Digit devised and executed an interactive installation, MotoGlyph for the exclusive nightly Sunset Sessions at Miami's M3 Festival. The innovative installation and related website were developed to represent Motorola's sponsorship of the 2004 Miami Music Summit.

The installation comprised of three glass panels within the MotoGlyph unit, each possessing its own unique library of sounds. Guests were invited to create their own unique digital signature or illustration upon the wall from which the variables of the marks and strokes were translated into the author's own sound and animation.

Users were then able to go to the MotoGlyph website where they could download an MP3 of their unique ringtone to their mobile phone.
www.hellomoto.com/motoglyph

Digit developed a technology so users were could write on the walls with a custom made 'virtual spray can', the movements tracked via ultrasound. The movements were back projected onto glass panels, creating a virtual graffiti wall and the sensation of writing in 'light'. In real time the movements affect and create sounds.

The three panels each have a unique sound effect. The first changes the pitch along the Y axis (from your initial registration point) and adds layers of sound loops dependent on acceleration. The second layers a number of sounds loops together depending on acceleration. The third constructs at random a beat pattern from a number of libraries. It then plays this forwards and backwards depending on direction along the X axis. The speed of playback is connected to the acceleration so for example is the user "scribbles" back and forth you will hear a "DJ scratching" effect.

Visitors had to 'sign out' from the wall, indicating that the signature or illustration had finished for it to be stored on the database. Every autograph and scrawl was filed for the author to listen to on the spot or visit the website and download as a unique ringtone, MP3 or desktop wallpaper.

Please visit the related website www.hellomoto.com/motoglyph to listen to a few examples of authors' sounds. Any one of the following codes can be entered on the homepage to proceed:

Technical Description of Motoglyph

• The user interface is a director/flash movie, which communicates via a socket connection to PD(pure data) - a sound processing application. Once a user begins a signature, the sound production and recording begins. A spray of light is produced on the screen taking the colour and distance information from the spray can.
• PD uses the messages passed from the movie to manipulate sound in real-time. The audio information is passed…
• to the 4 in 4 out sound card, which simultaneously outputs the audio to the speakers/headphones and back to its own audio inputs - required to record the soundfile…
• Once a user pauses for a predefined period of time (currently 3 seconds), the sound recording is paused, and the user has to make a decision to save their work, continue, or start again.
• The incoming audio is recorded directly from the soundcard, and the start/stop/pause process is controlled via an activeX control by the director movie.
• Once a signature is completed, a textfile is created which contains all the coordinate information for the signature, a label is printed which includes the created signature and a unique code, and a jpg is produced.
• At the end of an installation session, soundfiles are converted to mp3s (recorded as wav files), and all text files, and related media are manually uploaded to the website.
• The user takes their unique code to the website, and their signature is recreated as an animation with their accompanying audio file. The signature can be downloaded to their mobile phone as an mp3, or as a jpg wallpaper for their phone.

Software requirements:
The Director projector plus all associated Xtras and additional Flash movies.
ActiveX control to record sound files
MP3 codec to convert sound files
Mimio tracking hardware and software
PD and all written patches
All raw soundfiles to be used within the patches

CREATING NEW WAYS FOR GADGETS, HUMANS TO INTERACT

By Elise Ackerman

Mercury News

The two designers from Yahoo stood ready to test a new user interface at the Sunnyvale company's headquarters Monday afternoon.

“Gentlemen, start your licking,'' commanded North Pitney, a graduate student at the California College of the Arts.

Vigorously applying pink tongues to heart-shaped lollipops, Lance Nishihira and Bill Scott complied. Sensors transmitted each sloppy stroke to a laptop that was controlling the movements of several robotic toys.

“I'm trying to think which one of our properties can be driven by a lollipop,'' joked Scott, a member of Yahoo's platform design group. “Maybe Yahoo Games.''

The “Edible Interface'' was one of 10 prototypes featured at Yahoo's University Design Expo, an annual event that explores how humans interact with technology.

“They are really wacky, creative ideas that make us think about the future,'' said Joy Mountford, a senior director of the expo who launched the event 17 years ago at Apple Computer.

At the time, Mountford managed Apple's Human Interface Group. She needed creative, technically adept people to develop the next generation of computer technology. Skilled engineers were not hard to find, but Mountford was looking for brilliant geeks who were also artists.

She began holding the expo to identify talent and promote new ways of thinking about computers and design. Over the years, she estimated, 1,800 students participated. Some ended up at tech companies like Apple or Yahoo. Others ended up teaching at places like the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.

Five students from Tisch have brought a project they call the “Soap Box News Network'' to Yahoo this year. They want to create a platform where citizen journalists can work together and create television-quality video programs that challenge traditional broadcast media, explained Summer Bedard.

George Grinsted, the inventor of BlogRadio and a recent graduate of the Royal College of Art in London doesn't want to challenge the old media as much as to explore the new media. He has written computer code that searches the Web for audio that has been posted to blogs. The snippets are then broadcast to the world from http://home.imgeorge.org/blogradio .

“These posts are really human,'' Grinsted said. “You hear people in the most bizarre circumstances.'' For example, there is the person who can't sleep because the neighbors are making so much noise in the middle of the night. There is someone chirping. Someone stuck in traffic. Someone looking for the perfect handle for their kitchen cabinet.

The broadcast never stops, and that's part of its beauty.

Or in the case of a project submitted by three students from the University of California-Los Angeles, the beauty of their broadcast is it always stops.

“Deadends,'' features videos of dead-end streets from all over Los Angeles, a city the group views as “the ultimate dead end of the western world.'' Artist Pascual Sisto said his partners are hoping to expand the project to include dead-end destinations from every corner of the globe via a Web site, www.deadendproject.com .

For Kate Richards, of the California College of the Arts, the expo project was the first time she had incorporated technology into her art. Her interface combined grass, video and a glittering bug made out of found objects.

By running their fingers over the grass, people passing by can send the bug skittering over a smooth surface. The movements also trigger a video showing the world from a bug's perspective.

While the ideas may seem far out, Larry Tesler, vice president of user experience and design at Yahoo, said they can help Yahoo employees see where technology could be headed. “These students will be going into industry with these ideas,'' he noted.

“In the future, computers won't look like computers any more,'' Mountford said.

Concept 

"Earlier this year, my friend from Tokyo and I were talking about lives in Tokyo concrete jungle - how you get up in the morning, you go to the nearest subway station, ride the train under the concrete surface for an hour, then you walk through number of concrete paths, and then enter into your office building without seeing a sky once. Same story goes when you leave work after dark. And it’s the same route back again."

TAMPOPO is Japanese for dandelion, and in Japan, as is in New Zealand, dandelions occupy a sphere of folklore. A simple action of blowing creates a space amongst the bustle of human doings, it creates a direct relationship with nature, and it acts as a trigger of memories and nostalgic journeys. Perhaps it triggers memories of wishes made and long since forgotten.

The subject in TAMPOPO is a giant looming dandelion, an interactive digital work that lets you blow on the head of the dandelion and watch its spores gently drift away. Yamada is interested in creativity in computer programming, and how creative code has opened up new possibilities for new worlds. He creates environments using computer-programming techniques, and generates a simulation of the natural environment in a digital realm. Yamada sees programming as a structure that is not the antithesis of nature, but also as a responsive environment in itself. Both the programming environment and the natural environment are full of conditions and variables, of predictable and non predictable patterns.

Technology 

This installation use sound input fed through microphone, and blowing sound triggers seeds to spread. I use cheap microphone from K-Mart, they are especially good for picking up blowing noise.

Two or more dandelions communicate to each other using Colin Moock's Unity multi-user server/client. One blow can affect not only the dandelion in front of you but other dandelions on the network (or internet).

A number of viewers can blow each other's and their dandelion from remote locations using this technique. 

The clock and its designer Andy Plant WORK to erect a £200,000 stainless steel clock in the heart of Workington has nearly finished.

The switch-on will take place during a day of celebration and free entertainment from 11am to 4pm. The mechanical clock is an interactive installation, with a moving 15 foot arm on granite paving.

It was designed by artist Andy Plant, who drew his inspiration from local elements including the steel industry.

Another specialist artist, Matt Wand, created the clock’s chimes, which will use recordings from interviews with local people, set to music performed by the Stainburn School steel band, Dearham Brass Band and the artist.

The seating in the new space has been made by the Lillyhall firm Alan Dawson Associates.

The installation is part of a £2.74 million series of schemes funded by a grant from the Northwest Development Agency and organised by Workington Public Art Consultancy.

The clock has been described by Allerdale Council leader Jim Musgrave as “our equivalent to the London Eye.”

Rob Rimmer, Workington Regeneration manager, said: “Apart from a working clock, it is a huge piece of fun. Look through the eye holes and you get special views. Sit on the benches, which are stunning, and you will hear on the hour local voices speaking local dialect.”

a video time-warping machine with a tangible deformable screen

by Alvaro Cassinelli, with the support of Takahito Ito, Monica Bressaglia & Masatoshi Ishikawa.

What? The Khronos Projector is an interactive-art installation allowing people to explore pre-recorded movie content in an entirely new way. A classic video-tape allows a simple control of the reproducing process (stop, backward, forward, and elementary control on the reproduction speed). Modern digital players add little more than the possibility to perform random temporal jumps between image frames. The goal of the Khronos Projector is to go beyond these forms of exclusive temporal control, by giving the user an entirely new dimension to play with: by touching the projection screen, the user is able to send parts of the image forward or backwards in time. By actually touching a deformable projection screen, shaking it or curling it, separate "islands of time" as well as "temporal waves" are created within the visible frame. This is done by interactively reshaping a two-dimensional spatio-temporal surface that "cuts" the spatio-temporal volume of data generated by a movie.

There are many ways to visually explore the spatio-temporal volume generated by a movie; most of them result from cutting the spatio-temporal volume by a two-dimensional surface. The usual way of visualizing video content, consist on showing consecutively each image of the sequence. In other words, the intersecting surface is a plane that remains always perpendicular to the time arrow. Now, for instance, by intersecting the spatio-temporal volume by planes that are not perpendicular with the time axis, the resulting image will show a spatio-temporal gradient. Of course, there have been already many works and art-works that develop on such ideas. Now, to the best of my knowledge, the Khronos Projector is the first Art-Installation enabling the interactive shaping of an arbitrarily complex spatio-temporal cutting surface thanks to a dedicated tangible and "sensual" human-machine interface, and thus giving the user a strong feeling of being actually sculpting the space-time "substance" with its own hands.

Why? When contemplating a still image or a motionless sculpture, we are free to direct our sight wherever we want over the whole work - perhaps only secretly compelled by the compositional forces the author has succeeded instilling in it. This is barely possible in a movie - we are forced to adopt a point of view in space and time. Using the power of computers, we can free ourselves from this constraint. The Khronos projector unties time and space in a pre-recorded movie sequence, opening the door for an infinite number of interactive visualizations. Using the Khronos projector, event's causality become relative to the spatial path we decide to walk on the image, allowing for a multiple interpretation of the recorded facts. In this sense, the Khronos projector can be seen as an exploratory interface that transforms a movie sequence into a spatio-temporal sculpture for people to explore at their own pace and will. From the technical point of view, this work expands on the work I've been doing at the Ishikawa-Namiki Lab concerning human-machine interfaces using laser-based active tracking and dedicated, real-time image-processing vision circuits. The feedback I received during the presentation of a prototype laser-based tracking system at SIGGRAPH 2004 convinced me of the necessity to develop a tangible human-machine interface capable of interpreting touch - and if possible, capable of sensing even the delicacy of a caress - while at the same time able to react in a subtle and natural way, also through tactile feedback. The Khronos-Projector tissue-based deformable screen is a first step in that direction.

How? The spatio-temporal fusion algorithm is the core of the Khronos program: it consist on blending hundreds of images from a movie sequence to produce a unique displayed image. The blending operation is controlled by a "spatio-temporal filter", or "spatio-temporal cutting surface", which is a two-dimensional surface lying inside the "spatio-temporal volume" of the movie. The fused image is the union of all the intersections of the spatio-temporal surface with each image in the sequence. The program (extremely computationally hungry) was prototyped using Matlab, and finally coded in C++ using OpenGL. The present version can display the dynamic blended image both in 2D but also in 3D by mapping the image on a NURBS-generated surface representing the actual time/pressure map. In the most basic embedding for the proposed installation, the spatio-temporal filter is shaped interactively using the mouse, a graphic tablet or a touch-screen LCD display. A physically-based model of a membrane is then used to compute in real time a realistic shape for the spatio-temporal filter.

In a more sophisticated embedding (see image above), a real deformable screen made from a thin elastic fabric is scanned using infrared light and a dedicated Vision Chip. The resulting human-computer interface delivers position and pressure information in real time, and besides, it can also be controlled by light (more here ).

by andrew hieronymi
Project Assistant: Togo Kida

MOVE is an interactive installation divided into six distinct modules, JUMP , AVOID , CHASE , THROW , HIDE and COLLECT .
Each module offers a single-user interaction, based on a verb corresponding to the action the participant is invited to perform.
Each verb corresponds to a common procedure acted out by avatars during videogame play.

Each module offers an interaction with abstracted shapes (circles, rectangles) behaving according to simplified rules of physics (collision, friction). Each module is color-coded with consistency, where the color red is used for the graphical element that poses the core challenge.

Each module increases in difficulty in a similar linear manner.

	JUMP Jump from platform to platform before they fade away.
	AVOID Avoid getting your circle hit by the particle.
	CHASE Chase and get chased by the opposite circle without letting it catch your circle.
	THROW Throw the particle to the growing red field to have it recede before it hits your shadow.
	HIDE Hide from the wandering circle by standing still so that it doesn't grow.
	COLLECT Collect the accumulating particles by touching them with your shadow before they hit the central platform.