Hogtown Consulting

I’m working on an update to the TXTris projection system. You can read about the original and details on how it works. The gist is that it’s a txt message projection system that is ‘aware’ of physical obstacles placed in front of the projection screen.

This new version uses JBox2d, a open source code library for doing in game physics. I’m using it to provide much more realistic behaviour from the text. Now it slides, bounces, flips and falls in a realistic way.

There’s a grainy video after the jump showing how this looks working against my computer monitor. The final will be a projection at wall size.

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Earlier this year I was lucky enough to spend 5 months as a resident in the Canadian Film Centre’s New Media Lab programme. This was an opportunity to learn from a great faculty of ‘new media’ experts and then to spend time working within a team to develop a prototype project.

Our team, Angella Mackey; Deiren Masterson; Jeff Wright and myself, found common ground in an interest in using technology to strengthen human relationships at a distance.

Over an intensive 10 week production period we designed and built the Gaku you see here (in fact we built a pair). Gaku is a stand-alone device for use by grandparents and grandchildren to communicate, sharing photos and recorded messages.

Special thanks are due to Howard Suissa of Suissa Computers who helped up take our design for a wood encased, physically controlled computing device and make it a reality.

We’ve had a great response when we show the prototypes and we’re currently looking at options for moving forward beyond the prototype stage.

Here’s a visualization of the results of Canada’s recent election I’ve been working on.

The idea is to present the results in a way that allows you to explore in interesting ways. The data presented is pretty straightforward, with a group of coloured blobs representing the votes for each candidate in a riding.

I added one extra feature, a black ring that shows the votes for candidates other than the winner in each riding. This seemed particularly relevant for this election, where less than 38% of the popular vote went to the Conservatives yet they get to form the government.

You can explore the results:

• as an image (non interactive, but quick)
• through an applet (may not work on all browsers. I’m working on it)
• or as a downloadable application Windows, Mac or Linux

If you have suggestions, thoughts or what have you feel free to leave a comment or get in touch.

I’ve been thinking about technology art projects and installations a lot recently, what makes for a good experience and what falls flat. This is what I’ve come up with, there are just too many pixels.

Of course pixels are wonderful things. They make digital data (also great) into something we can see and understand. So what’s my problem? The problem, I think, lies in the ubiquity of pixels which has led us to become very difficult to impress with things pixel based. At least that’s my working theory.

I formed this idea while exploring Toronto’s Nuit Blanche at 6am Sunday morning, which may say something about the strength of my idea. Two installations I saw that early morning illustrated this pixel problem.

On the surface the two pieces, Overflow by Michel de Broin and Purified by Fire by Matthew Suib, have many similarities. They’re both about elemental forces, water and fire, and the both centre around the windows of an otherwise ordinary building. However my experience of the two was very different, I stood quietly and watched the waterfall in Overflow for several minutes but only glanced at the projected flames of Purified for a few seconds before moving on.

Of course these reactions are only mine and there may be many factors to explain why one piece really resonated with me while the second didn’t. But I think it’s that pixel thing, the flames were nicely rendered and well projected but they were still just pixels and not really fire. The stream of water falling from a second story window was real though, and I think it was the physical reality that made this piece work for me.

I plan on putting this theory to the test in a few projects I’m working on. Hopefully more to come soon.

Photo credits: pgleonard and basic_sounds

I’m eyeball deep in a great project to build an interactive system for 250 5ft, colour LED lit balloons right now. I’m collaborating with David MacAllum and Gabe Sawhney and we’re working with an awesome installation by KPMB for the Luminato festival.

update post-event: We, Media Lab Toronto, worked on sound reactive lighting effects that ran at various points throughout the week. We were given special billing along with the Silent Rave event (slightly odd, given the sound reactive nature of our setup). Gabe built on the control system I had put together in Processing and came up with a really elegant system for controlling the lighting colours and rhythm by hand. The night was earily silent (as billed) but loads of fun. Raju Mudhar from The Star described it like this:

“With the choreographed lighting from the balloons in the square, it did feel a bit like an outdoor club. But more than that, it was spontaneous and fun. People shared earphones with those that didn’t have. Every festival in town could use more of these types of moments.”

You can read more at Media Lab Toronto and see photos of the setup, silent rave and some rainy shots.

At root the idea of net neutrality is that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who provide our connections to the Internet should not discriminate against data traffic based on it’s origin, type or destination. Net neutrality may seem like an arcane concept, but it is an extremely important cornerstone of maintaining the huge potential of the Internet as a place for innovation and change.

Bell Canada unfortunately don’t seem attached to the idea of net neutrality. Bell Sympatico, the ISP arm of Bell, recently started throttling certain types of Internet data that it’s customers use. In PR speak this is referred as “traffic shaping”, in human speak “slowing down”.

As an example of what this means, lets say you are a Bell Sympatico customer who wants to download a copy of the CBC show Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister that was officially released by the Ceeb last week via the peer-to-peer technology BitTorrent. You might find the download speeds rather pokey at 30kB/s or less (not much better than in the old days of dial-up Internet). That’s only one tenth of the 300kB/s plus speed that you might expect under ideal circumstances based on the technical specifications of the connection for which you pay Bell $40-50 each month. That gap between actual and ideal download speeds is caused by Bell deliberately blocking your download, to “protect” their network from excessive use.

Not only are Bell applying this throttling to their own customers, but they are also now throttling access on the parts of the network that they rent to third-part Internet Service Providers. So as a consumer you can’t even turn to a more enlightened ISP to avoid this throttling, as the chances are they rent their network from Bell. This is a blow to the idea of market competition and consumer choice that is the very reason that Bell is required by law to rent out access to its valuable “last mile” network.

There are many, many reasons that this is an important issue and one where Bell seems to be firmly in the wrong. Here’s what it boils down to for me though: it has become increasingly clear that the Internet presents a huge opportunity for change, growth and development in many areas of life from culture to business. For one of Canada’s tiny handful of major ISPs to arbitrarily decide what can and cannot flow across the Internet to Canadians is hugely damaging to the openness and non-discrimination that is essential to the way the Internet works. If Bell have a problem with the capacity of their networks to provide the access their customers want, as they argue, then they need to invest and improve not clampdown on legitimate network use.

Read more from: WirelessNorth.ca, Michael Geist, Mark Kuznicki, public sector unions and many, many others.

Starting on March 10 (mucho soon now) I will be joining the Interactive Arts and Entertainment rogram at the Canadian Film Centre.

The five month long program is divided into two main components: an instructional component and a self-directed production component. The two and a half month instructional component consists of 10 weeklong instructor facilitated modules covering the following main themes collaborative creativity, interactive narrative, new media forms, and business development.

This was a fairly last minute opportunity, but seemed like one I didn’t want to miss. I’m looking forward to having 5 months dedicated to learning about this area, one I’ve been growing more and more interested in over the last couple of years. So things are likely to be quiet on the Hogtown side of things for a while, though I am still doing some client work my time is obviously going to be limited.

Actually it isn’t an all knowing table, but I have been working on a prototype table interface that can recognise objects and respond to them.

The project is based on the Reactivision software. Which takes care of recognising a specific set of amoeba looking symbols and reporting their position.

The underlying tech is fairly simple, though getting it right (or at least close) turned out to be a pretty big job. The surface itself is a perspex sheet with a sheet of filter applied, so it can hold a projected image. Underneath the screen is a camera, to recognise the objects placed on it, and a projector, to display the interface. There is also an infrared light source and the camera is filtered to allow in IR only, so it isn’t confused by the light from the projector.

The interface is certainly only a fraction of what is possible with this system. The majority of my time went into the physical setup and I wanted to get something done, so this is a quick hack in Processing.

I’m tired, but excited, after what might be called the ‘launch’ of Media Lab Toronto.

MLT is an idea, or really a bunch of ideas, and some people (Dory Kornfeld, Michael Pereira, Gabe Sawhney and I so far). The ideas tend to revolve around new media, technology and art (with some knitting and laser beams tossed in).

Tonight we became somewhat tangible with our first installation, TXTris, at CaseCamp6 in Toronto. TXTris is an interactive, SMS controlled installation that mixes computer generated with the staunchly DIY physical. You can read more over at Media Lab Toronto’s blog.

There is no shortage of ideas for cool thins we can build, assuming we can find a way to balance this with paying for roofs over our heads (maybe even have it help with that). Tangible table top interface, non-screen projections, LED stuff, the list runs on. Keep watching.

October 10th was election day here in Ontario, and gave me the opportunity I was looking for to dive into a Processing project.

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions… [It] is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.

The plan was to put together a data visualisation to explore the votes data intuitively, not just the same old percentages and charts. I think I had some success and it was definitely a good way to dive into Processing, even though it took about 500% longer than I anticipated spending. I’m actually using the 2003 election data here, but plan to update once the complete 2007 results are downloadable.

You can play with the online tools, see what you think. Comments, questions, offers all welcome. Leave a comment or email me.