I generally try to avoid personal posts on this blog, but this one was too amazing an experience to leave out. In September I went on holiday to the Galapagos Islands (inspired by Darwin's Bicentenary). I have absolutely hours and hours and hours of footage, and obviously not enough time to go through it all - but the highlight of the trip, was probably an extremely serene afternoon chilling in a mangrove forest, and on the way back to our big boat, a surprise encounter with a pod of orcas - two or three times the size of our little dingy - oh and some sharks too!
The video below is not an edit of the whole trip, it is just what we saw on the afternoon of 9th September 2009.
So my MSA Remote app has been rejected AGAIN, for the second time! This time because my startup image "infringes an Apple Trademark Image". Aaargh!
I had paid special attention to not include the sliver outline and home button in case it would be an issue, but it wasn't good enough. Apparently Apple own rectangles with rounded corners at a specific radius.
But like they say, Never give up, never surrender. I've resubmitted with a much tighter crop (I know, a lot uglier :S but it'll have to do for now), if this doesn't get approved, I think I'll just give it all up and retire to a little fishing village (maybe I should do that anyway).
P.S. You can see the previous post about the first rejection here.
Demo, Velocity Sensitive Keys and Patents
In the meantime I've uploaded a new video, this time demoing controlling Ableton Live (for audio) and VDMX (for visuals) and using faders, triggers, and velocity sensitive keys - yes velocity sensitive. The harder you hit the keys, the louder the sound (or whatever you want to map it to).
Coincidentally, in a tweet from cdmblogs I saw these guys have developed a very similar "patent pending" technique. They're very young, all in their early twenty's. So respect guys for all you've developed and the whole business venture etc. but a tip, please don't try and patent things like this. It's bad for mankind.
And for those wondering how it works, it's not rocket science, it's accelerometer. The harder you hit the screen, the bigger jolt on the accelerometer. And yes it does work on hard surfaces because you still get an internal jolt. You just need to do some filtering and check change of acceleration on finger touchDown. Neat I know ;) patent worthy? I think not.
In this video, OSCulator is routing the OSC (& TUIO) messages coming from MSA Remote to midi and forwarding to Ableton Live and VDMX simultaneously. Nothing is done in post, the same signal is controlling both audio and video.
So I just entered the world of google analytics (been registered for about a year, but never really looked at the data), and it's amazing. I was browsing the keywords people have used to find my site and there are some real gems in there. Most are what you'd expect (openframeworks, processing, quartz composer, physics, fluids, motion tracking, audio reactive and other interactive stuff). Some are so interesting and/or funny that I thought I'd share them.
For those that don't know what google analytics is or does, the below are some of the keywords that people have put in google, yahoo etc. and been led to memo.tv via the search results.
There are over 16,500 search phrases people have used and I didn't look at them all. Just a real quick browse through.
First, one of my favorite search queries I saw leading to memo.tv:
cool abstract shit (probably because I have the domain abstractshit.com, but i just love the fact that someone typed 'cool abstract shit' into google)
'girl' related queries that led to memo.tv (they must have been so dissapointed):
mad girls
madgirls
memo girl
amoeba girl (I hope you were looking for this, otherwise I dread to think what you were looking for)
cover girls memo 2008
glsl girl shader (yea, wouldn't that be nice!)
lab dance girls (unfortunately you don't get many dancing girls in labs. maybe you meant 'lap' ?)
mad girl secret (this guy spent 11 minutes browsing the site!)
mad girls graphics
memo girls
quartz composer my girlfriend (this one is slightly worrying)
visual 3d dancing girl
Some other interesting ones that caught my eye as I quickly scrolled through 16,500 searches:
algorithmic video i like to touch (8 people searched for this!)
you are not owner
does techfit really work?
why cant you see magnetic force (yes, it would be nice if we could see them)
why do we need hexadecimal number system when we have binary ?
why management by objective and not management by wondering?
why should i get high bbc ? (maybe because there's no other way of sitting through eastenders?)
psychadelic piercing
awesome mega flash game
islamic elements in motion graphics
cool acid visuals
what physical force makes up quartz (wow google, i can see why you thought memo.tv might be relevant, but you were way off!)
art interactif tutorial
how do i take a slit scan photo on my iphone
import radiohead house of cards into 3d
whereever you go,whatever you do notes for the piano (how on earth did that direct to my site!?)
how can i make the dust as gold?
interactive video art tutorial
physics falling balls 3d source code opengl
interactive installation free code
very nice dance
how to do visual distortion effects glslÂ
how to use msashape3d library in opengls + iphon + code example
open source quartz composer interactive projects
the good and bad paints of audio and visual movement
papervision high performance billboard for particle systems
quartz composer motion tracking
how to get a documentary on bbc television
msa 2009 interactive yearbook cd
using flash + quartz for tv production
generative video dance software for mac
the difference between real time processing and interacting processing
how to create volleyball game in flash as3
how to end a company's performance memo?
how to fake multitouch in actionscript
how to make sound reactive visuals
how to make psychedelic videos in flash
Actually just browsing the "how to ...." section was really interesting. Like looking through a window and seeing loads of people scattered around the globe, trying to find a solution to their problems - and in so many cases very similar problems. E.g. hundreds of queries about "when to release objects in objective c", or "how to do motion tracking in quartz composer" etc. Definitely a great source for data visualization. someday...
I wanted to actually publish them all, but google only allows me to download csv's in batches of 500. And there's 34 pages :S so I couldn't be bothered.
You might have heard on the news about this fire, more details at the BBC. Well this fire was a 5 minute walk down the road from me. I know this doesn't really fit in the 'lab' section, but I thought I'd post it anyway. I must say it did look eerily gorgeous. I don't want to undermine the horrific nature of this event, but seeing that massive black pillar of smoke twist its way into the sky made me pickup some old books on chaos theory. Here are some photos from my flat.
