Lumenoise is a light pen, which turns your old CRT-TV into an audiovisual synthesizer, made by Niklas Roy.

You paint abstract geometric patterns and sounds directly onto the screen. It is a playful and performative device, as anything that you do will cause an instantaneous reflection in the gadget’s sonic and visual output.

Just watch the video below, the grey square is the position of the light pen.

Niklas actually gave me an early version of the Lumenoise. The battery and the circuit were not yet inside the pen, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s  funny to play with. The simplicity of the this technology is really amazing.

Niklas Roy his workshop is located in an old storefront with a big window facing towards the street. In an attempt to create more privacy inside, he decided to install a small but smart curtain in that window. The curtain is smaller than the window, but an additional surveillance camera and an old laptop provide it with intelligence: The computer sees the pedestrians and locates them. With a motor attached, it positions the curtain exactly where the pedestrians are.

Golan Levin and Kyle McDonald wrote a piece of software to unwrap the 360-degree panoramic digital videos of the Sony Bloggie. But then they modified their software to unwrap photos of flowers. The results are stunning.
You can download the open-source code here and you’ll have to run it with Processing.

found at CreativeApplications

Petros Vrellis made these 2 pendulums which can draw. He used openFrameworks and some electronics to let the pendulums drop ink at the right time on the right spot. The first one is called “Irrational pendulum” and draws a square. The whole process takes around 6 minutes. The video shows this at a faster speed.

The second one is called “A drawing pendulum”. The pendulum need 15 minutes to draw this face.

found at make blog

This is very nice rendering of 3D point clouds data by Kyle McDonald, made with openFrameworks.

found via @zachlieberman

This new music video for ‘House of Cards’ by Radiohead is quite different. This video wasn’t shot with video cameras or even lights, but with a laser device and some sort of scanner which delivered 3D data.

Two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.

So far so good, the cool thing is that is an open source project on Google Code. Even the 3D data was composited with Processing, an open source programming language and environment, to make the final video. You can also download that data and make your own remix and submit it to the YouTube ‘House of Cards’ group. Here is an interactive Flash 3D data visualisation to get you excited.

Here is the making of video:

Physical computing is where it’s at! Machinecollective developed these open source hardware modules based on frequently used components, sensors and indicators. Just think of knobs, sliders and buttons which you can hook up to your software or use to build your own hardware project. The modules are designed to work with Arduino and Wiring, 2 development environments based on Processing.

found at MAKE: Blog

I’ve posted Lilypad before, it is a variation of the Arduino open-source prototyping board to create electronic textiles.
As you might have guessed, the Lilypad is the one on the right, the others are Arduino boards. Other electronic elements are also embedded in the embroidery. It definitely has a different look than all those other breadboard based physical computing projects.
work and picture by Beck Stern

Speaking of fashion & technology, here comes LilyPad. LilyPad is basically the hardware you’ll need to do that. It was developed by Leah Buechley & SparkFun and it’s based on Arduino, an open source hardware project based on Wiring based on Processing. It’s a modular system with an accelerometer, a light sensor, a tri-color LED, … now you can make your own Wii controller!
found @ MAKE: Blog

Yes, Flash is finally getting mature, Actionscript 3 and the Flash 9 player are giving us some more power. Adobe even released a beta Flash player that supports multi-core processors for some tasks! And now with Parklabs beat detection class for Actionscript 3, you won’t need any external tool anymore to build some VJ app.