Cast: Tobby Lang

The browser Firefox 3 wants to get the world record for the most downloaded tool within 24 hours. On the so called “Download Day” you can submit your mail-address to get the latest information. You “pledge”, that you will download the browser on that day. Just right at the moment the amount of people who promised to download Firefox 3 on that day is impressive. Just take a look at the live-update, interactive map.

[ via Gulli ]

Processing version 137 is released! Download here. Expect more on the way as the debugging continues.

Glü is a new shiny project we are launching with 3 talentuous musicians and me. I’m for the moment working on a website for the project and wanted to make some nice realtime music visualisation. I first started to do it in processing and then moved to as3 because java applet needs plugin to play sounds… wich is really boring for a website.

I decide to stop using others algorithms for doing beat detection and I quickly write a really simple code that can be a good starting point for people wanting to get into spectrum analysis. The code is really easy, I took something like a big hour to create it and it’s about 40 lines of code. The result is not optimal but for what I seen on the web it is the easier and smaller code I found. The code is also inside the KineLib package I uploaded on my server. This library is a collection of code I use really often and that I started to clean some weeks ago for public release. Here’s also the AS3 library (hehe! yes! yes! I restart coding in AS! and what a pleasure to learn this third, almost free version!) .

Don’t ask for others codes than SpectrumAnalyzer and EasyControl included in the package… It’s an error if they have been compilated inside the library…. But don’t worry, I will soon clean them and write something about them.

One good thing about Web Flash Festival is that you cant guess by reading his name that the festival show other things than Flash stuffs. They called me this year for doing a code performance called in french “Cadavre exquis de Code“. Following this old concept from the surrealism, we had to re-use and re-mix other’s codes during 6 hours!

I had the chance to meet Vega there and work with him on this performance. The theme of this year was “playable” so Vega and me quickly agree on doing something really interactive. We finally end up with an sms application that receive message and build them on the screen using huge cloud of sound reactive particles. We present it during the final ceremony of the festival, on a huuuge screen. It was really cool, we receive about 40 messages in two minutes so I guess the public liked what we did.

Anyway it was really nice to do that with Vega, and one funny thing is that we both had the idea of launching a “Cadavre Exquis” web project for a while… Maibee we are going to see what we can do together with that.

Otherwise, read what Vega said about this (more detailed and with links and pictures).

I’m using for a while ControlP5, a great processing library that really simplified the creation of user interfaces. When you sketch something in processing, there’s always a moment when you ask “what m I going to put in this variable? 0.0125? Mmmh. No! 0.0237… Still not good, let’s try 0.0242. Etc…” You know how it is! This is where a user interface may become really usefull.

The only boring stuff about user interface is that you have to lose time building it. This is why I wrote this little code that reads your processing sketch, looks for variables that needs control and automatically creates controllers for them.

You can download the library here and a little example here. Just add “//ctrl x y” after the variable you want to control (where x is the starting value and y the end value). then in your setup just add simply new EasyControl(this) and the library will do the rest!

Before downloading this library, remember this guy has done all the hard work. I just write a library that interface with controlP5. You can use my code as you want but his code is still under the licence of controlP5.

Last month I participated to the 2008 Störung Festival in Barcelona. This year the festival setup a little exhibition about generative design. I showed some of my works there and played a little live performance with Frederico Monti during the opening concert. It was a really nice experience. Frederico music is really minimalist and it was really fun to play with his sounds.

I will upload some videos soon. Here’s a link to a video taken by someone on youtube (thank you!) and another link with some pics on flickr (thank’s too).

I’ve been invited some months ago to speak at a nice conference at the ERG (”Ecole de Recherche Graphique”) from Brussels. Marc Wathieu invited me to speak about processing in the context of open source and community and to show some of my works to the students. This event was really nice and I think the subject is really something that I find more and more important everyday… What would I(we) be without opensource and what would processing be without community? This event was organised to present to students some alternatives to propietary softwares and solutions. I hope there will some more iterations of this day.

I feel like opensource and alternative software is really not a priority in art schools here in Brussels and this is a big shame! Really! I hope this is not the same in other countries because I think opensource and community is the main evolution factors for the tools we are using everyday… but…. this is a long debat and I’m not going to start what others has already done somewhere else. Anyway, go check this nice and interesting conversation that emmerge from a recent Robert Hodgins post. Some guys are saying really clever stuffs there.

I promise to Marc and to the students to release the sources of the two little applications I showed during my speech. Here’s a link! I did not had the time to comment them and to optimise the code. I quickly sketch both of them for specific use and there is no garanty and good sources for them (I will try to find some time to at least comment them). Finally, I would like to thanks Marc for this great initiative. I had a great pleasure to participate and would be pleased to continue that really soon!

This is a costume I built with a vibra-tab sensor and an Arduino microcontroller wired into it. it utilized code written in Arduino and Processing causing the computer to generate noise in relationship to my movements. the footage is from a performance on 21 may 2008 in Providence, Rhode Island.

Cast: honey Beast

Inauguration of our studio in Bordeaux,France. from 2Roqs on Vimeo.

Two weeks ago we@2Roqs inaugurated our new studio in Bordeaux (read my previous post). Invitations were sent to guests by e-mail that linked to the stop-motion video above. It was shot during some rainy days of April, and the idea was to create something non-digital that would show our new place and at the same time some of our past and present references, while displaying infos about the party itself. You may have recognized the green screen and the pixelized bee of that good ol’ Atari-St. The music was specially created by Arnaud, the man behind Bordeaux-based Splank Studio.

The party itself went super well, most of the people we had invited showed up to say hi (and drink a bit too ;-). For this occasion, we had re-worked one of the first interactive application (called RoqsTree) Mike and I started to develop back in 2004. The concept is quite simple, people can register to the application by taking a photo, and then their avatar is shown as a kind of fruit on a tree grown in a 3D model of the place hosting the event. Some interactions can occur too between the participants. More details soon !

Photos courtesy of Michaël.

Sparky is the first health awareness pet. It reflects the health of its owner and in the same time expects actions of the owner. The prototype senses sound/noise, gas, pollution, movement, abuse (hit-detection), time and light. So if you for example leave him alone for some time he will get unhappy, and even more if you leave him alone in a dark place.

This are some short shots from his first trip and some reactions of pedestrians.

The project was done in spring 2008 at k3 in Malmö by five interaction design master students.

for more see http://sparky.workx.biz

Cast: caist

Processing version 136 is ready. Be sure to read the release notes, there are a number of significant internal changes. Download here.

Scrubbing a Last.fm user account in preparation for creating visualizations.
http://www.leebyron.com/what/lastfm

Cast: Lee Byron

I spent an intense week-end in Paris where I perfomed a coding session with Processing (see my previous post). I had the pleasure to be associated with Simon Geilfus for the whole Sunday afternoon and we just had six hours to produce a program around the theme “Playable”, knowing that our production would be shown during the final ceremony on the evening (pressure, pressure!).
Fortunately we met the day before around a beer so that we had time to plan things a bit and talked on how we could possibly interpret that theme. We quickly agreed on the fact that it would be a good opportunity to let the audience participate and play with our application in some way.
We ended up re-using and re-mixing some code we had taken with us, and produced an animation which rendered 30000 black and white audio-reactive particles. Simon did a great job on this, by using a special technique with a pixel shader for individual particle drawing (cheers for showing me that :-).
People were then able to send SMS messages, and words were then dynamically assembled by picking up some of the particles and coloring them. All of their movements were controlled by some flocking behaviour. That was awesome, and I think people really liked it as we received almost 50 messages in 2 minutes…! We had very positive feedback, though a last-minute-we-didnot-let-run-the-application-enough-time bug prevented the application to display the whole set of received messages.

Links:

• Photos by Les designers interactifs
• Photos by Quasimondo