‘Volume of Emptiness’ is an installation by John Houck. 35 threads are hanging down from the ceiling, each of them is attached to an electric motor. Those are controlled by an Arduino board, which receives its commands from a Processing sketch. So when the motors start to run, the threads gain a certain volume which subtly shift in size over time. The whole space is then filled with empty volumes.
This project reminds me of ‘Live Wire‘ by Natalie Jeremijenko, a true classic from 1995. It’s also a wire hanging down from the ceiling, but this one displays the activity on a local network.
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!
A Japanese firm called Kajima Corporation, developed this new way to demolish skyscrapers. They start at the bottom floor, they cut the support columns and replace them computer-controlled jacks. When they demolished that floor, they lower the building one floor and start over. You have to see it to believe it, it’s such a clean method.
They called this ‘Daruma-Otoshi’, which is a Japanese toy where you have to knock out the bottom part of some piled objects.
2.Halbzeit is a visualization of the 2nd halftime of the soccer match between Portugal and The Netherlands during the Worldcup 2006 in Germany. Made by Pfadfinderei & Modeselektor.
‘Dipping Duck Orchestra’ by Kitty Clark.
8 Dipping ducks (a.k.a happy birds, drinking birds…) and their respective drinking glasses are wired up to the 8 notes of a modified keyboard. Each time a duck tips down and touches the water to ‘drink’ the circuit is completed and a sound is produced. Being thermodynamic, the ducks continue to produce random compositions depending on temperature.
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.
