observations and reports

Clock Opera - Once and for All (via sargespike)

totally digging this song.

hypem

Palance - JW and Blaze on Vimeo (via Vimeo)

Ha, that totally made my day!  It even has cookie monster!  and a bouncey bounce!  at the office!  with gratuitous furry references!!

Recognizr, an application that lets users point a smart phone at a stranger and immediately learn about them — combining computer vision, cloud computing, facial recognition, social networking, and augmented reality — has been developed by The Astonishing Tribe (TAT), a Swedish mobile software and design firm.

A user points the phone’s camera at someone nearby. Software then detects the subject’s face and creates a unique signature by combining measurements of facial features and building a 3-D model. This signature is sent to a server where it’s compared to others stored in a database. Providing the subject has opted in to the service and uploaded a photo and profile of themselves, the server then sends back that person’s name along with links to their profile on several social networking sites, including Twitter or Facebook. (via Tech Valley Computing Culture)

Chilly Gonzales: Piano Talk Show with A-Trak (Part 2)

tonight vs. princess superstar, at joe’s pub.

Micro helicopters, the kind that fit in the palm of your hand (and sometimes spread holiday cheer) are huge fun — and hugely frustrating. Have you ever tried to get one to hover in place next to another? Impossible! MIT thinks it can do that, not with just two but thousands of the little beggars all hovering in harmony as part of a project called Flyfire. By using LED-equipped drones the project pledges to build free-floating 3D displays, endowing them with enough smarts and positional awareness to organize themselves into an airborne canvas. (via MIT’s Flyfire paints images in the sky using micro helicopters, is apparently top-secret — Engadget)

Automatic Glassware | Jesse Stiles

“Automatic Glassware” is an electronic installation work of hundreds of autonomous light and sound generators that collectively produce an evolving field of audiovisual polyrhythms. Inside glass jars a simple circuit fires an LED and actuator at one of three musical intervals. As time passes and batteries slowly die, the individual generators align and drift from their neighboring generators creating semi-random shapes of light and sound that course throughout the installation.

2009
Circuits, LEDs, actuators, glass jars