New Media Initiatives Blog

David Zicarelli of Cycling ‘74 has posted some initial notes on what’s new and different in Max 5. He

For current users, I would describe Max 5 as analogous to Apple’s transition from Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. At some point, Apple decided that the technological foundation of their operating system was unsustainable, and required a completely new approach. We came to the same conclusion about many aspects of Max, and especially about the graphical interface — often the most complicated and difficult system within any large application software project.

Max was based on the way the Macintosh worked in 1987. Since then, a lot of things have changed about graphical interfaces, file systems, and pretty much everything else. As a result, the assumptions of 1987 were simply too deeply embedded to keep Max going for another 20 years with the same internal codebase. This became increasingly apparent in recent years, as we seemed be doing nothing but patching Max to keep it working with the latest hardware and software.

I’ve wanted to make Max better, but recently most of my work has been the drudgery of making it operate on OS X, or on Windows, or on Intel processors. While I’ve been doing this, I’ve also been accumulating ideas for what I would do once I got over all this kind of work.

Well, that day did come when we finally finished the Intel port of the OS X version, although it took about a year longer than I thought it would. Once I was able to clear that off my desk, I began organizing my thoughts about what Max requires to survive another 20 years.

He mentions the possibility of Max being available on Linux, changes to the way some objects work, and updates to the GUI. In respect to the GUI, my friend Paul puts it best:

I’m excited to see what their new interface changes will entail. I kind of liked it’s raw ugliness, same way I really liked Slashdot’s 1993 ugliness before they shined it up. Its like a really ugly comfortable couch that you know you should get rid of eventually.

(Obviously, Max is for visual thinkers)

You’d think I’m on a posting spree. Here are three quickies for the day, finally welcoming WebWalker in the Web 2.0 era.

• Hack A Day links up Pong implemented on an oscilloscope. I’m not an electricty geek, but this is a pretty cool hack. Anything with an analog (vector CRT) display is worth looking at.
• Advertising Lab points out some beautiful irony in the NYT’s story about ad blocking.
• Information Aesthetics links up an amazing photograph and entire article on the science of boomerangs on Popular Mechanics.

• Teddy Banks, writing for Design Observer, shares some commentary on Olia Lialina’s newest article: Vernacular Web 2. The article is a great read on it’s own, and as Banks tells us, should be a must read for every web designer. Lialina’s work, My boyfriend came back from the war, was featured in the Walker’s online exhibit, Beyond Interface: net art and Art on the Net.

  Lialina touches on the similarties of myspace of today and the web of 10 years ago. Instead of being designed by computer geeks, it’s “designed” by teens and ameteurs, and the music is mp3s and not midi.

• And speaking of MySpace, Danah Boyd has some new thoughts posted on myspace and remix culture. Seb Chan offers some thoughts on what this means for institutions that offer graphics and resources that can be remixed (legitimately or otherwise).
• Here’s an interesting article on the paradox of large displays, written by Jeff Attwood. He quotes Dan’s Data:
  

  Users of 30-inch monitors face the terrible, terrible problem of how to effectively use all of that space. You don’t often want to maximise a folder or document window on a screen this big; either you’ll end up with a lot of white space and important program buttons separated by a vast expanse of nothing, or you’ll get lines of text 300 or more characters long, which are difficult to read.

  I use three displays at work, two on my main computer and one on the laptop. While synergy makes this a very useful setup when doing video work, it can also be extrmely distracting at times. I find it necessary to sleep my laptop so I can focus on important tasks on my main displays.

• Interactive Architecture had been quiet for a while, but they posted a brief blurb on a conference going on next week that will discuss the many implications of signage in public space. Hopefully some of the papers and presentations from the conference will make it to the web.

Daniel Shiffman has just released Most Pixels Ever as an alpha library for use with processing.

What is MPE and how does it work? From mostpixelsever.com:

The Most Pixels Ever library is a software solution for taking a single-screen real-time graphics application (developed in Java) and spanning it across multiple screens (each connected to a separate computer). Its features include "time syncing" and "spatial syncing." Time syncing ensures that each frame is rendered simultaneously on each display and is achieved by network communication. Spatial syncing ensures that each client computer renders the appropriate portion of the larger display on its display.

I can’t wait to play with it and see what the possible applications are for signage. Performance looks to be quite good. Daniel posted a video of Run Lola Run on the IAC video wall:

Run Lola Run Lola Run Lola Run Lola Run from shiffman and Vimeo.

Daniel’s also teaching a class this fall, and the projects are being developed for the IAC wall. The syllabus looks interesting, including computer vision and phone interaction.

I’ve seen a couple of new mutlitouch related things come down the pipes recently, so here’s an unordered list of morning multitouch links:

• Andrew dropped us a note about a table that design house Moto put together. One of the tables is currently at the Art Center College of Design, for their students to play with. Check the video out:
  Andrew notes that Moto was one of the development partners with the Julie Snow/Post Tool proposal from the finalist pool on the Telematic Table competition. The Telematic Table was what eventually became the Dialog Table.
• There is now an instructable for how to build your very own multitouch display. Eleven easy steps. People afraid of soldering need not apply.
• David Wallin, author of touchlib, has a new video posted of a mutlitouch screen he made for the Archer group. Looks pretty responsive:
  

The next After Hours Preview Party isn’t happening for another two months, but I have recently been doing some work on the Party People Photobooth. During the Picasso Preview Party, we experienced some trouble with the camera control system. Specifically, the camera, an older Canon 10D, would get into a frustrating state where it wouldn’t talk to the computer, and the only cure was to cycle the power by physically disconnecting it from a power source, cycling the power switch wouldn’t do the trick. Add in that the CF card somehow corrupted itself, that the timing of the capture was always tenuous at best, and it was clear gphoto2 as the camera connection program wasn’t working.

Enter PSRemote. Having seen the software package Photoboof, I knew there had to be a better way. Indeed, looking at the requirements for Photoboof, it is noted that if you need to buy PSRemote if you wish to use a Canon PowerShot camera. Looking at PSRemote, we see that it “also includes a DLL and a sample program (complete with C++ source code) which allows other applications to release the camera’s shutter and adjust the shutter speed and aperture”. Sounds nifty, huh? The only (big) downside of PSRemote is that it runs on Windows only. Despite the pain this would this would inflict upon me, I decided that the benefits potentially outweighed the personal suffering and inevitable reinstall/reboot sequences I would endure.

Camera and Software
The Cameron Wittig in the Walker Photography Studio happened to have a Canon G7 that we could use, and it worked beautifully with PSRemote. The sample program that PSRemote provides for CLI access to snapping photos also works great, giving a reliable delay of about 1.5 seconds from hitting enter to the flash going off. Instead of using Photoboof, I used the Max/MSP + Jitter to control the preview and PSRemote. Under Windows, Jitter needs java installed from Sun, and the vdig component for quicktime so quicktime can talk to firewire devices. For the Camera, we added the AC adapter so it wouldn’t run off batteries, the lens adapter and macro ring adapter so that the ring flash would fit on the camera. It fits great and the camera stays powered up.

Video Preview
PSRemote, in it’s GUI form, can show a live video preview of what the camera sees, pulled over USB. The CLI sample program doesn’t provide this, though it is certainly possible for a person who knows c++ and the Windows development environment. Instead, I used the video output from the G7 connected to a firewire digitizer box and then pulled the digitized video back into Max/MSP this way. Certainly it is not the most elegant solution, but it is very reliable. PSRemote does turn off all the icons on the Camera display when you enable the video out preview. The added benefit of all this was that I no longer have to align an iSight and the actual capture camera so they see the same things. Now, the capture camera is also the preview camera. Our capture station isn’t very fast (an old AMD XP1700), so I am only able to run the preview (320×240) at 5fps, but as a preview, it works great. For the countdown text, displaying text in Jitter on windows is not so good. The jit.gl.text2d produces text that is not anti-aliased and just not great looking. It does, work, however.

Talking to PSRemote from Max proved to be a little tricky at first, mostly because I had forgotten how windows is put together. The DOSHack external under Windows provides similar functionality to the shell or aka.shell externals on OSX. The trick here is that you can only call built-in commands, or call upon programs located in c:\windows\system32\ (which is why you can launch notepad with the external). The solution is to simply place the PSRemote sample program and the DLL into the system32 directory, and then it magically works. Coming from OSX/Linux land, this doesn’t really strike me as an optimal solution, but it does work.

Proof is in the Pudding
As a test of this whole setup, I set up the photobooth for a private event a little over a week ago. Despite only having a week to put this together, everything worked with only one minor glitch. PSRemote saves the captured photos in sequentially numbered files (1.jpg, 2.jpg, etc..). My scripts that transfered the files around were erasing the captured files after copying them to the display computers. When this happened PSRemote would name the next file 1.jpg, and when it got transfered, it would replaced the existing file named 1.jpg. A quick rewrite of my transfer script fixed this and then it was in business. During the event, there were almost 100 photos captured and no crashes or other glitches.

Future Plans
The G7 has different white balance and levels than the 10D does, so the post processing script needs to be adjusted. I am planning on cutting Photoshop out of the mix, and instead post-processing the images with Imagemagick, since that can be easily installed on the projection computers. I also plan on enjoying the Frida Kahlo Preview Party a lot more since I won’t have to be baby-sitting the camera the whole time. It is my hope that this will make the Party People Photobooth a much more stable platform that won’t need to be revisited for testing every time we set it up.

Demo Movie
Attached is also a revised clip of what the projection looks like. My original annoucement post featured a similar clip, but with test photos before we ever took real photos during an event. Here is a clip using some photos taken during the Picasso opening (but not with the picasso-ify filter).

• According to BoingBoing, Jenny Holzer is on twitter. As Xeni Jardin says, she is perhaps “the only person who should be allowed to use twitter”. And perhaps Holzer is responding to that tittle with her latest twitt, or whatever you call it… “DRAMA OFTEN OBSCURES THE REAL ISSUES”.
• Eric recently found a super useful site full of browser widget resources for web designers. Search no more for a good photoshop template of Navigator 4.8 for OS 9! And we should also note that Eric’s firm’s work on the Adobe CS3 interactive wall has been getting some notice lately, too.
• Nate points out the creepiest photo ever on mnartists, by Mary Britton Clouse of Minneapolis. And if you’re not so keen on roosters, then you probably should avoid eating the comb of one.
• We’ve been told through the grapevine that the Walker sites work great on the iPhone. Art on Call, in particular is a pretty slick deal. You can play the tracks through the website, or if you’ve got the podcast, listen to it in iPod mode. And in iPhone news, it seems someone has finally gotten an application to run on the iPhone. It’s just too bad their typography is going to be no good.

WebWalker is getting touchy feely all over in this edition with some computer interface goodness.

• This one might be a bit old, but it seems Panasonic demonstrated some sort of multi-touch table a last year, as well as a gigantic interactive video wall. I don’t really know how to describe the table. The video looks very nice in 720P glory, but the narration that goes with it is worth a chuckle and the interface is just a bit weird. Translucent fish?
• Another big multitouch screen, this time from DAHAN T&S (via nuigroup via engadget). This time we get dolphins instead of fish, but my questions still remain, why so many creatures of the sea on multitouch screens? There’s no video, so I can’t tell if their dolphin talks like ours.
• Speaking of sea creatures, did someone say calamari? The iPhone is certainly putting some pressure onto the demand for multitouch, we should remember multitouch is not actually that new. Case in point, Powerbook trackpads have been multitouch for years, giving users that lovely two-fingered scrolling. Apple even owns a multitouch patent. The iPhone is taking the idea and coupling it with a screen, which is really the important part. I’m rather curious to know how it works and what kind of tech they’re using to make it happen. None of us in NMI plan on getting an iPhone for various reasons, so who’s going to be the first person to take apart their iPhone?
• And while it is not multitouch, this is a neat project: The digital newsstand. It is basically a newspaper box with a computer screen replacing the window showing todays issue. It is not entirely practical, but I certainly appreciate consistency of the visual language and presentation. If you were going to show newspapers, you might as well do it in the right box. (via Paul)

Danah Boyd has a really good look at the social divisions that are emerging in the use of Facebook and MySpace:

The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other “good” kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we’d call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, “burnouts,” “alternative kids,” “art fags,” punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn’t go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. Teens who are really into music or in a band are on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.

She also discusses the role that aesthetics play in this breakdown:

This is even clear in the blogosphere where people talk about how gauche MySpace is while commending Facebook on its aesthetics. I’m sure that a visual analyst would be able to explain how classed aesthetics are, but it is pretty clear to me that aesthetics are more than simply the “eye of the beholder” - they are culturally narrated and replicated. That “clean” or “modern” look of Facebook is akin to West Elm or Pottery Barn or any poshy Scandinavian design house (that I admit I’m drawn to) while the more flashy look of MySpace resembles the Las Vegas imagery that attracts millions every year. I suspect that lifestyles have aesthetic values and that these are being reproduced on MySpace and Facebook.

I should note here that aesthetics do divide MySpace users. The look and feel that is acceptable amongst average Latino users is quite different from what you see the subculturally-identified outcasts using. Amongst the emo teens, there’s a push for simple black/white/grey backgrounds and simplistic layouts. While I’m using the term “subaltern teens” to lump together non-hegemonic teens, the lifestyle divisions amongst the subalterns are quite visible on MySpace through the aesthetic choices of the backgrounds.

This lines right up with what I found when I talked to some of the WACTAC teens a few months ago. I’m still contemplating what this means for a museum, or any institution that wants to reach audiences. We need to be all-access and blind to class lines. Yet, at the same time, there is also a drive to maintain the and re-enforce the image (brand) of the institution itself.

It may all be moot, though, because some people tend to think that there is a saturation point for all this social networking / web 2.0 activity, and it is quickly being approached.

Roger Dooley at Futurelab:

…the rising tide of total time spent online (number of users and hours per users) has lifted a lot of boats, but inevitably online activity will become a zero sum game. People who spend more time on one activity will cut back other online participation by the same amount.

and Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion:

However, there is definitely a bubble and therefore a crash coming. It's not financial. It's not related to the level of noise or startups. This crash is personal. We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore's Law.

I think the lessons are clear, extend beyond social networking, and can be easy to implement. Don’t try to grow a community where one doesn’t exist. Go to where the community already is. Make the information that users want free of any sort of restrictions. Don’t make me sign up for an account, everyone I already have too many. Don’t make me give you my email, I already get enough junk. Let me as the user choose how much I want to interact, and reduce all possible barriers to interaction.

Daniel Shiffman dropped a quick note about a new article in Metropolis Magazine covering IAC’s video wall:

To project a 120-foot-long high-definition video image requires not one but eighteen sequential projectors perfectly calibrated with computer software so that the point at which one projected image starts and the next takes over is barely discernible--a process called "edge blending." When Al Gore stands in front of a giant projected graphic of CO2 emissions in An Inconvenient Truth, edge-blended projectors are working behind the scenes. To choreograph, translate, edge-blend, and calibrate the imagery requires an entire room of computers. All in all, says Steve Zink of Warren Z Productions--which produced the software system and the spinning globe--it uses enough power to "run a small house or two." So much for LEED certification.

It is a quick but interesting overview of the wall, and some of the projects and content IAC is putting on it. It sounds like they also face a lot of the same issues we face with the Hennepin Signage: projectors aren’t cheap, easy to align, synchronize, or see in the daylight.

The IAC Building site has a video of the projection if you sit through all the flash nonsense and click video wall, or just grab the FLV directly.

Here’s a youtube video from what seems to be some sort of dance party:

If you didn’t know, this wall is in the Frank Gehry designed headquarters for InteraActiveCorp. Wired had this to say about the building and Gehry several months ago:

The new headquarters for Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp stick up from the low-rise terrain of Manhattan’s West Chelsea neighborhood like Space Mountain at Disneyland. The 10-story asymmetrical protuberance has outer walls that veer every which way, a typical design for architect Frank Gehry. But the building’s showstopper is a facade that looks like sails billowed by the wind. Gehry, famous for his complex compositions in titanium and stainless steel, had never before designed a major building in glass, and he was shocked to learn how difficult it would be to soften and mold the material around the contours of the building. Each of the 2,541 pieces of glass would have to be heated to 1,148 degrees Fahrenheit, then cooled and shaped. It was physically possible, but the sheer size of the project made it seem inconceivable. “We didn’t think we could do it,” Gehry says. “We were going to abandon it.”

So it would seem technical hurdles and setbacks are nothing new for this building. The narrative is one that we’re familiar with too, but such is the price of being cutting edge.

Just a quick note, as we’re busy prepping for the sold out After Hours Preview Party tonight. As per usual, the pictures from Party People Photos will be uploaded to flickr during the event, and will show up in this set and also in the After Hours group pool. Don’t forget to join the group and add your own photos if you’re at the event and have a digital camera.

We’ve set up something special to happen with the photos (see above). I’ll share more after the event is over.

Interesting method to create a multitouch surface:

I guess most of the people reading this will have seen some of the multi-touch demos by Jeff Han, Apple and Tactiva. I wanted to play around with some ideas that required a multi-touch pad, but there aren’t any devices available (Tactiva aren’t shipping…)

Long story short, I made a simple one from a plastic bag, some dye and a camera.

This is interesting, but there are a couple problems with it. First, it is just a multitouch surface, not a screen, making it a lot different from Jeff Han or Apple. There is no projection onto the back, and I can’t see an easy way to ever project onto or into water or other liquids. Secondly, $2 is pretty cheap, but you get what you pay for. You might want to spend $3 to get the heavy duty freezer ziploc so that it would last a week of touching rather than an afternoon. A true FTIR screen made of plexi or glass will be more expensive, but the screen itself is never the expensive part. A fancy FTIR screen in an enclosure might cost $300, but that is still nothing next to the computer, projector and software needed. And a plexi FTIR screen will probably give better blobs, since not the whole surface is going to morph when pressed on.

That said, it is still an interesting exploration and use of what I am assuming is touchlib.

[Via Daily Irrelevant]

If you’ve been to the Walker recently, you may have noticed that the Bazinet Garden Lobby has a bit more light in it these days. You may have also noticed that the Vineland kiosks have a new screensaver on them.

The screensaver on those kiosks is something that Eric had played with before. I also made a version of a screensaver that uses more of Walker Expanded, and posted about it a few months back. In depoloying it to the iMacs, though, I ran into some trouble. The machines we’re using have their graphics driven by a lowly GeForce FX 5200, the 64mb lame dog of the quartz extreme world. When I put the screensaver on them, it would create horrible drawing problems, similar to the artifacting you would see on a jpeg file at the highest compression, except worse.

This hung me up for a while, but at some point I decided to try again. Through a process of trial and error, I figured out the magic bit that was missing was the Clear object:

Paints the entire rendering destination with a constant color and clears the depth buffer. This is usually the first rendering operation a composition should perform, in order to reset the rendering destination to a known state and prevent visual artifacts. If the rendering destination is intended to be composited over some other visual content, make sure the alpha component of the color used to paint is smaller than 1.0.

Dropping a clear object in there did the trick and the saver was now running quite well. Sometimes it is the simple, obvious things that are missed the most easily. Here is a rendered preview of the kiosk screensaver.

The trick to getting the background pattern bars to swoop in the way that they do is to use two different interpolation objects, one for X position, and one for Y rotation, feeding into a sprite. Both objects should be set to the same duration. The X position simply moves the sprite from left to right (-4 to 4), and the Y-rotation (-30 to 30) changes the tilt as it moves right to left. Since they’re both running at the same duration, the animation appears very smooth. Put this all in a macro patch, copy and paste a bunch, changing the duration, pattern and color, and you have our flying identity patterns.

I would love to give away this screensaver so those of you on Mac’s could enjoy it, but it depends the fonts Walker Expanded and Avenir. It is possible that I could convert the identity patterns to images and change the typeface to Arial or Helvetica and get pretty close. Would anyone be interested?

Here’s a larger image of the Kiosks in the Bazinet Garden Lobby, with the new Vineland entrance being prepared in the background:

One of the first big projects I worked on when I came on board here was redesigning the Walker shop’s online storefront. This effort has now come to fruition and I’m happy to present the new Walker Shop. Here are some interesting tidbits about the design:

• The design makes heavy use of our identity system, Walker Expanded, as implemented on Shop materials, and extends this into the web version.
• The shop home page borrows the poster design metaphor from the main Walker homepage, since it works well to exemplify the different neighborhoods, and in the shop, item categories.
• Each of the item categories also have different photography in the header that closely tie in with the items as they are seen in the physical shop.
• In creating the design, I also did research on what information shoppers look for or need when shopping. The resulting pages are located in the bottom 3 columns on every page.
• The cart icon in the shop is from the Drunkery Love icon set and the plus icon is from urlgreyhot.

In terms of technology powering the site, we worked with EVT Retail to handle the back end work. EVT hosts the entire operation, but their software is able to talk to the point of sale system and inventory system that our shop uses. This means that the online shop has accurate knowledge of what items are for sale and how many we have left. Not every item that is in the physical shop is online, but there is much more available than the old shop. The new shop also talks to our membership database so patrons with memberships can also get their 10% discount (it shows up in the checkout process).

It is not often I find exciting Microsoft products on Slashdot, but there are exceptions to the rule. /. linked up a Popular Mechanics article on Microsoft Surface. Surface is a fancy multitouch table that Microsoft has been working on in semi-secrecy for a while. In addition to being multitouch, it also features proximity detection so it can talk to your phone (bluetooth) and camera (wifi) and other devices when you put them on the table.

Gattis took out a digital camera and placed it on the Surface. Instantly, digital pictures spilled out onto the tabletop. As Gattis touched and dragged each picture, it followed his fingers around the screen. Using two fingers, he pulled the corners of a photo and stretched it to a new size. Then, Gattis put a cellphone on the surface and dragged several photos to it -- just like that, the pictures uploaded to the phone. It was like a magic trick. He was dragging and dropping virtual content to physical objects. I’m not often surprised by new technology, but I can honestly say I’d never seen anything like it.

It looks and feels a lot like CityWall and some of Jeff Han’s work, but it does not appear that Han has worked with Microsoft. One of the notable differences between Han’s tables (which are pricey) and Surface is price. Surface is supposedly going to be on sale this year for $5,000 to $10,000. The article mentions commercial applications, but I would think that education and museums would also have a huge interest. While I wouldn’t be able to afford one for my home, $10,000 is a very accessible price point for a museum.

Whiz-bang aside, the table also reminds me a bit of Pac Man. I also wonder if it can run linux. I’m actually sure that when this comes out, there will be a linux distro that includes a Pac Man knock-off.

EDIT: Create Digital Music has some commentary, as does Chris O’Shea.