Here's a video of me at Nerd Nite San Francisco, talking about the OpenKinect Project. This covers the history of the project, as well as some examples of what's happening in the community. As this talk was given at a bar, it is probably rated R for language and adult situations.
Oh, what a crazy month it has been.
The Microsoft Kinect camera came out on Nov. 4th, and has eaten a good portion of my month, in a good way. Work with the OpenKinect Community has been one of the best open source project experiences I've ever had. I'm the lead code integrator on the project, as well as doing some platform support. Haven't had a lot of time to work on my own kinect projects, but it's been fun to watch what comes out of the libraries. The code repo is available on the OpenKinect Organization Github Site.
In terms of press around the kinect project, I did an interview with New Scientist Magazine as well as a talk at DorkbotSF. Video of the talk (audio is horrible, but I might redo it later) is available in 3 parts:
A few weeks ago, I got pretty dire food poisoning. I eventually felt better, and for some reason ended up with an emacs jerkcity mode too. I'm not sure how these things happen.
For a quick rundown on maintenance of other projects and interesting news:
After 10 months of silence, it's time to get things moving on here again. First off, I've created a new website for all of my Max/MSP and PureData externals. After 5 years of creating externals and having people find them randomly, it seemed like a good time to start advertising them like an actual developer.
np_mindset version 1.1.5 released
I've also been getting a few requests for my Neurosky external lately, which I never actually finished after the biometric presentation project last year. So, I've tightened it up, released one non-working version, and have now released one slightly less non-working (or more working) version! Version 1.1.5 should allow you to reliably pull data from the mindset using Max/MSP, though the CPU usage is still on the high side, and it still crashes horribly on PureData. There will be a version 1.2 release that addresses these issues soon, but this should work for the time being.
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.
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".
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".
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.
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.).
