I finally pulled myself together and released the easing library I wrote for the Arduino last summer. It’s based on Robert Penner’s nice work, so all credits should go to him.

Anyway, you can find it here:

http://bit.ly/arduinoeasing

Check out this well written article by Kit Eaton at FastCompany.

The vehicles are extremely simple electronic objects, that seem to show a specific personality from their actions. The interesting thing is, that they are in fact extremely stupid, but because we (humans) only look at their actions without knowing why they act as they do, we tend to project our own logic and reason to them and thereby give them a personality that they actually don’t have. It sounds a bit complicated, but actually it isn’t – it’s just because I can’t explain it properly yet

I decided to base them on Arduino, though it might be overkill – the reason I did it is to keep flexibility, so that I later can upload more advanced firmware to the bots. Here’s a photo I took of one of my boards – unfortunately I put it upside down!

Anyway, of course I also snapped some photos of the first vehicle and it’s half-finished sibling today. Here they are:

You can see more photos in my Flickr photoset.

And as a small bonus, a close-up of the Beosound 5 controls and the Beo 5 remote – extremely well-engineered aluminum parts. Maybe a bit over-engineered actually?

Here’s the Beo 5 remote. I still don’t know what I think about the design though.

And finally: B&O’s office and factory buildings are in general a bit boring, but the newest one was actually quite interesting. Here’s a couple of shots from the inside.

You can see a lot more photos from our industry visits in my Flickr gallery.

Well, the last week before Christmas was dedicated to “Skills Upgrade”-courses. The class was split in two, one half was working with James Tichenor and Joshua Walton from Rockwell Group, on different proposals for interactive installations for SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen. The other half (which I was part of) worked with games and computer vision which was taught by Yaniv Steiner.

We spent the week experimenting with different small things within the field of computer vision. The first project we did, was the game “Style Wars” – a reaction game, where you use your hand as the game controller. The game is very simple: you and your opponent face each other like in a classic western duel. When you hear a specific bang-sound, it’s all about being fastest to draw your gun (gun = pointing hand). If you react too early (before the right sound), you lose. The name “Style Wars” doesn’t really make much sense – but the reason for the name is, that in the game, one player has the role of a flamenco-dude, the other player is a hip-hopper. I am assuming that it’s common knowledge that flamenco-dancers and hip-hoppers don’t get along very well.

Dave Mellis captured me and Erlend dueling in the video above. After making “Style Wars” which was based on simple Flash-motion tracking, we moved on to reacTIVision, where we made our own lo-fi reactable with a standard camcorder, a window and a desklamp. We used the table for testing and having fun with both Flash and Processing.org. One of the applications were a “body-mixer”, that made it possible to build your own custom CIID student (or freak) by mixing the legs, torsos and heads from all of us. The controls were three “dials” with fiducials underneath.

I uploaded some pics from the skills upgrade on Flickr – you should check them out if you want to see some of the other cool stuff people made, like the Dancing Game, for instance… The thumbnails are here:

We started using XML data from UN Data, which is an enormous source of information on almost anything. I started digging into data about alcohol consumption per capita for a wide range of countries, and came up with a small application that will let you filter, sort and highlight countries based on either country name or consumption. The app is just a quick one, so it’s probably buggy and hard to use, but at least I got around handling XML data in Flash. Click the screenshot below, to try the application.

Screenshot of the data visualisation of alcohol consumption per capita

 The second week, I started exploring other data formats than XML. I went with a set of datafiles in CSV-format from the Danish Statistics Bank. Here the main task was to parse and combine different files into one dataset, so that I could use it for a visualisation. The data i worked with, was about the number of fatal bike accidents in Denmark for the last ten years. Actually I was surprised to see how relatively low the numbers were, compared to the amount of cyclists here in the country. Again, usability was not my main focus, and I know there could be done a lot in this field, so please bear with me. Here my main focus lied in using layout organizers, which is why you will find three buttons, each representing a different layout.

Screenshot from the data visualisation of bike accidents. Beware of the bugs!

Click the part of Denmark you want to see the statistics for, and you will get a graphical representation of the fatal accidents. Red bikes are women, black are men. Mouse over a bike to see limited details on the accident.

Btw: For some reason the swf runs fine in the external Flash player, but acts a bit strange in the embedded browser player. Do you know why?