Physical Interaction Lab : News

NMM 09 Performance

2009-06-03T02:24:41-07:00

Some clips from our performance at New Media Meeting a few days ago. We did a 30 min set using our light bulb-rig Lights and two Theremin-like MIDI-controllers we originally developed for technoproducer The Subliminal Kid. The devices also give feedback to the audience by illuminating the player's hands. See a video of our first test of them below.

Seeing music at NMM 2009

2009-04-20T15:07:16-07:00

We are performing a live set on this years New Media Meeting. The live set is part of a concept that we call “Seeing music” and is a continuation on a theme that we recently explored with our project Lights. This is the description from the NMM-site:

“Electronic music performed live on laptops often lack the connection between action and output that is obvious with more traditional instruments. This is one reason why electronic music performances often miss out on the live feeling to it. Frustrated by this shortcoming Physical Interaction Lab has in their recent projects explored ways to make live settings of electronic music more engaging to the audience. The results of two projects will be demonstrated as a performance exemplifying how artists can create more engaging shows by using controllers supplying feedback to the audience. Exploring light and gestures, the performance adds another dimension to the minimalistic and secluding laptop rigs governing the scene.”

Goodbye, for now

2009-02-24T09:47:49-08:00

After almost three years of insanely interesting projects, many new friends and happy clients we have decided to take a break. We have already failed too many dull courses on our way to degrees in engineering in advantage for fun projects with the Physical Interaction Lab. It has become time to clean up some stuff so that we eventually can move on to real work full time. We promise to be back, but for now we are not taking on any new projects or assignments. Though, we might pop up in different settings during this spring with already finished projects and hacks.

All of us can still be reached at our at-physicalinteractionlab.com addresses so feel free to get in touch!

Performing Lights

2008-12-04T11:11:26-08:00

We were invited by VJ / graphics-master Mikael Wehner to do a performance at Interactive Institute's 10 year anniversary. We came up with an idea, which is a merge between two of our earlier projects, Strings and Out of the Box. The concept is simple: Four electric light bulbs, each starting a soundloop when they are turned on. Each light bulb flash in sync with the loop it's playing, creating flickering shadows of the audience on the walls around. Here is a video of yesterday's performance of Lights, Patrik doing the thing:

Lights performance (alternative angle) from Physical Interaction Lab on Vimeo.

One of the things we discuss alot at the lab is how to make live performance of electronic music more engaging to the audience. We think that we have seen enough artists hiding behind laptops during their whole set. There is really something lost when you don't see what the performer does and how that corresponds to the music. Lights is a small step towards an performance that bypass the traditional stage, use the space more freely to let the audience stand around the performer. The connection between action and music output is made more obvious, a connection that is often lost when a performer only turns a knob on a keyboard or clicks a control on his screen.

One design decision that we discussed was if we should use other loops in addition to the four controlled by the lamps to build up the song even further. This felt "unpure" at first but we eventually found this compromise better, as the other five loops made the song way more dynamic and complete (you can see it in the video when Patrik is moving back and forth to the laptop). In hindsight I think this kind of compromise is a good thing that I'd actually like to see more of. Most artists are still using laptop and MIDI keyboards, most probably because other options are too complicated/expensive to use. I don't think you need to leave the old setup behind altogether to make an engaging performance. Incorporating just a small element of interaction that makes the audience understand the connection between action and music can create an more engaging act. We are currently working on another project in this area aswell, more info on that will be posted on the blog in the coming months.

Lights is written in c++ using openFrameworks. Input is handled by an Arduino and lamp output by DMX with the help of Erik Sjödins cppGlue. The song we use is called "Shadows and Light" and is made inhouse by our own music master Patrik. For more information, code etc check out Lights under projects.

Update: Added two more movies of the performance filmed by Mikael Wehner. Embedded one of them above instead of the first one. All three can be found on Vimeo: Lights performance, Lights performance (alternative angle), Lights performance (break).

oF Syjunta @ Detroit

2008-11-17T05:09:23-08:00

The next oF Syjunta (Knitting Circle) will be at the Detroit studios here in Stockholm on November 26th (18.00-22.00), where we also have our lab. Come by if you want to hack some openFrameworks or just chat! Read more here (Swedish).

Live from Shanghai

2008-11-07T00:17:06-08:00

Thought I'd give you all an update on how the Visual Voltage project is doing on the first stop on its two-year tour around the world. Right now the exhibition is alive and kicking at the Citic Square on Nanjing West Rd. / Shaanxi Rd. Shanghai, China.

This is the second location in Shanghai, before it was a part of the Shanghai Creation Expo where it was on display for three days. The exhibition has now been up at Citic Sq. since a week back and the last day is on Sunday the 9:th. So if you are in Shanghai, hurry up and see it. The inauguration took place last Thursday and was held by the Swedish Consul General as well as representatives from Jingan District and Swedish Institute. After that we showed the exhibition to the press and regular visitors. It was a lot of fun talking to Chinese visitors and getting their view on the environment and energy awareness.

And there is nothing fundamentally wrong with their view but China has a huge energy problem right now and it's gonna get a lot worse before it gets better. For example, they open five new coal power plants each week to match the need of energy and one of the biggest plants outside of Shanghai is used only to power the city's air condition, which the Chinese people are misusing a lot. But there is light in the tunnel. Environmental questions are getting a lot of attention at the moment, both by the government and media and they have to get some of It fixed before 2010. Because then The World Expo comes to Shanghai and all the world's eyes will look at China (again, last was of course Olympics in Beijing) and if they haven't reached at least some stagnation in the development in energy usage they will probably end up under heavy fire.

On a totally different note, the city is quite amazing. It's boiling with people, fashion, art and culture, and I've visited quite some places during my stay here. One of the favorites is Translocalmotion / Shanghai's 7:th Biennale at Shanghai Art Museum on People's Square. There artists from around the world gathered and showed their work. One of the pieces, a Computer Vision installation, simulated a mirror using a high rise facade to show your body's outlines, very cool and well implemented as well.

Other Shanghai favorites is the electronics market on Beijing Rd. A whole block with four levels, totally filled with circuits, sensors, buttons and other random components. An engineers dream come true and a very good source of inspiration for hardware hackers like us!

Today our last weekend here starts and on Tuesday we are heading back to Europe for this time. Next stop for the exhibition is Beijing and we are already looking forward to coming back to China. In the mean time you can read up on some of the articles posted on Visual Voltage so far, links here below:

SvD (Swedish)
DN (Swedish)
China Visual (Chinese)
If Green (Chinese)
Oriental Morning Post (Chinese)

Revolution or reform

2008-10-21T07:05:18-07:00

Just wanted to give a heads up about a debate on copyright at the KTH library tonight (21/10).

Speakers will be:

Rickard Falkvinge, Pirate Party
Rasmus Fleischer, Bureau of Piracy
Peter Sunde, Piratebay
Karl Sigfrid, Moderaterna
John Buckman, Magnatune.com
Tere VadÃƒÂ©n, University of Tampere (chairman)

The time is 18.00 to 20.00 and it's free. So if you are in Stockholm and interested in copyright reformation, check it out.

Let's meet in China

2008-10-16T04:59:36-07:00

As I wrote a few weeks ago I'm going to Shanghai & Bejing in two weeks to work on setting up our latest production, the Visual Voltage exhibition.

I'm going to be there from 26:th of October until 9:th of November and if you are too, it would be great to meet up since It's my first time over. We are opening the exhibition the last week in October so If you wish to be invited let me know.

Looking forward meeting you!

Photo by Stuck In Customs

Aftonbladet and mobile barcoding

2008-10-01T13:07:06-07:00

Aftonbladet, a Swedish tabloid, announced that they from today are going to use mobile barcodes in their printed version of the newspaper. This, to connect the online and offline version of Aftonbladet and in that way offer more value to their readers.

The platform that they have chosen to collaborate with and promote is BeeTagg. BeeTagg supports both Datamatrix and QR-code, but they also have their own standard called simply BeeTagg. Unfortunately Aftonbladet has chosen the BeeTagg format but on the bright side the application that everybody will download supports other open formats as well.

I tested the application on my N95 today and it was really great. One of the best barcode applications on the market actually. We also tested BeeTagg on an iPhone and it worked quite good.

Maybe this is going to be the Swedish breakthrough for barcoding that we have waited for over a year now. When we've been around talking to companies about our project Comments.se all have been wainting for a big player to do all the hard work of introducing and teaching the public about the "new" way of interacting, now this player has turned out to be Aftonbladet. One of the things we have learned when working with mobile barcoding technology is that it's almost impossible to get people to download and install an application on their mobile phone, it's just to complicated.

I hope they will succeed and really open up for other mobile barcoding projects such as Comments.se.

Portugal, Shanghai & secret projects

2008-09-23T15:51:42-07:00

It's been an intense summer for everyone at the lab, nothing at all like this blog so to say. Guess it's time to give an update of what we have been up to and what is going to happen in the near future, let's start from the beginning.

In the beginning of the summer me & Emil were invited by SSES to participate in a entrepreneurial conference around the art of pitching. It was held in Cascais, Portugal during a weekend in June and entrepreneurs from five different countries participated. Over four days we developed our pitches with input from all the other entrepreneurs and their coaches and finally we presented the results in front a jury. Emil won the award for best developed pitch in his group and Matilda, one of the other swedish entrepreneurs we traveled with, won in hers, big ups!

Our main project this summer is around music and physical interaction. We are collaborating with the multi talented techno producer The Subliminal Kid in developing a new kind of controller for his live gigs. This project has taken a lot of time this summer but has also been extremely exciting for us. It's a bit early to tell you exactly what it is about but we are currently getting feedback on our second prototype and promise to tell you all about it later this year.

We keep getting a lot of love from Sara and the others over at SSES and a couple of weeks ago they nominated Emil to this years Young Entrepreneurs Award. The prize did unfortunately not end up in Emil's possession but we congratulate Erik Fjellborg of Calnet and will try next year again. Read more about the nomination here.

The Visual Voltage project that we helped Svenska Institutet & The Interactive Institute with this spring is currently on a freighter somewhere between Sweden and China. Shanghai is the first stop and I'm going over on the 26:th of October to help setting it up. It will be our first assignment out of Sweden and my first real visit to Asia so I'm really looking forward to it. If you are in Shanghai or Beijing and interested in the same stuff as us, please send me an email so we can meet up, would be great!

Finally, we are currently working with Game Studios and award winning The Company P on a project hopefully starting early 2009. It's involving a lot of interesting components as interaction, mobility and gaming and we really hope that it will happen. We promise to keep you posted!

Over and out from a rainy Berlin!

NMM 08 - First day

2008-09-19T11:06:22-07:00

The first day of New Media Meeting is over and now awaits a night of music, vj:ing and party. Golan Levin started of the day by showing projects from 10 years of exploring new interaction modalities. His projects aim to be playful in order to let the user discover something about themselves when interacting with them. While moving away from the mouse he has explored voice, hand and most recently eye recognition as alternative ways of interacting. His eye tracking projects Double-Taker and Opto-Isolator are interesting, because even though they are very simple in their design the fact that they keep eye contact makes them project a personality to the user.

Kristina Törnblom from K3, Malmö Högskola showed wearable technology projects and talked about how wearables can extend the body and amplifying cultural expression from a fashion perspective. Carolyn Strauss from SlowLab also had a nice showreel of products from which many would fit into the critical design category.

Adrian Bowyer spoke about his replicating RepRap machine. The RepRap is essentially a 3D-printer that can create the parts to build another 3D-printer, in other words making children. Since every system that can duplicate itself is capable of exponential growth the spread of the RepRap machine can be really fast, given that materials are available. The machine cannot yet produce all parts, but Bowyer explained that he was not striving for "pure" replication, the important thing is that the machine can replicate and do so cheaply. So you have to buy the bolts and screws, but those are abundant at most places in the world anyway. The electronics also has to be brought in, but it seems like in the near future the machine will be able to produce the electronics aswell.

The current version of the RepRap makes its parts out of plastic but Bowyer and his research team are looking into getting the machine to work with polyactic acid. Polyactic acid can be made from different kinds of plant cells like corn, which means that people could themselves grow the material needed to manufacture products. Not only that, polyactic acid is biodegradable so when you get tired of a product, just put it on the compost and six months later its molecules are ready to become a new version. By also being cheap to build (the parts cost around $500) and having low energy consumption the machine is made for being used in developing areas. The construction are licenced under GPL which hopefully ensures a good evolution of the technology.

This project is fascinating in so many ways. First of all the idea of a machine that can produce copies of itself is very appealling from a purely technological standpoint. But it also shows a vision on how manufacturing could change in the future. It might not be long before the term "user generated products" will be something we all talk about. What would the effects be if people could make their own products? Obviously it would cut substantial amounts of the environmental and economical costs of transporting products around the world. If everybody has their own 3D-printer and can create another one for their neighbour, the price will converge towards the cost of the materials. We would probably get alot of interesting special products for special needs, just like we in the long tail of digital distribution have special content for niche markets. Imagine buying a pair of shoes from the website of some independent designer and being able to print them on your future version of RepRap instantly. I'm also looking forward to seeing what the user generated products equivalent of lolcats will be.

New Media Meeting 3 has really had a great start. I'm looking forward to the next set of talks and performances. Check back for updates.

New Media Meeting 08

2008-09-16T10:20:51-07:00

This weekend the festival New Media Meeting takes place in NorrkÃƒÂ¶ping, Sweden. We were there last year, showing some of our projects, listening to the talks, meeting lots of terrific people and generally having a blast. This year we're going back, but just as visitors, so now we will have lots of time for talks, socializing and partying!

The line-up this year seems great. These are some of the things I found interesting:

Adrian Bowyer
Will talk about his RepRap machine that can duplicate itself.

Andrew Vande Moere
Assistant Professor at the Design Lab at the University of Sydney who also has the excellent visualization blog Infosthetics. He covered our project Wable back in February.

Helen Evans
Does art on emissions among other things.

And lots more! The festival takes place the 19-20th of September (Friday and Saturday). It's a great place to meet people interested in new media, music, art, VJ-ing, interaction design and everything around it. Check the NMM website for more information.

If you're going there and wanna meet up, send a mail or just come up when you see us there!

Another Man-Machine 2 movie

2008-09-12T06:32:33-07:00

The movie shows the Metabolism and Dreamworld of the Organism installation from the Man-Machine 2 exhibition we did at National Museum of Science and Technology last year. Movie posted by knektelino.

Visual Voltage

2008-06-08T05:03:40-07:00

We are very pleased to welcome you to the preview show of Visual Voltage in Kista Galleria outside Stockholm! As you might have known, during this spring we have worked with artists Tina FinnÃƒÂ¤s, Tore Nilsson & Steven Dixon and contributed with technical knowledge and production to their works. Together with an installation by Nils Edvardsson these pieces will be the art division of Visual Voltage, an exhibition that will tour the world over the next couple of years together with design pieces from the The Power Studio at the Interactive Institute.

It is open between 7-9 June, check here for more info.

The picture is from Edvardsson's piece The Spirit of High Voltage.

Changing movements slides

2008-05-12T14:43:09-07:00

Today we held a small talk for one of Sweden's best web consultancy companies. The topic was, of course, physical interaction design and as examples we took two movements that we think will have an impact on todays digital landscape.

Here are the slides if any of you are interested:

And here are the missing videos:

Supporting free speech in Belarus

2008-05-11T14:38:41-07:00

Last week we were invited to hold a workshop and lecture as part of a project funded by Sida. The participants were journalists from Belarus and the topic was how the advances in new media can be utilised to support democratic movements. Belarus is considered the last dictatorship in Europe and its citizens lacks the right to express their political views.

We talked about our component based view on technology and how easy it has become to put together existing solutions to fulfil a desired need or function. There is a gap between people who know about new technology and those that need to know. Nowadays, services are not only easy to use, but also, connecting different ones to create something new usually just takes a bit more effort. This enables many interesting and useful combinations.

One example is our project comments.se and how it can be implemented as a location based platform for communication. Supporting discussion and commenting in public spaces.

The participants were enthusiastic about the the project, but explained that comments, as it is now, is too easy accessable for KGB (yes, they're still active in Belarus) and therefor too risky to use as platform to arrange meetings or political rallies.

Other projects of interest that we mentioned were Bambuser and Graffiti Research Lab's Laser Tag. These two was highly appreciated, and they wanted to use both at their return to Belarus.

As MÃƒÂ¥ns Adler from Bambuser said on What's next, having technology you developed to be used for novel purposes and support democratic movements is somewhat the ideal scenario.

In the preparations for this workshop, we asked fellow Detroit member Ebba Forslind to help us come up with a new design for our stickers. We're all very pleased with the result. Thanks Ebba!

Thanks to Behrang for co-ordination and Veronika for translation!

ITP Presentations Live!

2008-05-07T12:07:10-07:00

Right now, this years ITP students from NYU are holding their thesis presentations in New York City. It's all broadcasted live here.
Gotta love this, check it out! And don't forget to visit the dedicated chatroom on AIM.

Via Mike, thanks!

Article on natural interfaces

2008-04-23T06:17:33-07:00

Today was the new issue of Urban Lifestyle Report released. The report is a monthly subscription based trend report covering the constantly evolving media landscape. This month's issue features an article on natural interfaces written by myself and David Kjelkerud. The article is in swedish but for those of you who know swedish can order a subscription here.

Hacking reality

2008-04-18T03:55:15-07:00

Yesterday Joshua Klein gave a talk at SICS Open House. Joshua is an unusual hacker in that he also hacks other things than computers and networks. One of those things are crows.

One day a friend called and told him that he had a problem with crows in his garden and wanted get rid of them. Klein thought that instead of killing them there should be some way to make the crows do something useful...

Crows are synanthropes (species that are adapted to human ecology), and are seldom found more than 5 km from areas populated by humans. They are also very clever and are able to solve difficult problems. Even more spectacular are that they have an ability to cultural adaptation, which means that they pick up behaviors from their kin and so create patterns of behavior that can be unique to a particular area or population (this behavior is for example only done by crows in a suburban area outside of Tokyo).

Klein studied crows and their behavior for 10 years and created the crow vending machine. Basically what it does is train crows to collect coins and return them to the vending machine in exchange for peanuts. The whole process on how the crows learn this behavior is explained on the projects website. The goal of the project is to teach crows to collect other stuff, like garbage, to create a mutual beneficial system between crows and humans.

The main point of Klein's talk was not the crow vending machine, but rather showing that as an example of hacking in a context where you usually don't think of hackers. He argued that hacker philosophy is something that is important for innovation in all areas, not just computing. Hacking is about breaching the rules and that means thinking in new ways and finding alternative ways to solve problems (or even redefining the problem space itself).

We live in what he called a “post-web world” where the web has become a medium that is widely spread and very much intertwined in our daily life: “It's no longer about the technology but it's about the possibilities it can give”.

In this world everybody can be a hacker, mixing knowledge from different disciplines to create something new, because the necessary information and communication tools are out there free for anyone to use.

Joshua's talk shined light on how important internet and the web are for many of the new innovations that are taking place. Our business, as most others, is dependent on it, and much of my personal life as well. It has already in a radical way changed they way we live and we are only in the beginning.

It's also amazing how little we know about animals and their capabilities. I have posted some videos below on animals and their behavior, be sure to check out the Bower bird video, the bird with a design sense. Alot of qualities that was thought to be unique to humans are now being found in other animals, especially among the big apes. I'm wondering how our views on animals and other species will change when we better understand how they think and what their emotional life is like.

Other smart animals
Bower bird - The bird with a sense for design.
Lyre bird - Beautiful singer.
Ants - I don't like how they conducted this experiment, but I'm glad it got filmed, because it's spectacular.
Deep sea creatures - Don't miss the Phonema, the inspiration for the Alien movies
Dolphins - Playing with bubble rings

Not so smart animals
Bullterrier and cat

Title photo by grendelkhan

Media Technology Day 2008

2008-04-14T11:48:16-07:00

Once again the students at the Media Technology program at KTH arranged a superb conference on the current and future developments of the media area. I had the pleasure to take part of the making of the 2005 version, so my heart beats a little extra for this conference. This years focus was on the Swedish media industry with almost no international speakers. This turned out to be a quite good move. It felt like one could leave the day with a good and multifaceted view of the current Swedish media landscape. But I was sad to see the fine tradition of having a speaker from MIT Media Lab broken this year. Past speakers have been Stefan Agamanolis (2004), Walter Bender (2005) and Christopher CsikszentmihÃƒÂ¡lyi (2007) which all gave us mindblowing talks. But back to this years event...

The day started of with the Swedish minister of justice who talked about her and the governments view on copyright issues and how to deal with them. She explained why she feels that it's such an important issue that companies who bases there income on copyright stands for 6% off the Swedish BNP. The main point in her speech was that she wanted to make it possible for copyright owners to act against copyright-infringement without going to court.

BjÃƒÂ¶rn Jeffery from Good Old talked about the technical divide and the power of software and it's implications not only on the media industry but on all industries that in some part of the production line is digitalized. He sums up his thoughts best in this blog post.
One example is Mint.com which is a web service for giving you an overview of your economy. Sadly it's not possible to use it with Swedish banks because they aren't allowed to give out information from private banks accounts. But it sheds some light over how underdeveloped the banks web services are.

Sara Ãƒâ€“hrvall from Bonnier and b.vision gave a talk about general trends in media right now. Here is some of the punches she had.

20% decrease in people eating breakfast in Europe last year. A problem for newspapers and morning TV.
Snack culture. We constantly need to update us on news, social networks and trends. This creates shorter breaks where we quickly take in the new information and then return to work.
We actually have more spare time, from work and other dutys at home, but we feel that we have less. The reason is that we have more media to catch up to like TV-series, newspapers and blogs.
Shopping is the number one thing we love doing and we do it on Saturdays where we earlier consumed a lot of media. Sundays is now the day when we actually read the newspaper.
We buy more books.
We read less books.
27% of mobile users in Japan regularly use QR-codes.
10 years ago there where 500 programs that where watched by at least 20% of the Swedish population, today it's under 100. Regarding people under 30 it was about 145 programs before and now... 3!

Two other good speakers were Pontus Schultz from Veckans AffÃƒÂ¤rer and Joakim Jardenberg from Mindpark. Pontus gave a talk about the current and past media landscape and what big media companies can do to adapt to the future. Joakim talked about the importance of transparency in companies (slides).

Photo by Andie Nordgren, thanks!

New media meetup

2008-04-11T02:57:07-07:00

Attention Stockholm inhabitants. Every now and then our friends over at The Interactive Institute arranges a great meetup for artists, engineers, students and other people interested in new media, art, music, electronics, the web etc. called Fringe. Yesterday the fourth meeting was held over at the Institutes offices in Kista and it was a really good one.

The Brazilian VJ / artist Bete Rum, who is now working for Ericsson, gave an interesting lecture about her work for ex. Nokia. She has done some cool stuff in the SÃƒÂ£o Paulo VJ scene and has also built a social network for clip sharing.

Apart from lectures there were students from a course called Reverse Design at Konstfack displaying their current projects. Among the projects displayed were LED jewellry and circuit bending synthezisers. Head over to the Fringe page and don't miss the next event.

Video interview series

2008-04-11T02:03:02-07:00

Today our friends over at innovationsbloggen posted the first episode of three in a series of interviews about our company and our thoughts on start-up life and entrepreneurship. If you wish to subscribe with an rss reader and not miss any episodes, here's the link. Sorry, only in Swedish.

Update, Wed 12:59: The second episode published.

Update, Fri 11:03: The third episode is now up.

Office upgrade

2008-03-30T13:50:39-07:00

We just upgraded our office to the third major version. The first version was named “Speak” after our favorite hungarian rapper, the second version we decided to call “Sean Banan” after the funniest participant in Floor Filler ever, and now, the third version is here, “Ken Lee”.

We would like to give a huge thanks (and a link) to Saatchi & Saatchi Stockholm for the help. Thanks!

For more pictures, visit flickr.

Tell stories with your phone

2008-03-21T14:57:06-07:00

If microblogging with jaiku was last years hype at the lab, this years most maybe-revolutionary-service is called Bambuser. With the Finnish technology Movino they have provided software, along with a service, that enables you to broadcast live video, right from your mobile phone.

When the service was first launched the only function available was the videofeed but after a while, MÃƒÂ¥ns and the others added a small chat window to enable communication from viewer to viewer but also between the viewers and the one holding the camera, um, i mean the mobile phone. This layer of interaction added real value to the service and made it a lot more interesting by giving the viewer the possibility to actually influence the event or situation being broadcasted.

Some people have reacted over the poor interaction design and functionality of the site and we totally agree, it's not a pretty sight. However, MÃƒÂ¥ns explains the strategy behind the desicion to release the site to the people while still in Alpha version in an episode of What's Next. It's in Swedish so for you that doesn't understand: MÃƒÂ¥ns explains that the team still doesn't really know what Bambuser is going to turn into. He says that releasing the site early is a way to let the users of the service take part in the development and turn it into a service that they really want and need. It might be a good strategy, but as mentioned, it doesn't seem come entirely without problems.

For me, Bambuser stands for something new and exciting, the possibility to start a broadcast from anywhere, with only your mobile phone is extremely cool. Although the quality could be much better and the framrate could be the double, as BjÃƒÂ¶rn Falkevik says: "if only the story get's told, you are there".

To give the team some (hopefully useful) feedback then. Me, David & Emil did a broadcast with three cameras, i.e. three angles, today and we immediatly felt that we miss the function of combining several streams into one channel where the viewers can easily change between the different angles. This would be great for sport events and concerts.

Also, please give us a better chat window with timed comments. Watching an archived stream that contains interaction with the viewers is really messy right now since all the viewers comments drop in at the beginning of the stream. This makes following an old conversation between the broadcaster and the viewers close to impossible.

I can't help remembering the 90's with MTV's The Real World when watching and talking to people while they hang around in their homes and offices but my feelings remain, Bambuser (or Qik, or Seesmic) will change things. And yeah, i can't wait until Steve Jobs next keynote!

Tangible audio at KTH

2008-03-13T17:21:01-07:00

Two weeks ago the entire lab visited the final presentations from this years round of Physical Interaction Design and Realization. PIDR is a course held at KTH and is one of the main reasons to why we started this company. Therefore we like to stay updated on interesting projects designed and prototyped by the students in the course. A couple of weeks ago we also got the opportunity to show the Man Machine 2 exhibition to the students and give them our take on interdisciplinary processes and how to design robust productions for museums. We were overall very impressed with this years projects, however, three of them really caught our eye.

1. Klossen (“The block”)

The idea is to use this quite good looking and light shining block as a physical music sequencer. Each side acts as a button that triggers a kick, snare or any other sound. With the help of basic time quantization itÃ‚Â´s quite easy to build a nice sounding loop. “Klossen” is built with 3x3x6 RGB LEDÃ‚Â´s & basic digital buttons on top of the SunSpot sensor platform which means that all the code is written in java and that the block is completely wireless. The push of the buttons are processed in a computer and translated to MIDI notes, this makes it possible to connect the block to various audio/music software like Live! or Logic. To clear the current loop, simply give the block a shake and the built in accelerometer will pick it up and let you start all over again. Push the buttons, flip the block, watch the beautiful RGB LEDÃ‚Â´s blink and nod your head!

Project by Joakim Bergman & Jesper Jalvemo

2. UFC 2400 - The electronic flute

This group wanted to create an electronic version of the recorder, and they did really well. With the use of LEDÃ‚Â´s and optical sensors they created the holes on top and with a wind sensor they simulated the blowing mechanism. MIDI was the protocol of choice for this group as well which gives it great flexibility. What was especially interesting about this project was that the design and construction of the actual flute was awesome. The group had the benefit of having one person from the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design working with them and it seemed to have payed off. We are looking forward to the next version!

Project by Adam Gardefjord, Tobias Ter Laag, Anton Hedblad, Jakob Li and more

3. LED Jacket

Ever since we started working with interaction design and physical computing we have been talking about creating the LED jacket. I guess they beat us to it, although iÃ‚Â´m not sure we would have gone for the horse design.

Project by Marja Gustin, JÃƒÂ¶rgen and more