Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Media Sensitive glasses (we-make-money-not-art)

This is a slightly less aggressive take on the TV-B-Gone device: Sunglasses that go black when there is a TV in sight.
As part of her Social Defense Mechanisms: Tools for Reclaiming our Personal Space research, Limor Fried (creator of the Wave Bubble and the Minty MP3) developed the Media-Sensitive Glasses that automatically darken whenever a television is in view, so as to protect the wearer from television's 'hypnotic' effect.

Link

Thursday, May 26, 2005

Setpixel // Shadow Story


Shadow Story allows children to physically play with sketches that they created. Shadow Story is a projection-based interactive installation. Children cast shadows on the wall using their bodies to interact with the elements in the visual projection...

Link

Edirol CG-8 Visual Synthesizer


Why rely on software to generate your cheesy dance-club visuals when you can buy an expensive piece of hardware to do it?

CG-8 Visual Synthesizer

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Apple - Mac OS X Downloads - Video - Trans Lucy

For people with serious attention deficit disorder:
[Trans Lucy] Allows you to watch DVDs on your computer in a whole new way. The movie display can be floated above all applications and the translucency of the video can be adjusted so you can see through the video and work with documents underneath.

Link

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

SSSSSSLLLLLOOOOOO MMMMMOOOOOO VVVVVIIIDDDDEEEEOOOOOO

Slo/Mo Video: Touring Festival+DVD+Website, Seeking one hundred and twenty slow motion video submissions. Each exactly 1 minute in length. Deadline July 15th, 2005. Fiction and non-fiction, The more crunked up the better.

That sounds like a challenge. I'm game. Nick, didn't you say you just got an AE plugin that will do some kind of motion interpolation that would allow you to do convincing slow motion in already shot video?
Link

Quartz Composer Samples

Quartz Composer is a developer tool that ships with Mac OS X 10.4 ("Tiger") that allows you to access all the nifty graphical powers of Tiger's CoreImage without having to learn how to program. Fooling around with it I managed to make a couple of screen savers, and I can already see that there's a lot more potentially that could be done with it. Quartz Composer has controller patches for midi input, but what I think would be really nifty is if you could use it to create your own iTunes visualizers. I'd love to see something replace the tie-dyed-vomit visualizer that has been shipping (relatively unchanged) with iTunes since it first came out. It was fine in 1995, but it just doesn't show off what the Mac can do now, it's an embarrassment. The current homebrew visualizers aren't much better.
I want someone to make an Atari Video Music Emulator!

Check out some sample Quartz compositions on this Japanese page: (You'll need to have Tiger/QuickTime 7 installed)
Link
Found Via QuartzComps.com

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

H.264 day three: Demonstrations at HD resolutions

Shapeofdays.com has a bunch of very informative H.264 tests, basically affirming what we already know, that at the present moment it's God's-own-codec.
Link
Thanks, Mike!

Friday, May 06, 2005

My ghetto 360° video experiment

Inspired by this previous Video Thing post about panoramic video, here's my incredibly lo-fi DIY attempt.



Old plastic Christmas tree bauble I found in the garden the other day
+
Felt tip pen
+
Blu Tak
=

+
"Polar Coordinates" distortion in After Effects
=


1.1mb mpeg4 test clip!


EDIT - now also on Youtube! :)



It's decidedly fuzzy, and my demo isn't exactly spectacular as the camera was tethered to capture card and power supply, (battery dead & couldn't be bothered to find a blank tape) but works much better than I thought it would! Exciting results for such a half-baked attempt.

I'm going to build a more robust and high quality version (ie get a better mirror ball!) some time soon.

Oh, and by the time I took the above photo of my setup it had gone a bit wonkey, but I did have the ball lined up with the lens much better than it looks there!

Thursday, May 05, 2005

Near-Near Future: Khronos Projector

"The Khronos Projector allows people to visualize movie content in a new way. By actually touching and deforming the screen, the user can send portions of the image forward or backward in time."
Link