Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall

August 19, 2010 at 7:04 am · Filed under play

“Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall…”

I have been wanting to play with Processing canvases that reflect one’s social state on the web, and I finally got around to it.

Above is a screen grab of my Processing canvas – the logic is simple – Dip into the twitter streaming api, if there is any occurrence of my twitter identity, then reveal more.

The revelation of the image (my own) is done through a simple algorithm – start from a single origin, and fork out slowly based on rate of twitter references.

The canvas, therefore, reveals the number of times a certain person is referred, and works best for twitter celebs.

I am still tweaking the visual style, and the underlying logic, but the framework already allows me to play with quite a few things…

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are we married yet?

July 18, 2010 at 6:52 am · Filed under design, technology

While en route to Finland from Sounds Like Graffiti art project launch in Bradford, UK (I will write about this interesting art experiment later), Supreet and I decided to stop on the way two weeks of leisurely workshops in Estonia and Latvia.  The workshops – titled New Media and Innovation Management: Workshop in Creative Industries – professes ambitiously to take a deeper look at how the creative industries can act as drivers for economic growth.

Dr. Benedikt von Walter - head of MTV's digital research team for Northern Europe

So as expected: there has been quite a lot of the usual hooblah and blaahblaah about innovation and digital technology and other such buzzwords that everybody seems to spit out these days (what do these words even mean anymore?).  I guess when you have worked in this area as long as I have, the intellectual output of such workshops is seldom the main point any more. Rather, such workshops provide us with the best way to experience the different kinds of creative energies and experiments that are going on in regions such as the Baltic States.  So despite some of the usual recycling of American cliches of digital openness, participation and digital revolution plus a few good speakers, the best part of the week so far has been the guided visits to the local incubators, art collectives and cultural centres such as the Culture Factory Polymer where probably the most interesting art/technology/business synergies are happening today.

The first week in Estonia is now done. Now looking forward to seeing a few more of such places in the lovely town of Riga.

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The Internet Of Things & What It Implies

July 1, 2010 at 3:47 am · Filed under technology

I recently attended the Conversation: The Internet Of Things & Augmented Reality – Convergence Conversation discussion / brain-storm meeting on the implications of ‘Internet of Things‘.

There are several companies and groups that are now focussing on this – one of the best examples of it being Pachube. There is no doubt that there are massive gains to opening up communication channels between various ‘active’ objects. Applications lie in several domains: energy, environment, SCM, reactive systems, so on and so forth.

Personally, I expect two primary variations of this:

Closed Systems: where organizations control their own silo of communication channels and devices. Example: yellow cab state and position monitored by a central monitoring system in the yellow cab company. Encrypted channels, and everything that comes with closed environments. This is already happening, btw.

Open Systems: this is the interesting bit – imagine being able to predict earthquakes (through resources like LISS, for instance) and tweeting it out. Or collision detection in traffic. Or reactive rooms, environments.

Post the meetup, I decided to chalk out the underlying architectural implications for  an open web of highly communicative systems, with the goal of opening up thinking around some issues that are bound to come about:

1. Unifying the communication language: we know about microformats and how long they have been in the pipeline. Especially for open systems that provide data feed, this is essential.
2. Handling data explosion that comes with Real Time systems – take the case of twitter, for instance. The scalability challenges they have faced are widely known. And this is when they aren’t doing any semantics yet.
3. Creating Relevance: as data explodes in volume, applications need to figure out a way to crunch and filter out the noise. There is a google right there in the making.
4. Smart usable applications: while you could create an application that makes your ‘car keys’ searchable by the public, you wouldn’t do that now, would you? Technology is not the biggest problem, creativity is.
5. Data presentation: interface is the king. With the volume of data, it becomes imperative that the interface / application is able to understand the deeper chaotic nuances of a ’state-based’ system, and make intelligent interfaces out of it.

One of the key idea that Kit Macgillivray of Real Time Project discussed was the concept of gazillion agents do one simple task, and yet, as a collaborative system, appears very smart.

I will be posting more on this later.

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particles, space and 3D

November 14, 2008 at 7:23 am · Filed under design

A few quick sketches. I am still learning the possibilities of Processing for doing simple and quick sketches. There are a few projects I want to use this in but, having no background in computers, it takes awhile to get my head around the electronic palette – objects, arrays, classes and such.

This here is a very quick experiment where I composed a palette with 5000 particles moving around semi-randomly in 3D space with their color subtly affected by the movement in the 3D-space (the z-axis). Instead of doing anything more fancy, the aim here was merely to experiment with the possibilities of this and to prove the concept,. Even this might look a bit more complex, in fact, I actually only used rectangles and ellipses to compose these images. I let the program run for a few hours and see what comes of it.

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