Updates from April, 2011 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • hilalkoyuncu 10:25 pm on April 7, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Prior art/ reframing the concept 

    Prior Art:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5psNItY-f4

    Concept:

    I decided to reframe my concept.

    My game is going to be aimed toward adults and the diseases that the toy will display will be ones that I will create based on contemporary afflictions of technology. An example of diseases would be “facebook fever”. I am still researching though, hopefully will come up with interesting conditions.

    I will most probably barrow the game mechanics of “the operation”.

    I built most circuits and coded the interactions (sound and visual feedback) and  there are some glitches that I would like to work on.

    Hopefully I will have a working first prototype in the next session.

     

     

  • Thom Hines 9:53 pm on April 7, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Easy Peasy CMS 

    I’ve developed my CMS a bit further than last time, as it now works with images and can store user settings (such as password, etc.) in a data file on the server. Since my CMS is intended to operate without a database, it’s essential that all of the information can be stored and updated on the server, but only in file format.

    See it here.
    user: thomhines
    pass: pass

    Todo

    • Some sort of media manageer so that images, PDFs, etc. can be linked to easily from within the browser window.
    • A multi-user permission systems that will allow for different users to have access to only content, styling, page structure, etc.
    • A way to store drafts and/or versions
    • Smart, inline editing that will allow the content editor to feel like he/she is actually editing the page.
    • Smart phone optimization
    • Standardize theming system to allow for quick changes in style
    • Collaborative editing?
    • Automatic install process
    • Site manager

    In addition to all this, I need to get it onto a few sites and test it thoroughly. In order to make sure I can get enough testing, I’ve decided to break the development down into several sub-versions, which I will make available as I go along. I’ve also set up the file structure so that the core files are stored separately from the settings and content, so that upgrading should be as simple as replacing the core file folder and the new features should be integrated right away.

    Needs

    The more research I have done, the more I can see the advantages of a system like this in certain, somewhat specific instances. First of all, MySQL and all the relational databases that drive all the common CMSs are generally slow(ish), and when operating under heavy traffic loads or on a server with sparse resources, can slow to a crawl or even crash. I ran across this an article earlier today (http://carpeaqua.com/2011/04/05/recipe-for-baked-wordpress/) that talks about how to ensure your hosted version of WordPress can survive a large influx of traffic. The advice isn’t difficult, but it is above many people’s heads, and even if it wasn’t, people clearly aren’t following it. The takeaway of the article: If you can’t or don’t want to do this, don’t bother setting up your own WordPress install.

    Furthermore, there is a movement of people who are completely against the use of MySQL in almost any capacity. Called the NoSQL movement, they think that for sites, large or small, there are better solutions, including flat file CMSs like the ones listed below:

    Prior Art

    Razor CMS

    Pluck CMS

    Pivot Blog

    Lotus CMS

    Skeleton CMS

    Cushy CMS

    Also, I found a couple of patents that are somewhat related, but not much in the way of dynamically changing flat files on a web server.

    http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=sk42AAAAEBAJ&dq=content+management+system (1981)

    http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=dySXAAAAEBAJ&dq=content+management+system

    http://www.google.com/patents?id=1-CDAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false (2001)

     

  • catherine 9:53 pm on April 7, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Prior Art 

    Some more prior art for kni++.


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  • scottpeterman 8:38 pm on April 7, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Prior Art and a new name??? 

    ART:
    kraakdos
    Kraakdoos – Michel Waisvisz and Geert Hamelberg – 1960s
    folgerphone
    Folgerphone – Nolan Hatcher and Craig Nutt – 1979
    Gittler Guitar
    Gittler Guitar – Allane Gittler – 1970s and 80s
    played by Andy Summers of the Police on “Syncronicity II”
    gravikord
    Gravikord – Robert Grawl – 1986
    SynthAxe
    SynthAxe – Bill Aiken – 1986
    z6-spxa
    Ztar – Starr Labs – 1980s-Present
    kaisatsu
    Kaisatsuko – Yuichi Onoue – 2003
    moodswinger
    Moodswinger – Yuri Landman – 2006
    played by Alex Hemphill of the Liars on “Leather Prowler”
    Yamaha Trumpet Yamaha EZ-TP MIDI Trumpet – Currently available ($350)
    Yamaha WX-5 woodwind Yamaha WX-5 MIDI Woodwind – Currently available ($350)

    PATENTS:
    1942Electrical Clarinet
    1959 Device for measuring speech

    1965 – VOLUME CONTROL APPARATUS FOR A SINGLE-TONE .ELECTRONIC MUSICAL INSTRUMENT
    1966 Fluid Pressure Actuated Sensor controlled instrument
    1969 Electrical Woodwind Synthesizer
    1969 Breath Control sensor for single-tone musical instrument

    1971 Electric Reed Mouthpiece
    1973 Electronic wind instrument
    1975 Electrically Operated Music
    1976 Trumpet using variable wind pressure post valves then feeding into synthesizer
    1976 A method for capturing sound actually housed inside the mouth
    1977 Breath pressure actuated electronic instrument
    1978 Pressure transducer for musical instruments
    1979 Voice controlled instrument
    1979 Control system for an electronic music synthesizer

    1981 Wind sensing mouthpiece for electronic instruments
    1982 Musical apparatus
    1984 Hand-held musical instrument and systems including a man-machine interface
    1985 Musical instrument
    1987 Musical Instrument (flute)
    1988 Synthesized Whistle
    1988 Entertainment and creative expression device for easily playing along to background music
    1989 Detection of Musical Gestures

    1990 Musical wear – finger switched by Hideo Suzuki for Yamaha
    1990Air flow response controlled musical instrument
    1990 Electronic musical instrument with pitch alteration function
    1991 Electronic Saxophone
    1991Musical keyboard for buttonless woodwind synthesizer
    1991 Electronic musical instrument with a tone parameter control function
    1991 Electronic musical instrument with improved generation of wind instruments
    1992 Electronic musical instrument with selection of standard sound pitch of a natural instrument
    1992 Pitch data output apparatus for electronic musical instrument having movable members
    1993 Breath controller for musical instruments
    1995 Electronic musical instrument with tone generation control
    1995 Electronic musical instrument having key after-sensors and stroke sensors to determine differences between key depressions
    1996 Musical instrument having voice function
    1997 Hands-free input device for operating a computer having mouthpiece with plurality of cells
    1997 Wind instruments with electronic tubing length control
    1998 Hybrid electronic and acoustic musical instrument
    1999 Electronic wind instrument capable of diversified performance expression
    1999 Woodwind-styled electronic musical instrument

    2002 Musical instruments that generate notes according to sounds and manually selected scales
    2002 Musical wind instrument and method for controlling such an instrument
    2003 Voice-controlled electronic instrument
    2003 Wind controller for music synthesizer
    2005 Musical tone generating apparatus and method for generating musical tone on the basis of detection of pitch of input vibration signal
    2006 Hybrid wind instrument selectively producing acoustic tones
    2008Tone generator control apparatus and program for electronic wind instrument
    2009 Electric wind instrument and key detection structure thereof
    2010 Hybrid wind musical instrument and electric system incorporated therein
    2010 Instrument
    2010 Flute controller driven dynamic synthesis system
    2010 Wind musical instrument with pitch changing mechanism and supporting system

    TITLE CHANGE?
    I think the term “Ghost Music” is too vague and helped to contribute to Yuri’s feeling that I needed to restate my central thesis again. What about “The Transparent Brass Band”? Then you get the nice consonance of “Transparent Trumpet,” “Transparent Trombone” and “Transparent Tuba.”

     

  • minho 8:20 pm on April 7, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Bad robot – face detecting 

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  • catherine 8:11 pm on April 7, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Knitting Techniques 

    4 Videos of Basic Knitting Techniques
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  • thisisvictorkim 8:03 pm on April 7, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Musical Cigarettes 

    http://vimeo.com/22066071

    This was inspired by the youtube hit “Amateur” by Lasser Gjertsen.  It is my first “prototype” (rough video edit) of the notion of mundane, everday habits as musical instruments.

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  • Behnaz Babazadeh 5:42 pm on April 7, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Plausibility Tests 

    Today I ran a series of tests to see where the technology might be limited in and/or if it is completely plausible.

    Here I experimented with the possibility of incorporating illustration board into the novelty cards to give shape and structure. The alloy was able to move the pieces, however the shape was a little distorted. I believe I can achieve the right type of interaction with the use of several alloys on each corner.

     

    Part of a series of experimentation of how shape memory alloys react with in the oven and at what temperature. This alloy was placed inside of a conventional oven at 150 degrees. The alloy went from a stretched state at 3 inches to its compressed memory state at 1 inch, all in just one minute in this oven.

     

    Conclusion | I can definitely use shape memory alloys as the technology to change flat shapes into 3 dimensional shapes with in the convenience of a standard home oven.

     

  • Behnaz Babazadeh 5:05 pm on April 7, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Interactive Novelty Cards 

    Currently there are absolutely no other paper/novelty products that utilize SMAs (Shape Memory Alloys) technology.

    1) The current trend in smart novelty cards seem to be in soft circuit space of paper craft and conductive inks. Novalia is a company that has been started by Cambridge professor Dr Kate Stone. They create flat circuits on paper to get interactive simple circuit greeting cards. Most of which are simple, push button/ light led. Click Here for the Article.

    2) Here is a video of a neat greeting card hallmark is doing with augmented reality. Hallmark wants to go Hi-Tech!

    3) The standard tech cards that everyone has seen such as pop up cards and musical cards.

     

  • Oylum 4:36 pm on April 7, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Prior Art 

    I found some prior work related to over distance emotional impact or haptic outputs.
    My keywords are: Haptic feedback, telepresence toys, virtual/physical existence.
    Most of them have more science oriented approach, you can tell it even from their interfaces. Here are some examples:

    Augmented reality puts the squeeze into virtual hugs:

    Virtual hugs
    It uses Second Life to communicate. It matches your words in Second Life with emotions and convey that emotion to your partner. In the video, there are 2 characters in Second Life, hugging each other, talking, getting excited atc. The look and feel is horrible! So technical, so engineer style. Would you wanna walk around wearing this? And the guy, he’s like Clark Kent – The Engineer!

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    • Willie 10:12 pm on September 12, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      What an awesome way to explain this-now I know everiytnhg!

  • Behnaz Babazadeh 4:09 pm on April 7, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Materials Exploration | Symposium 

    Parsons Fashionable Technology Event Series continued on the 31st with a series of lectures and demonstrations from the people in the industry who are doing interesting things in their field relating to fashionable / wearable technology.

    This is a video of my favorite talk at the symposium. I think was was really great to see the variety of different materials out there available that I had never heard about before. You can thank me later for shooting this video 🙂

    Below are some of the interesting things Bare Conductive is up to with their patent non-toxic conductive ink.

     

    Conductive Ink Track Pad

    Conductive Ink Switchs / Potentiometor for outputs of light / sound.

    Conductive Ink Flex Sensor

    According to Matt Johnson from Bare Conductive, this ink will not be available for purchase for quite some time. Huge bummer for some soft circuit friends of mine who would have loved to use this ink for their mini-thesis.

     

  • andywallace 5:55 am on April 7, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Gyroscope Vs Accelerometer 

    Tilt Sensors are still on their way, but my Sparkfun order came in today, along with some foam balls I orderred form Amazon! I didn’t get home until late, so I have not had too much of a chance to play with my new toys, but I did experiment a bit with the gyroscope and accelerometer as a way of getting the velocity of the ball (or at least something close enough to the velocity to fool any user).

    I set up simple openFrameworks app to monitor each sensor and see how it reacted to different movements. I really wanted to get each of them in a ball using xBee, but something is going wrong with one of my xBees. I’m going to look into it tomorrow. Instead, I put the gyroscope in the ball and used long wires to attach it to the Arduino. Unfortunately, this limited the movement a lot more than I was expecting it to, and the ball really is not free rolling at all.

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  • Behnaz Babazadeh 4:57 am on April 7, 2011 Permalink | Reply  

    Materials Exploration | Workshop 

    Last week I attended the Materials exploration workshop held by the fashionable technology team of Parsons. Here is a link to the fashion tech blog. Below are some interesting materials and facts I discovered over the course of the event.

    Workshop materials included; Woven Optic Fabric, Photo Luminescent Fabric, Photovoltaic Fabric, Heating Fabric, Liquid Crystal Fabric and Anti-Magnetic Fabric.

    The workshop was sort of set up as a game, where each group of students were to pick up a set of cards with constraints listed. My team got

    WHO – With friend
    WHEN – A slow time
    WHERE – In a big city
    WHAT – Photovoltaic

    We came up with several different projects and ideas for using the technology with these set of constraints.

    The idea we followed through with was Dance Dance Beach Blanket. An interactive blanket that can use the solar energy power received from sitting out in the sun all day, getting your tan on like JWOW and The Situation (See image below) and when the sun goes down, the party continues with this networked, dance dance revolution and twister inspired interactive light up game.

    In the end, I think it was a fun way to structure a workshop but it was unfortunate that we got a material that was not available for us to cut up and prototype.

     

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