Design


22
Nov 09

Real Time Graphics

At Norsk Teknisk Museum during the final concert of the elektrOpus sound competition I served a tiny portion of live graphics. It was kept simple, doing pixelation, blur, blending and a few other tricks and treats. I think it came out as a beauty, and Drivhuset ordered more graphic software for image manipulation for their Minnepinne-project.

So to make this story shorter than it could have been: I want to give a preview of how this came out, because it will be developed further and sneak on to stage with Goldwasser. Eventually. The images below are screenshots taken during testing of the software that I made for Drivhuset.

Source material are two videos: One of my son looking at fish at the aquarium and one video of a Norwegian coast guard ship going out from a dock in the local harbour. A Wiimote interfaces the manipulation presets too any kind of hands.

Cheers
Arve


30
Oct 09

Contact microphones

Sensors are often a requisite for a successful end product when making a new interface for human-machine interaction. Contact microphones are one of my favourite sensors, and now we have a new batch of them in the workshop.

Contact mics are designed to pick up sound transmitted through hard materials: A contact mic glued to a table will pick up sounds that are made when things hit the table, but not what those around the table talk about.

Glue it on your floor, and make your computer aware of feet, toys, parts hitting your floor. By using a grid of contact mics you can even get a rough approximation on the position of things that are moving around!

Contact mic on my MacBook touch plate

Contact mic on my MacBook touch plate

Cheers
Arve.


20
Oct 09

Soundscapes in everyday life

I have started working on sonification in human machine interaction, and yesterday a video was published over at Ted’s place.

I like this short and informative video, as it succeeds in showing the impact sound can have in an environment.

For me, who is researching how sound can be used as part of a user interface, it is very useful to be reminded about how sound pollution affects us.

Cheers
Arve.