Blogs Media Lab

WebWalker 1.4

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It is Friday and we haven’t posted in a while, so here’s a semi-juicy WebWalker. There’s more in the pipes, too. Web 2.0 Strip Generator – Looks like our designers are out of a job: we’ll just modify this and plug in the Walker font, and voila! Walker Identity a la Web 2.0 (so you [...]

Stripe Generator Software Kaleideoscope Run Lola Run Social Media Marketing for Small Business

It is Friday and we haven’t posted in a while, so here’s a semi-juicy WebWalker. There’s more in the pipes, too.

  • Web 2.0 Strip Generator – Looks like our designers are out of a job: we’ll just modify this and plug in the Walker font, and voila! Walker Identity a la Web 2.0 (so you know it’s gotta be BETA!) -Nate

    Justin notes: They could use a designer to fix their hideous justified type, so we designers aren’t totally out of a job yet.

  • Software Kaleidoscope – A very fancy display from Samsung combined with a video camera and some processing work. Make sure you check out the movie. I wonder how many interesting projects get made at trade shows to just show off some technology and then never see the light of day again. -Via Brent
  • Lola Running Very Quickly – Speaking of Processing, Daniel Shiffman has been working on a system he calls Most Pixels Ever which is a library for spanning processing projects across multiple screens relatively easily. In this demo, he’s taken every frame from Run Lola Run plays it as a giant grid of changing frames. Quite the interesting way to look at time based media. -Justin

  • Social Media Marketing for Small Business (And non-profits?) – Search Engine Land has a great article on why social media is useful for business and how to do it. There are some great tips in there, and many museums are working on these issues. It is something I will expand upon during our workshop at Museums and the Web 2007. -Justin

WebWalker 1.4

By

It is Friday and we haven’t posted in a while, so here’s a semi-juicy WebWalker. There’s more in the pipes, too. Web 2.0 Strip Generator – Looks like our designers are out of a job: we’ll just modify this and plug in the Walker font, and voila! Walker Identity a la Web 2.0 (so you [...]

Stripe Generator Software Kaleideoscope Run Lola Run Social Media Marketing for Small Business

It is Friday and we haven’t posted in a while, so here’s a semi-juicy WebWalker. There’s more in the pipes, too.

  • Web 2.0 Strip Generator – Looks like our designers are out of a job: we’ll just modify this and plug in the Walker font, and voila! Walker Identity a la Web 2.0 (so you know it’s gotta be BETA!) -Nate

    Justin notes: They could use a designer to fix their hideous justified type, so we designers aren’t totally out of a job yet.

  • Software Kaleidoscope – A very fancy display from Samsung combined with a video camera and some processing work. Make sure you check out the movie. I wonder how many interesting projects get made at trade shows to just show off some technology and then never see the light of day again. -Via Brent
  • Lola Running Very Quickly – Speaking of Processing, Daniel Shiffman has been working on a system he calls Most Pixels Ever which is a library for spanning processing projects across multiple screens relatively easily. In this demo, he’s taken every frame from Run Lola Run plays it as a giant grid of changing frames. Quite the interesting way to look at time based media. -Justin

  • Social Media Marketing for Small Business (And non-profits?) – Search Engine Land has a great article on why social media is useful for business and how to do it. There are some great tips in there, and many museums are working on these issues. It is something I will expand upon during our workshop at Museums and the Web 2007. -Justin

WebWalker 1.3

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Let’s see, it’s Friday morning… haven’t posted in forever… must be time for WebWalker! The Quartet Project is built on the very cool idea of mixing multiple inputs – sound, movement, motion capture – into multiple outputs: virtual instruments, and even a projected virtual dancer. The cast of Quartet comprises of a dancer, a musician, [...]

quartet1.jpg asirra.JPG wppluginsshot.png

Let’s see, it’s Friday morning… haven’t posted in forever… must be time for WebWalker!

  • The Quartet Project is built on the very cool idea of mixing multiple inputs – sound, movement, motion capture – into multiple outputs: virtual instruments, and even a projected virtual dancer. The cast of Quartet comprises of a dancer, a musician, a motion controlled robotic camera, and a 3D virtual dancer. It looks like a lot of custom development for this, tied together with MAX/MSP. The Project Outline section has more details on the performance.
  • You won’t generally find these opensource advocates linking to Microsoft, but this is actually a cool project and they’ve got an API so you can plug into it for your own site. Asirra is an alternative to the widely-used CAPTCHAs involving wavy and distorted text that PETA’s blog described as being “torture devices for dyslexics“. MSR calls Asirra a “HIP” (Human Interactive Proof) and it involves quickly classifying pictures of pets as either dogs or cats – so easy a child could do it, but difficult for computers without some serious processing. Just another tool in the constant arms race against the spam bots…
  • WordPress continues to make my life better: the team has just released (finally!) a central repository for plugins. What used to be a rather complicated process – “1. I know there must be a plugin for this… 2. What was that site again? 3. Man, how can I be sure this is the latest version? Who’s the original author? 4. Cross fingers and download.” – is now reduced to “1. Go get it from WordPress plugins.” Sweet.

Touchscreen roundup

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Chris O’Shea of Pixelsumo sent me a note letting me know he has been collecting info on mutli-touch screens as well and has a wealth of links to check out. The most impressive of which is the Perceptive Pixel screen. Check out the video to see it in action. We’ve previously covered O’Shea’s Sonicforms project. [...]

Chris O’Shea of Pixelsumo sent me a note letting me know he has been collecting info on mutli-touch screens as well and has a wealth of links to check out. The most impressive of which is the Perceptive Pixel screen. Check out the video to see it in action. We’ve previously covered O’Shea’s Sonicforms project.

I also recalled hearing about some big multitouch screens at CES this year, but google is not helping me. I did find a mention of a large screen from Sharp that was shown at IFA 2006. Watch this clip at about 1:37 for a short view. I can’t find any more details on it, so if someone knows more, I’d love to hear it.

Accenture also has produced some large-scale mutli-touch screen recently. Here’s the press release. The scale is certainly impressive (10×7):

And some tech details:

Accenture’s patent-pending touch sensing system has the ability to distinguish between touches from multiple simultaneous users. Additionally high-resolution cameras are leveraged to provide touch capabilities for simultaneous usage. The screen consists of a series of nine rear-projection DLP screens fastened together to display cohesive images at a clarity of 2100 x 1200 pixels/resolution. The network is managed and updated from a remote location to allow for content to be adjusted regularly.

Here’s a video of what I think is the same tech being used in a military application, though it doesn’t show off the multi-touch capabilities, and some information on Accenture’s site.

Blogs bits and pieces

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If you’ve visited the blogs lately you might have seen a few small changes around here. There have been a few under the hood too. Here’s a quick list in case anyone is interested: We’ve made comments more prominent on individual blogs as well as on the blog home page. We wanted to increase the [...]

If you’ve visited the blogs lately you might have seen a few small changes around here. There have been a few under the hood too. Here’s a quick list in case anyone is interested:

  • We’ve made comments more prominent on individual blogs as well as on the blog home page. We wanted to increase the visibility of comments in order to foster more of a community feel. People do comment and you should too.
  • Nate also re-enabled the subscribe to comments plugin. If you make a comment and want to get further responses by email, it is for you. And we have a general comments feed as well as comment feeds for each blog. Again, this change is aimed at fostering more dialogue on the blogs.
  • Nate performed an upgrade to WordPress 2.1, which made life a lot easier for us, thanks to the dual mode visual/code editor.
  • We’re now using Viper’s Video Quicktags to let our authors post youtube video without having to deal with embed tags and what wordpress does to them.
  • The ECP blog has received some customization for two categories: Girls in the Director’s Chair and Respond to Kara Walker. I was able to modify the template in such a way that the design changes can be implemented with css. Posts to these categories get a different design treatment, and the category pages themselves also get a different design treatment.
  • For the Respond to Kara Walker category, we also wanted to let people post their responses to the exhibition Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, in much the same way that the postcards and response book in the gallery allow visitors do. We figured the best way to do this was to let people simply create their own post. And thankfully the TDO Mini Form plugin lets us allow people to create a post without having to log in.
  • We also began using another plugin, Better Feed, to modify our feeds to add some meta info and a link to our survey in order to promote it to our readers.
  • Finally we put out our first-ever blog survey to try and understand more who our readers are and what they’re coming for. Initial results have been encouraging and give us some ideas for things we might want to work on. The survey is still open, so please take it if you haven’t yet. We’ll be discussing it during our upcoming workshop and posting some of analysis here after that.

Marek Walczak, MW2MW & Kinecity recent work

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Interactive Architecture has a lengthy article on Marek Walczak’s recent work The article touches on the Podium Light Wall made for 7 World Trade Center and the Shimmer Wall, a video wall that represents sunlight shimmering off the Hudson River for the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. Don’t miss the Dialog Table which [...]

Marek Walczak, MW2MW & Kinecity recent work

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Interactive Architecture has a lengthy article on Marek Walczak’s recent work The article touches on the Podium Light Wall made for 7 World Trade Center and the Shimmer Wall, a video wall that represents sunlight shimmering off the Hudson River for the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. Don’t miss the Dialog Table which [...]

Walker Blogs Survey

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The Walker blogs are among some of the more well regarded in the museum world, and we’re always working on making them better. With that in mind, we present to you a survey. It consists of 11 quick questions that will help us understand why you read our blogs. Your identity is totally anonymous. Down [...]

The Walker blogs are among some of the more well regarded in the museum world, and we’re always working on making them better. With that in mind, we present to you a survey. It consists of 11 quick questions that will help us understand why you read our blogs. Your identity is totally anonymous. Down the road, we will be sharing some follow-up analysis on the new media blog.

The full survey is below, in this post, but if you have problems you can visit our dedicated survey page. If you’re reading this in an RSS reader or browser without javascript support, our survey should work, as it does not require javascript.

  1. How did you find the Walker blogs?
    • <input class=”sg_Radio” type=”radio” name=”Q_47″ id=”Q_47O4″ value=”O4″ /
  2. Which Walker blogs do you read?
  3. How often do you read the Walker blogs?
  4. For what reasons do you read the Walker blogs?
  5. Have the Walker blogs informed you of any of the following?
  6. On which topics and disciplines would you like to see the Walker blogs expand coverage?
  7. Have you ever left a comment on the Walker blogs?
  8. When was the last time you visited the Walker live and in person?
  9. Are you a member of the Walker?
  10. Please tell us where you live:
  11. Any other feedback you would like to share with us? We welcome your comments.

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Photos from Free First Saturday

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I manned the photobooth this past weekend for our monthly Free First Saturday event. It was a hit, and the photos are just about the cutest thing ever. I made a special point to make sure the camera was positioned lower so that little kids, which are generally shorter than adults, could fit in the [...]

I manned the photobooth this past weekend for our monthly Free First Saturday event. It was a hit, and the photos are just about the cutest thing ever. I made a special point to make sure the camera was positioned lower so that little kids, which are generally shorter than adults, could fit in the frame. Adults had to crouch down.

Take a look at the resulting set on flickr. Prepare to say awwww.

DIY multitouch tables

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“Multitouch” seems to be all the rage lately, mostly because Apple hyped it with the iPhone, though the idea has been around for a while. Make lets us know about a way to create a do it yourself multitouch system that seems to work pretty well. See the video to see for yourself: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eS4L5avQqM[/youtube] The [...]

“Multitouch” seems to be all the rage lately, mostly because Apple hyped it with the iPhone, though the idea has been around for a while. Make lets us know about a way to create a do it yourself multitouch system that seems to work pretty well. See the video to see for yourself:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eS4L5avQqM[/youtube]

The system uses a camera, mirrors, and a computer, just like our Dialog Table.

ftirschematic.jpg

The difference is that the software for this, VVVV, is freely available for non-commercial use. I’d love to see their patch to know how they did it. I bet that a similar setup is achievable with Jitter or Processing, too, the latter of which is free as well.

Linked in the comments for that post is also a blog from a grad student in Holland, who goes by the handle Gravano, doing some work with multitouch as well. He has many pictures and progress updates on his work posted, in addition to helping run a wiki and a forum. The opening post on sums up the contents of the blog fairly well:

In January this year I co-founded, a community called NUIgroup (Natural User Interface) Open Source Multi Touch Community, with a couple of other guys. Since there wasn’t alot of information online related to FTIR and DIY multitouch, we decided to centralize all the information of all our individual projects, so other people can learn and contribute to it as well.

Currently I’m working on a multitouch related project with 3 other guys from school. I’m soon going to develop a second multitouch display prototype. I will be posting my developments on this blog, as well as some usability thingies from time to time.

Looks like something worth keeping an eye on.