today and tomorrow

Sketch-a-Move is a project by Anab Jain and Louise Klinker. They actually did this a few years ago. It’s a concept for a toy car that allows you to explore the unique relationships between small surface doodles and actual physical movements. If you draw a circle on the top of the toy car, it will move in a circle. If you draw a complicated spiral, the car will move in a spiral. They don’t explain how it actually works or could work, but it sure looks like fun.

via @sermad

Flyfire is project initiated by the SENSEable City Laboratory in collaboration with ARES Lab (Aerospace Robotics and Embedded Systems Laboratory), both departments of the MIT. The goal is to transform any ordinary space into a highly immersive and interactive display environment. Its first implemetation is a display system using a large number of self-organizing micro helicopters. Each of them acts as smart pixel by using LED’s. Their position in 3D space and their color can be defined in real time, together they’re canvas able to display any kind of 2D imagery.

“X by Y” is Daniel Rozin his current exhibition at the Bitforms Gallery in New York, but it’s also the title of one of his interactive installations. “X by Y” is a little different than his other mechanical mirrors, this time he arranged forty-four wooden slats horizontally and vertically. Of course they are controlled by motors and react on camera input. The result is an interactive pattern / grid display.

A second new piece that he presents is “Rust Mirror”. It’s made of 768 oxidized steel tiles and works like most of his mechanical mirrors.

The third one is a piece from 2008: “Mirrors Mirror”. I know that I’ve posted it before but it is still great.

Last week, F.A.T. introduced the Graffiti Markup Language (GML), a new XML file type specifically designed for archiving graffiti tags. Of course it doesn’t make sense to only archive those tags, you should also be able to reproduce them. And that’s exactly what Golan Levin and Jeremy Ficca did. They wrote a small tool to translate the .GML files from 000000book.com into instructions for their industrial ABB IRB-4400 robot arm. If they now could place his robot on a truck like Evan Roth suggested …
Here you can find some more details about the Robotagger.

Mobile Mobile is a Christmas installation at the Lost Boys international office in London. They used 50 old company cellphones to make this huge mobile. Each phone is controlled by a computer and has its own tone. When no one interacts with the sculpture, it plays “Carol of the Bells”. But you can also play with it. You can control it through this website or you can send a tweet with #lbitree and it will react to it. If you’re in London, you can just pop by at their office.
You might also like AKQA last years microwave oven piece.

found at Make blog

The Senstor reminded me of another project called Outerspace, I’m so surprised that I didn’t post this before. It was a project which Andre Stubbe and Markus Lerner did during their time at the UDK Berlin in 2004.
Outerspace is a reactive robotic creature with animal-like behaviour. It can react to humans thanks to the photo sensors in the top part and capacitory sensors that react to human body contact. There’re some nice videos on the website showing this interaction.

Electronic Popables is a project by Jie Qi, a mechanical engineering student at Columbia University. But last summer she spend researching with Dr. Leah Buechley as part of the High-Low Tech group in the MIT Media Lab and there she did this project. You could describe it as a classic paper pop-up book filled with electronic components. The LED’s and other elements are connected to arduino based boards through conductive ink. So when something moves, the circuit closes and something happens. But this videos shows will make everything clear.

In this next video, Hannah Perner-Wilson shows you how she made a paper piano.

Another project by Jie Qi are these paper flowers. She built-in some memory wires in the paper flowers connected them to a strong battery. Those wires let the flowers move, just like they would bloom.

found @zachlieberman

The piano in this video can speak, I kid you not. The Austrian composer Peter Ablinger transformed the voice of a child reciting the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court into MIDI events. Those events let the mechanically-controlled piano play the voice of that child.
This is video is German but it has English captions, the text that the piano is playing is in English.
Hearing is believing.

found @golan

PUSH N900 is a competion organised by Nokia to promote it’s new N900 smartphone. Everyone is invited to come up with projects how you could hack or mod the N900 and its open-source Maemo operating system. You have to submit your idea by October 11th, a jury will then decide who will get a N900, funding and support to make them real.
Hyper and Tinker it! were asked to develop some sample projects. They decided to use 4 objects from the 80’s: the Viewmaster, the Rolodex, an FM Radio and the Speak & Spell.

Now in 3D!

They’ve fitted a N900 inside a Viewmaster, when you move the Viewmaster to the left or the right a switch is triggered. The signal is then passed on through an arduino board and a bluetooth signal to the N900. The camera of the N900 takes now 2 images, a few centimeters apart. The two images are colored red and blue and superimposed and displayed on the screen of the N900, so when you look through the Viewmaster you’ll see a 3D image.

Talk & Text

A Nokia N900 and an Arduino are hidden inside a Speak & Spell. The keys are connected to the arduino which sends the signals over bluetooth to the N900. So you can write and send a text message using a Speak & Spell.

Leave a Message

An Arduino connected to the Rolodex detects the position of the wheel and sends that information over bluetooth to the N900. Each position indicates a specific contact. Without touching your N900, you bring up the contact you need to the screen of the N900.

Phone FM

You can send a text message to your phone and it will read the artist’s name and send that information to last.fm. MP3’s will start streaming and the cover art will appear on the screen. The N900 has a build-in FM transmitter, the signal will be picked up by any radio nearby when it’s set to the right station.

“Rope In Space” is an interactive installation developed by the Ars Electronica Futurelab. It allows people who are in different locations to play tug of war. You have to pull a rope which is attached to a device with a screen and camera. Your data is then sent to the other location and the other way around, so both can see how they’re doing. I guess you’ll understand after watching this video.

photo by aemkei