Media Technology

My friends Bill & Amy have set up a page for their Personal Aura Device, a set of sound-reactive LED poi and clothing they’re designing and building for Burning Man this year. Seeing them in action is amazing — they have one controller with a microphone that wirelessly controls boards fitted with with extremely bright red, green and blue LEDs. The main music mode ties intensity of each color to a different frequency band in the audio, so base and drums beat in the blues, mid-tones in the greens and vocalists and guitar are followed by the red. It’s pretty hypnotic to watch, especially when they’ve got two sets of poi plus costuming all pulsing in unison to the music.

Interesting: Livejournal has just launched a Jabber server, and are developing integrated features like posting via Jabber and of course integrated Friends and Buddy lists. And they’ll be federating, so you’ll be able to talk to other Jabber-enabled systems (like GMail/GTalk) without the usual mucking about in monopoly-space (you know, like you do with AIM, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, and all the other dark-age services that still wish it was 1990).

(Thanks to Sunyata__ for the link!)

From OpenDarwin (thanks to Dave for the link):

I would like to introduce a new addition to the WebKit open source tools—a JavaScript debugger. Drosera, named after the largest genera of bug eating plants, lets you attach and debug JavaScript for any WebKit application—not just Safari.

One of the unique things about Drosera, like the Web Inspector, is that over 90% of it is written in HTML and JavaScript. This is a true testament of what you can do with web technologies today and the rapid development that WebKit allows.

There’s a nice video demo up of the BumpTop 3D Desktop from the University of Toronto’s Dynamic Graphics Lab. Here’s the abstract from their paper (presented at CHI this year):

We explore making virtual desktops behave in a more physically realistic manner by adding physics simulation and using piling instead of filing as the fundamental organizational structure. Objects can be casually dragged and tossed around, influenced by physical characteristics such as friction and mass, much like we would manipulate lightweight objects in the real world. We present a prototype, called BumpTop, that coherently integrates a variety of interaction and visualization techniques optimized for pen input we have developed to support this new style of desktop organization.

I don’t know about this being a full desktop replacement, but for some kinds of applications I could see it working quite well. For example, I’d love it for sorting through tens to hundreds of images or other visual media, especially if they added two-handed or multi-handed interaction to it.

Check out the Bush Speech Generator: now you get to be the guy controlling the radio teleprompter hidden under Bush’s coat! (By way of GeneratorBlog, by way of Dorothy.)

If I were to write a kind of How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying kind of guide to giving demos of your research, it would probably include the following list of things to avoid:

1. Infrastructure: the only time people notice the plumbing is when it doesn’t work, and the challenges involved are subtle and non-obvious. Stick with pretty interfaces that demo themselves.
2. Multiple caches: Cached information can mask what’s really going on in a system and change the results from one demo to the next. This is even worse when some of those caches involve software that isn’t yours.
3. Multiple threads: Multi-threaded applications are a bear to debug, and are a great way to introduce race conditions and deadlocks that invariably only pop up when you’re giving a demo to someone important.
4. Anything involving networking: Networks are complex and cantankerous creatures that can fail for a number of reasons beyond your control.
5. Wireless: That goes double for wireless. Especially since wireless acts differently when you’re in a room full of audience members who all have their own laptops out and broadcasting.
6. Asynchronous communications: Throw in multiple machines (read: multiple potential failure points) where the same exact user action might produce different effects depending on the timing of how messages are sent and you’ve got a situation where you can successfully test the same demo 10 times in a row and still not know for sure if it’ll work on the 11th try.

Never one to take the easy route, my current research project contains every one of these features. No matter how many successful trials I run, I never really know whether this time it’ll go boom.

Here’s a nice example and how-to on drag & drop sortable lists in Javascript (by way of Steve)

Apparently there’s another Bradley J. Rhodes out there that publishes in a vaguely related field (Cognitive and Neural Systems) and who got his Ph.D. from Boston University at the same time I got mine from MIT. This should cause no end of fun-filled confusion for years to come!

At the Ambidexterous Magazine launch party last night, Chris Tacklind (of D2M, I think) was showing off his laser-diode glove. These things are lots of fun — I remember my group-mate Michael P. Johnson built one when I was at the Media Lab, and got good enough he could make little figure-8s with two fingers while the other dots circled around them.

Something I hadn’t seen before and liked even better was a sound-display toy Chris was playing with, but I forgot to take a picture that one (eit!). It was just a small cardboard tube with a balloon stretched across one end, and a laser diode shining onto a small mirror stuck to the end of the balloon. You’d speak or sing into the tube and the sound vibrations would show up as little laser shows on the wall in front of you. Use it as a drum and you’d get even cooler effects. (Chris goes around teaching kids to make these things — the one he had was made by a 10-year old.)

Now I want to install something like that into the bottom of the little dumbek drum I have. Stretch a membrane across the bottom of the drum and attach a laser pointer to the inside of the drum shining onto a mirror on the membrane such that it reflects up onto the underside of the white translucent drumhead. Aligned correctly, I bet I could get some fun lasershow-style patterns on the drum head on every beat. (Might need to modify the design if the membrane changes the sound too much — we’ll see.)

Remember my continuing rant about how it’s time to just cache the entire Web and keep it local? A start-up named Webaroo has a similar idea. They’re offering free software (Windows only) that caches “webpacks” of pages that make up certain interest areas, and update those caches whenever you re-synch. Their current plan is the usual “pay for it all through advertising” model.

I’ve not tried it yet and don’t know how easy it is to personalize webpacks or how well they handle things like accessing pages that require sign-in, but it definitely looks like a good start. (And if they do the job well, I could easily see them winding up being purchased by one of the big players in search.)

(Thanks to Aileen for the link!)