Glitch is pretty cool, both as a musical and a visual aesthetic. I think it formed as a response to so much of our experience being mediated by digital technology. Without noticing, we’ve become extremely familiar with the idiosyncrasies of digital delivery, and developed a sensitivity to what happens when it goes wrong. Anyone who has Windows should try listening to “Welcome to Windows” to see if it makes them feel funny when it gets to the alert sounds.

People like James Bridle and the people at BERG write a lot about post-digital media. Internet artists like Pixelfucks and Quickhoney (both moderately NSFW) cover the discussion visually, too. They like to go into the fact that now that we can do anything with bits and bytes, we can focus on what we want to do, rather than being restricted to what computers and pixels are good at. One of the things that I really like exploring is the impact of some of those old limitations of the digital form, particularly when those previously hard-and-fast limitations become more of a rough guideline, as the transition from 2D pixels to 3D volume pixels (voxels) suggests in a game like Voxatron. Something about pattern diffusion and the textured-but-clean surfaces they produce are extremely appealing. I’ve spent a lot of time in front of this latest experiment and find it very entertaining.

Are there any features of the old digital limitations that you have a fondness for? Has there been any adequate re-examination of what made those features interesting? I loved all the complex dither patterns on the black-and-white mac classic in the 80s and the lurid vibrance of palette-cycle animations in the early 90s.

Not a full-blown facebook app, but it is certainly entertaining – I’d love to see what you make with this one too!

Note: To use the smudge brush, click and drag in the direction you want to smudge in. For the pinch/bloat brushes, you can just click. They also work better at a larger size. Have fun!

I’m still working on Housifier, and one of the things that Stage3D is going to make available is detailed ‘normal maps’ . Normal maps are used by modern graphics cards to fake a higher level of detail on 3D models by changing the apparent angle, or ‘normal’, of an object’s surface.  I want to use this system to generate better textures for the materials that Housifier can use. Because Ponoko has so many materials on offer – and are updating their catalog continually- I need to be able to generate normal maps automatically in order to keep up. The math required to generate these maps is simple, but involved. In working it out, though,  I remembered that a 2D Displacement Map uses a very similar set of rules to generate distortions. On top of that, a number of discussions about Kaleidoscoper have ended up on the subject of a Displacement map-based solution, particularly for the funhouse mirror-like modes. I thought I’d give it a try and the result is what you see before you.

My question to you, the still-interested reader, is this: would you want this integrated into Kaleidoscoper? Is the app authorization process for Kaleidoscoper too demanding? Let me know in the comments below!

Housifier basically consists of two parts: the ‘engineering’ part, which decides what shapes to make, and the ‘visualization’ part, which shows you what it’ll look like. They’re both equally important – while the engineering actually generates the object, it isn’t much good without being able to give people a realistic idea of what they’re getting!

Toward that end,  Adobe recently added hardware-accelerated 3d graphics to Flash. It means you can fit a lot more graphical fanciness into a flash app – I’ve been experimenting with it for a few weeks and I’m really pleased with what’s possible. There is a slight down-side, though – because the hardware acceleration is integrated into the system weirdly (it has to be underneath everything else), it’ll mean starting parts of Housifier from scratch. As you can tell from the proof-of-concept above, though, it’s definitely going to be worth it!

What it looks like

Icon for the page

A map generated from a single wanderer

Whenever I see a painting or a design that is especially interesting, I like to understand it as well as I can. In order to do that, I make a copy. In order to make a copy, you’ve got to pay attention to a much finer level of detail than when you’re just appreciating something. Every brush-stroke in a painting needs to be made, and when you try to make them all yourself, you understand them better.

It’s the same with programming. Spending time wondering “how did they do that?” will give you some answers, but trying to do it yourself will give you more.

A few weekends ago I was watching Jared Tarbell’s speech at Flash On the Beach from 2010, and when he started talking about his ‘substrate’ algorithm,  I was eager to try it out. His experiments seem to be centred on the crystalline quality of the result, but I found the idea of a street map to be more interesting. Hit ‘Draw’ at any time to start a new map, or play with the numbers to get a different effect. I’ve managed to create maps of 6000×4000 pixels with 90 starting wanderers. I have some good samples up at My Flickr page.

Note: This runs in other browsers but it was written as a chrome experiment, so it’ll run best in Chrome and Safari.

Draw!
Save as PNG!

In testing this page I have had some ‘security domain’ errors because it’s trying to execute javascript. This only appears to happen when the page hasn’t finished loading already – so if it doesn’t work, reload the page and try again. If you want to use this code and modify it yourself, please do – I’d love to see what you do with it!

Summary: This is for designing boxes and printing out the plans for them. The white frame is an A4 page. Follow the help in the app if you’re confused. Enjoy!

I really like playing with computers and finding out what they can do. Between the power of a modern machine and the wonder of the Internet there’s a vast array of possibilities. But ultimately, if a computer’s outputs are only a monitor and some speakers, all we can do is make coloured pixels or make some sound. That’s starting to change, though. People have built machines that can take a design from the computer and ‘print’ the finished object out of materials in the real world. On top of that, there are services like Ponoko and Shapeways. They take your design, print it out and post it to you for the cost of the manufacture and shipping. If you want one of these machines for yourself , there are even free designs available for the Makerbot and the DIY lil’ CNC, so it’s possible to dabble in the field without sinking tens of thousands of dollars into equipment.

One major point that this movement fails to take into account, though, is that Time Is Not Money. Not quite. That’s why when you offer a service to the public and they ask how much it costs, you need to think about the cost in minutes as well as in dollars. While digital fabrication opens up amazing possibilities, people still need to understand quite a lot in order to do anything useful with it. That takes the kind of time that a lot of people don’t really have. Even if fabrication costs can drop into the single digits of dollars, it’ll only be ‘cheap enough to use’ when the time it takes to put together an order can be measured in minutes instead of days.

Introducing Housifier

That’s why I’m building Housifier, a website and a set of tools to make the act of creating designs as easy as it can be. Toward that end it’s still an experiment – there are trade-offs between control and simplicity, striking a balance between Do As I Say and Do What I Mean. The first app will be a close relation of the box maker on this page, but it’ll allow you to make snap-together boxes like my Arduino enclosure – from there I’m hoping to get more elaborate shapes composed, though some of the math is a little difficult. It’s going to be fun!

I’m a big fan of M.C. Escher’s work  - in particular the tessellations – and have always wanted to come up with a way to handle the difficult-but-mechanical task of making sure that the tiles actually match up properly.  It’s a reasonably simple problem, so while the internet was disconnected this weekend I tried to build it, and so far it seems to be working!  I’d be very interested in either animating a blend from one set of points to another, or blending over distance (like something in Escher’s Metamorphosis series.) In any case, I 1. Have had a  a great time with it and 2. thought other people would like it too.  I hope that that is the case!

Simple house tessellation

A lot of things end up looking like either fish or birds.

(and this is the icon for the page)

A friend of mine bought a Fujifilm W1 a while ago, and has been taking very entertaining stereoscopic images with it.  The only problem with taking stereo pictures, though, is that it’s next to impossible for anyone without very special hardware to appreciate them.

Enter the “Jitter Gif”.  If you take the two images that are captured from the left lens and the right lens and put them into a fast-looping animation, you can get some sense of the space that they capture.  It’s demonstrated really well at 3erd.  While it’s possible to make such Gifs in Photoshop or a specialized tool, it’s often too much of a hassle for people to bother with – Photoshop has a serious pricetag and is total overkill if you just want to see what it will look like.

Toward that end, I have made this generator. Feed in your jpg frames and get out your gif movie.

This is an example of a jitter-Gif of the junk on my desk, although not taken with a proper stereo camera. Even so, you get a much more interesting sense of the objects in the scene! Note that you will want to shrink your pictures down to a manageable size before constructing the animation.

Note: For large images, click+drag on the picture to move around.  While you’ll only see a portion of it here, hitting the ‘Save JPG’ button will export the entire picture.

I’m not the first to make a fur generator in Flash – Andre Michelle, Mark Knol and a bunch of others have already made some – but it was fun to make and I could see it being useful for generating fur textures for creatures, or making an application that would let you draw hilarious moustaches on your friends. As with the Sequencer , it’s surprising what kind of performance you can get out of Flash these days!

Oh, one thing that was extremely frustrating and somewhat silly: I had to use Thibault Imbert’s custom JPG decoder because of the security sandbox that the latest Flash player throws up around images loaded from external sources.  It’s possible to load and display them, but any programmatic attempt to access, say, pixel values, will result in an error that can’t be sidestepped.  It was a point of some frustration, since if I can see the picture, I want to be able to play with it!  Please correct me if I’m wrong, by the way – if anyone knows how to get pixel values from uploaded pictures in AS3/Flash 10+ I would be very grateful to hear!

This is a demonstration of what it looks like – just in case you can’t see:

(courtesy of Mr. Aidan Fraser of Shide and Prame)

After my tinkerings with sound output and processing, my Friend Aidan got inspired to embark on a more ambitious project of creating a simple music sequencer and invited me to participate.  A large portion of our free hours since then have been devoted doing that.  We’ve been really impressed – even without particular attention to efficiency, it seems that even Flash can take pretty much everything we throw at it!

Both have us have tinkered around in music sequencers for over a decade  now.  We started with ReBirth RB338 and Jeskola Buzz, so we’re very familiar with the expectations for what needs to go into this type of app.  It has been fascinating to shift from simply using a sequencer to considering how it should actually work!  There are so many questions around application design that have remained theoretical until now, where we’ve run across them almost by accident. There are some questions that are much harder than they would first appear – When something is a dial vs. when it can be a slider, how to guide a user through the most important feature of an application etc.  Other things that people often get wrong are laid bare as lazy mistakes – Load/Save effects and a failsafe when the application gets too processor-intensive, say.

Anyway, do not be fooled by its sleek, refined appearance! This application is very much a work in progress, and part of the fun of working on it is deciding what happens next.  If you have any ideas, let us know!

(this is what it should look like)

Warning: Setting the squareness below 0 will result in a much louder sound than anything else, so be aware that you might need to turn the volume down!

I’ve been reading a textbook called Human-Computer Interaction. It’s an excellent and extensive primer on the subject for someone who hasn’t studied it formally in the past, although at nearly 8 years old it can’t be expected to be up-to-date on everything in the field. At first I thought that one of those areas was the use of sound in HCI, though when I thought more about it, I realized that sound is almost always an afterthought – in games, and especially in applications.

One of the reasons that sound-based UI isn’t explored more is that an interface that uses pre-recorded sound samples is limited in the number of ways that those samples can be used to convey information. Sound can be generated on the computer, though, so I decided to look at where more fine-grained feedback could be given to a user through sounds that can be modified at will to reflect even minor changes. In order to do that I had to put together a system that would be able to generate a wide range of sounds that can take a range of parameters, and what you see before you is the initial result of that exploration. Source code can be provided if desired. I’m hoping to use this generative sound output in the near future – stay tuned!