotate the scene in that way, that the fellow wanderer will get his way through. Watch a video of the gameplay.

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Railscast Video Podcast deliver clever advanced Ruby on Rails Hacks

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A valuable source of short video tutorials are on the Railscast videopodcast. They are very clever not only focusing on good code practises, but also implicate how to work on rails in general (including refactoring and such).

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XGameStation and Hydra - a do it yourself Gaming Console

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Andre LaMothe is the creator of the XGameStation, a do it yourself kit for making your own gaming console. Yes, I am talking about hardware here. Get the technical details for example for the XGameStation Micro Edition on the website. On a meta level this console kit is about the following:

“Imagine understanding how video game systems are designed and developed at an engineer’s level. Imagine writing your own games for a piece of hardware you’re personally capable of building. This isn’t a field trip to the factory — this is decades of video game hardware development boot camp compressed into a single product designed to upgrade your brain and take you to the next level of skill and understanding. It was estimated that only 100-200 people on the entire planet understood the workings of the legendary Atari 2600 and its design. What if you could design machines like this and beyond?”

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If you want to dive into self-written games on your custom console then you will prefer HYDRA.

“The HYDRA Game Development Kit is a complete edutainment platform to learn multiprocessing game development, graphics and media applications on the HYDRA Game Console. Based on the new Parallax multiprocessing Propeller Chip. For beginner to intermediate coders, you need only basic programming experience in any BASIC or C-like language to get started with the kit. The HYDRA Game Console is based on a socketed 40-Pin dip version of the new Parallax Multiprocessing Propeller Chip. The Propeller chip is simplified cell processor very similar in concept to the Sony ‘Cell Processor’ used in the Playstation 3.”

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Pictures and quotes from XGameStaion website

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User Interface Design: Up to Eleven

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Second picture by Sargant.

This entry is about a very special topic on user interface design - it’s about the labeling of volume controls on analog and digital boxes. Ordinary volume controls are labeled with numbers just from 0 to 10, well I guess because we have ten fingers and generally live in a decimal system. Now why are there knobs going to eleven? The origin is going back to a rockumentary video made by the reality/parody band The Spinal Tap back in 1984. In this video Nigel Tufnel speaks about their Marshall amps that have a very clever feature, because all volume controls are labeled from 0 to 11. Opposed to the ordinary Guitar player who plays at the maximum volume with all controllers turned up to ten they are able to turn their amps “one more louder” - up to eleven. See the originating part of the video below.

Up to eleven became a synonym for “to the maximum level” or “taking it to the extreme” and lots of nice and interesting stories are wrapped around that parody video, that still influences the user interfaces of mostly musical gear. Read much more and a comprehensive list of 11-appearances at the Wikipedia site.

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Why I think the iPhone is about seamless integration

And while we are already on the topic… Please spot this post to get a screenshot on recent iPhone development sources, mostly focusing on web development for iPhone.

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Rails-Rivva: get the latest Buzz on the Ruby on Rails community blogs

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rails.rivva.de

Frank Westphal (note that interview I held with him) started some months ago a project called Rivva - a “Meme-Tracker” that automatically aggregates content from blogs and sorts it in order to relevance with some algorithmic voodoo hidden inside the application. Rivva now became a new child: rails.rivva.de. That new section focuses on English blogs with debates on Ruby on Rails. To keep in touch with what’s hot on the blogs just visit rails.rivva.de or directly subscribe to the RSS-feed. A fresh source to start the day.

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N3D: A 3D Library for Nintendo DS Homebrew Development

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N3D mesh example

Groundbreaking news on Nintendo DS homebrew development! Peter Schraut wrote an library in his own words “an abstraction layer for the Nintendo DS 3D hardware, to
be used with the homebrew devkitPro toolchain. The interface is designed to
be very similar with Microsoft’s Direct3D API”. The documentation is available and on the official website some examples waiting to be explored (also look here).

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N3D code example

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Digital Tools

Innovative Gameplay: Portal the Game

Another interesting gameplay ahead with the game Portal. Innovative gaming seems to slowly overcome the market, although I still think that still most of the commercial games are some kind of bloodless (if you take it literally this is clearly a good thing, but on a meta level this games don’t seem to communicate much). This is very fast opinion though on Portal, in fact I did not even played Portal, but it looks very first person shooter-like, just with puzzle elements and different game mechanics. Nevertheless interesting game mechanics, though.

New service SCR and “Kaze to Desktop”

We (tha.ltd) launched new service called SCR.
SCR is our own service which publish highly experimental widgets and apps.

First product is an experimental screen saver, “Kaze to Desktop“.
It blows away everything on the desktop with storm that reflects wind velocity where you live.

Enough worth to see.

Simon

World is not round

A little capture from my last live visual set.

It’s all realtime, so there’s certainly some mistakes and bad notes. That mean too that all the pictures are generated in live. I have no loops, no prerendered footages. It’s all improvisation. Things move according to the beat, to the music frequenties and to my little fingers pressing buttons and switching knobs and faders.

Music by Trentemoller.

Built with Processing and captured with Fraps.

Vimeo / Videos tagged processing

World is not round.


World is not round.

Music by Trentemoller.

Built with Processing and captured with Fraps.

Captured from my last live visual set.

It’s all realtime, so there’s certainly some mistakes and bad notes. That mean too that all the pictures are generated in live. I have no loops, no prerendered footages. It’s all improvisation. Things move according to the beat, to the music frequenties and to my little fingers pressing buttons and switching knobs and faders.

Cast: Simon