A different kind of party
NyARToolkit for Processing on Mac OS X troubleshooting
If you’ve been trying to use the NyARToolkit for Processing library on Mac OS X, you might’ve noticed that running the example sketch results in an unresponsive, empty gray window. So here’s what you need to do to fix this – add the following lines in the setup() function before any other code:
try {
quicktime.QTSession.open();
} catch (quicktime.QTException qte) {
qte.printStackTrace();
}
I spent something like 8 hours trying to find a solution for this problem, until i found this workaround in this bugtracker thread. Hopefully this can save you some time. Tested and worked on Mac OS X 10.5.8, Processing 1.0.7 and nyar4psg-0.2.2.
War in Films
Using Processing it scrapes IMDB for films labeled with the genre “war.” It takes the data, plots out each movie to the year it was created and draws a line back to the war it is about.
War in Movies from Amy Martin on Vimeo.
G-stalt
G-stalt is an interface to manipulate complex data sets with your hands. Very Minority Reportesque.
iPhone Accessibility
It is remarkable how the new accessibility features on the iPhone (OS 3.1) completely transform the interaction vocabulary for this device. It’s like a complete overhaul of the interface without changing its appearance at all.
Nearness
Touch and BERG present Nearness, a touchless Rube Goldberg machine:
Nokia mixed reality fail
Fast Company doesn’t like it. It reminds me of something Warren Ellis recently wrote about Nokia on his weblog:
Nokia [...] seem to have reached a point where the idea is much more interesting to them than it actually working.
Half-baked thoughts on hackers and urban hacking practices
During friday’s paraflows symposium and subsequent discussions there was a lot of back and forth on the definition of a hacker, primarily focused on ideological issues. Hackers vs. crackers, black hat vs. white hat, ideological differences and motivations were brought up and it seemed that most people couldn’t agree on a definition in the context of urban hacking. Some of the disagreement might have stemmed from the approach of recontextualizing the mythical, idealized image of “the hacker” in light of urban hacking practices, when it might have been more prolific to approach this topic the other way around. Near the end of the discussion a very succinct and fitting definition came up: hackers in general don’t necessarily share specific political or ideological dispositions, but are primarily driven by a naive curiosity to expand their possibilities as well as capabilities.
While i find this definition very agreeable i still think that ideological motives can’t be discarded when discussing urban hacking practices. While hackers might not be driven by ideological motives in their work, i believe that from the vantage point of a spectator or critic, urban hacking must be disruptive, subversive or at the very least unorthodox. It must break with existing conventions, because otherwise it would be completely unremarkable and by extension imperceptible to the observer. Consequently, even though the creator’s original motivation might not be politically or ideologically driven, the necessarily disruptive nature of urban hacks will in most cases be framed in some political or ideological context by its observers.
Now i don’t really know where i’m going with this, but still, it seemed worth pointing out.
Buggy projection augmented reality
Lifewriter, Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignoneau:
Delicate Boundaries, Christine Sugrue:
Processing for the web
Processing for the Web is a proposed Mozilla-sponsored initiative to create a complete and robust port of the Java-based Processing language and environment (popular for art, design, and visualization applications) to the open web, using standard technologies such as JavaScript, Canvas, etc.
I think the biggest challenge for this (and processing.js as well) is library support. In my opinion much of the value of processing comes from the numerous available libraries, as well as the possibility to use a great number of java libraries with little hassle.