Timbap is a platform-independent application for augmented DJing. It was developed by students and assistants of the University of Ulm (Germany). It provides a rugged tangible interface for browsing your music collection and manipulating playback by scratching, pitching, skipping etc. Like many others it is based on an acoustic timecode signal recorded to vinyl records. In contrast to existing digital solutions however, it completely releases the DJ from mouse, keyboard and monitor. Instead it relies on physical interaction with the standard club turntable only.
It still sounds quite strange, right? So basically it is a projected video interface for selecting mp3’s. Maybe this video will make it all clear to you.
Guessing from the amount of student DJ projects, there are a lot of bedroom DJ’s among the students out there.
Augmented Reality is nothing new, but till now it was mostly a nerdy webcam demo thing. But when you use a mobile phone like the iPhone, where you can move the camera and the display in one device, the user experience could really become enjoyable. Just think of all the possible applications with this technology. ARToolworks developed a version of the free ARToolKit (a software library for building Augmented Reality applications) for the iPhone. In this video they show us a preview, unfortunatly they only managed to get 10 frames per second. But maybe with some help from Apple they could boost the speed over 20 fps.
Warning, mute the sound of the video right away! Believe me!
This project called ‘Slit-scan Cam‘ by Casey Pugh has exactly the same video effect as ‘Chronotopic Anamorphosis‘ by André Mintz. The only difference is that Casey build it with Flash, so you can try it out for yourself if you have a webcam.
This video ‘Chronotopic Anamorphosis’ is quite simple but the effect is just amazing. It’s part of André Mintz his Marginalia Project. He wrote this piece of software with Processing, which can slice up a video feed horizontally in real-time and display those pieces with a one frame delay. It’s based on Zbigniew Rybczynski’s “The Fourth Dimension”.
Make sure you see the effect when he opens the door!
Displacements is an immersive film installation by Michael Naimark. He filmed 3 people in an archetypal Americana living room. The camera was standing in the middle of the room and rotated sowly. Afterwards he spray-painted the whole room white and placed a projector at the same spot of the camera. The result is a strange augmented reality effect. He did this for the first time back in 1980, this version is from 2005.
Pablo Valbuena made a name last year with his ‘Augmented Sculpture Series‘, they are a combination of 3D objects with precisely mapped video projections. Here he had full control over the composition of the 3D objects. But in his latest project called ‘Entramado‘, he took his concept outside to an urban environment in Madrid. The result is …
As always, watch the videos!
Virtual Cable could become one of the best implementations of augmented reality. It’s a car navigation system that projects a true 3D line on your windscreen. Very smart!