qDot

For the past month, I’ve been living in Vienna as part of as artist residency with monochrom. The main goal of this residency was to complete some projects for roboexotica, the robotics cocktail party held each year here in Vienna. This year, roboexotica is being held December 3-6, and now that I’ve actually seen my projects pour some drinks, I figured it’s time to present them to the world.

First off, there’s Adult Mario, the mario game that drinks and vibrates!

Then there’s Bartris, the tetris that’s also a bartender.

I’ll have a post next week that goes into the implementation specifics of these projects, but for now, all of the code is available at http://www.github.com/qdot/bartris.

POWEr from artificiel on Vimeo.

POWEr

While I was out flying my stunt kites this weekend, the wind ended up being a little iffy. So, after flying a bit, I decided to see what kind of things I could put together using just my iPhone. Thus, the ‘Day at the Ports’ project was born.

This is consists of 2 and a half videos (the half being a test one I took just to see if looping was going to work correctly). all of these were taken using viewfinders around the park I was at, Middle Harbor park in Oakland.

Both videos use a combinations of tracks generated by rjdj, mixed with the wind and environment sounds taken from the iphone mic while recording the video.

The first one is “Construction from Far Away”.

Construction from Far AwayfromqDotonVimeo.

rjdj page for original audio clip

I was really happy with this one. The quality of the viewfinder along with my shakey cinematography ended up inducing a bit of a dreamlike state in the video, and the soundtrack matched up just perfectly.

The second one is called “A Headless Sutro”.

A Headless SutrofromqDotonVimeo.

rjdj page for original audio clip

This one ended up a little harsher than I think I originally meant it to be. The viewfinders I was using for it seemed to move very quickly, so I decided to use an audio scene that was a little choppier. However, it came out also… schizophrenic in the end.

To show what I was using the take the video, and also to just remind myself where all the buttons were in the video software, I made a little sample video. Uses William Besinski’s The River, because, well, water. I’m original like that.

Test Water LoopfromqDotonVimeo.

All in all, I’m really happy with how everything turned out. Managed to make something relatively neat while just screwing around waiting for the wind to adjust its attitude (which it never did. Stupid nature.).

I really hate naming things.

Currently, my build system repo is called build_sys. It's usually managed outside of the directory I'm building in myself because all my projects use it.

However, when distributing source, that becomes a subdirectory (to include all the needed build scripts with the distro), which means it's linked off the project repo's root, i.e. [project name]/build_sys

Unfortunately, my build scripts create platform and build specific directories that start with build_* too, i.e. build_darwin_10.5_x86_release_static_distcc (yes I'm that long winded, you try dealing with single source heavily cross platform development with a single directory named 'build' and see how long it takes you to start doing it, too)

The easiest way to do a development clean on a project root is 'rm -rf build_*', which would also take out the build system itself if someone was building from an archive.

I was thinking about naming it compile_system, but that's kinda eh.

So, now, the name is "Compily Buildd" (or compily_buildd as the repo/dir name). You can see it at http://www.github.com/qdot/compily_buildd

Why? Well, it worked for Neverhood/Skullmonkies...

This is a picture of my first execution of a case in Forssim, an open source haptic wisdom tooth extraction simulator available at www.forsslundsystems.se/

Usually, the program is meant to run on Linux (or recently, windows too) using a Phantom Omni. However, since it works on top of H3D, and they just implemented libnifalcon, I can change the device setup to use the falcon, and it's pretty much cross platform otherwise.

The problems here are many-fold:

- I didn't install the shaders right, so the tooth skinning and deformation information is missing. Therefore, our patient has a cube for a tooth. As a cube myself, I consider this evolution taking its course.
- The falcon is missing the rotational degrees of freedom on the end effector that the omni has, so I can't tilt the pen.
- The falcon has a FAR smaller workspace than the omni, so I can't move the pen very far.
- I'm getting around 0.5 FPS for unknown reasons.

So, my pen seems to only be able to drill between the front and back lobes of the brain. Instead of a wisdom tooth simulator, I seem to have created a lobotomy simulator. Whoever is manning the forceps seems very confused about the position of the brain. We'll have to work on that.

Performance with Cubie from sadmb on Vimeo.

via CDM

I've been following Masahiko Inami's work for years, but I'd never seen this video before. You've probably heard me talk about GVS before, but check out this application of it. Evil.