Johnny Chung’s amazing Wii hacks have been around for a while, in fact, some of the youTube videos demoing how they have been done have been viewed more than 3 million times. Although I had some idea of the Wiimote’s DIY capabilities, my first proper introduction was Rahle Dusheiko from Pixel Project’s talk at the inaugural Cape Town Pecha Kucha night. Pixel Project had done some interesting interactive installation work for Liliesleaf Museum in Johannesburg using the Wiimote. See the video here.

Still it wasn’t till I saw Johnny Chung’s talk at TED that I realized just how easy it can be, and just how many possible applications there could be for Wiimote hacking. Here is the video:

I’m really excited about the possibilities for my students exploring multitouch and gestural interfaces with the Wiimote. Usually its only the big institutions like the MIT media lab that can offer the facilities for students to explore these new fontiers in Human Computer Interaction. In Particular I’d like to investigate using the Wiimote to control flash-based interfaces.

Here are his videos:Tracking Your Fingers with the Wiimote

Low-Cost Multi-point Interactive Whiteboards Using the Wiimote

Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the Wii Remote Really impressive.

All of these hacks are detailed on Johnny Chung’s site.

This is my graduate research paper from Cape Peninsula University of Technology.

Abstract

VJ’s of recent years have begun to perceive increasingly diverse roles for visuals performers in live musical performances. True to their namesake, most VJs will “jockey” between these roles at various points in their careers, others have an affinity for a particular approach and will concentrate on one area.

This research aims to identify the primary points of divergence that separate different roles and approaches to VJing, and their manifestations in technique and execution. This will take us closer to an intellectual framework and language with which to discuss kinds of VJ performance.

Keywords:
VJ, VJing, Video Jockey, Visuals Jockey, Performance, AV, Audio visual, Performative, Atmospheric, AVJ, DVJ, Audio visual Jockey, Digital Jockey, Production VJing, Video Instrumentalism, Video Instrumentalist, Live Cinema, Kinesics, Kinesic, Cathexis, Club, Categorization

Recent weeks have seen a resurgence in my inner Otaku. In modern Japanese slang, the term otaku refers to fan of, or specialist in any particular theme, topic, or hobby. These topics technically could be anything, but in a Japanese context they usually refer to manga, anime, gunpla and cosplay to name but a few.

At the center of Otaku culture is Anime (animated movies and series) and Manga (illustrated books and magazines). These in turn spawn entire armies of toys and merchandise.  I’ve always enjoyed Anime, Especially the greats like Shirow Masamune’s Ghost in the Shell, or the Studio Ghibli masterpieces like Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, all very well known in the west. Recently I decided to look into the actual manga graphic novel originals from which these great animated movies were make. Usually if you like a movie based on a certain book then you’ll very likely enjoy the book even more. Surely the same would apply to anime?

Anyway, on my search for retailers within South Africa for this kind of thing I have discovered that there are actually quiet a few. Whether you are a manga fundi, hentai perv, gundam geek or cosplay maid outfit connoisseur,between these guys you should find everything and more:

http://www.awx.co.za

http://animedirect.co.za

http://www.animezone.co.za/

http://www.myjapanshop.com/

http://www.akiba.co.za

http://www.hlj.com

Ukiyo-e [Clear skies in May] from demi168 on Vimeo.
Originally seen on Motionographer

Thanks Yum!

The above image comes from Alex Dragulescu’s “Spam architecture” series, “…generated by a computer program that accepts as input, junk email. Various patterns, keywords and rhythms found in the text are translated into three-dimensional modeling gestures.” Other projects include experiments with sound, viruses and even a VJ tool, very interesting stuff, and pretty!

I have to admit, I have shared this sentiment at times. I think that us designers, especially graphic designers, often yearn for our work to have more meaning, for our craft to have some higher purpose other than simply packaging for other people’s ideas or commercial interests. Often times though, there are more immediate and more obvious way to make a difference.

From Designer Daily

This is crazy. Talk about an audio visual experience! This reminds me of something similar that was done ages back, using sound frequencies to create “Chladni patterns” in salt crystals. Check out the vid on youTube. The Singing Tesla coil is made by a company called Resonance Research, which creates “high quality and ultra-reliable electrical exhibits for modern science museums”. Imagine a dancefloor with Tesla coils.

Unlike HTML, flash has always been plagued by the fact that the bots that trawl the net indexing its content, like those used by Google and Yahoo, couldn’t “get inside” flash files to see what was there. This makes the data (text, links, images) virtually invisible to search engines. This has been a major handicap for flash and a very compelling reason why most sites continue to exist as HTML. Flash was only really appropriate for primarily static, media rich sites.

Now Adobe, Google and Yahoo are working on technology that will take flash closer to being fully search-engine friendly. This will involve a “virtual user” technology, developed by Google. This is a robot that virtually clicks through each Flash piece it encounters and indexes what’s inside.

While some have hailed this as the long-awaited solution to flash’s Achilles heel, more skeptical sources point out that the results of this wont be as incredible as one might think on first glance. This is for two reasons (From Marc Siry’s blog, A Better Mousetrap):

The first: the crawler will not index Flash that is embedded in the page via Javascript. To avoid the IE ActiveX ‘click to activate’ security feature, the vast majority of Flash movies published by professional outfits are written into the page via Javascript. Thus, few of them will be indexed.

The second: The crawler will not index externally loaded SWFs or XML. The vast majority of Flash movies published by professional outfits load external information as SWFs or XML. The crawler will follow links to those items and index them separately, but that’s fairly useless for the goal of increasing the relevance of the main page.

It seems we’ll need to wait a bit longer for rich media to get to the point where it’s totally search-engine friendly, still, it’s definitely a step in the right direction.

Source: Webmonkey, A Better Mousetrap

For good reason too. Firefox 3 absolutely rocks. If you don’t have it already get it at www.getfirefox.com