Yeesh.  A really short day in the LEMUR studio this evening.  Leif helped me out with note dampening on the guitar bot which helps with things like this:

VIDEO!

More to come tomorrow. The long haul for show prep (which happens on Friday, May 2nd) will be over this weekend. All my performance is belong to you.

Okay day three.  I had a vision in the shower.  That’s usually how it happens.  Change of plans somewhat.  Today I shifted focus from gestural mapping cueing to programming.  The “ModBots” / or the bots that are mainly percussive and tend to hang from the ceiling at LEMURplex / are easy enough to control using simple thresholding detection while wearing the TwitchSet.  But the bots with notes, i.e. the XyloBot and the GtrBot are much harder for me to control with any sort of fine resolution.  The GtrBot, for example, takes MIDI notes of 36-81, which means 45 note resolution.  I had been trying to control notes variations using one axis of the TriAx accelerometers on the TwitchSet.  An accelerometer is not a tilt switch and is a bad substitute for one in this case of trying to get 45 steps of resolution with a 180˚ rotation of my shaky hand.

Besides, I’m not a musician.  I’m not going to become a musician just because I have the pleasure of spending the next two weeks with musical robots.  I’ve decided to focus on the performative aspect of why I’m doing the residency.  Hell yes.  I think I’ve got something going here.  Below is a short clip documenting the partial results of today’s programming.  I didn’t write the song.  And I’m not going to tell you what song it is based on, or who wrote it.  That’s the surprise for the performance.  In progress:

Recently I spent my first significant amount of time at LEMURplex in Brooklyn as part of my April residency in preperation for the Resident show on Friday, May 2nd.  I’m not great with Max/MSP for logic, which seems to be the biggest hurdle for me right now.  That and not possessing the ability to write music are bringing me down.  I will not rest though.  Hopefully I’ll use these obstacles to make more interesting work.  Here’s a video of yesterday’s experiments:

“The 1492nd dorkbot-nyc meeting will take place at 7pm on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at Location One in SoHo.” And I’ll be showing my stuff! Experimental Devices for Performance comes out out of it’s fall hiatus and rears it’s experimental head to the SoHo masses. I’ll be featured with the other “Humid and Tropical” presenters Ted Johnson and Fiona Hallinan (aka Fink). Ted will be talking about “how to build your own secret laboratory in a small NYC-sized space and at a low cost, and thereby produce silly and useless gadgets” and Fiona “would like to tell a story about [her] first interactive experience between computers and people, which occurred when [she] was twelve years old.” I have no idea what to expect except that it’s free and everyone seems really very nice. So please come on out! Free (((BlinkCam))) pics!  (see below)

(Image by Lisa Max)

I gave my final Thesis presentation on Tuesday at noon at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU. The whole thing came very much down to the wire. I ended up builing the whole presentation in Max/MSP and Isadora. The idea was to have it look exactly like a Keynote or a power point, but with the ability to build interaction and live video processing into the mix. Overall, I think it went well. The archive is here, but I’ve edited off the first few minutes of the screensaver here as a standalone:

More ITP thesis info here. More ITP Spring Show ‘07 info here.

I gave my final in-class presentation yesterday. It was for Personal Expression and Wearable Technologies class. I had created the usual Keynote Presentation and was all ready to roll, when I was riding the train to the village in the morning and it struck me that this would be a good opportunity to do something different. Try to out with a bang. Prep for my actual thesis presentation. I knew and I know, I am not going to make a “performance” for the thesis presentation, but I do want to perform the presentation. I can use the devices to talk about the devices. Since I am focusing my final in wearables on the Prolixus (formerly known as the FaceMask) I thought it would be a good opportunity to use the device for what it does best (besides making people feel uncomfortable). I would give my presentation through someone else. I would speak for them. My mouth. Their face. I somehow tricked Kate Hartman into agreeing to help me out. I rigged up a microphone outside the room, and gave Kate the instructions about advancing the Keynote presentation. I could hear absolutely nothing. “Working the room” though obstructed view and no sound is not an easy thing to do. I’m still not sure what the feeling was in the room. Perhaps the documentations below will help. Thanks to Preston Noon for the video and Kate Hartman for the surrogation. The whole class did some pretty amazing work. I especially enjoyed Ben Leduc-Mills’ SMS (Secret Messaging Sweatshirt), Kyveli Vezani’s work with Ziplock Bags, and Addie Wagenknecht’s dirty little secrets. Video of the Prolixus below:

I ran into Ilan on the train back to Astoria a couple nights ago and we started talking about various things: About how people in Chicago are too nice. About his inflatable for toddlers. About my thesis. As I was describing the project to him, I nervously realized that in fact, I had gotten it wrong. I would need two camera’s per mask. I couldn’t just use two wireless cams unless I wanted to split the signal pre-wireless and preemptively route it to it’s own mask. I don’t want to degrade the signal on the wireless cams any more than I have to. So. Two cams it is. Here’s a test with two. For some reason the IR LEDs are still giving me some trouble. Apparently IR light is hard to diffuse. Try it sometime. Let me know.

My head fits in a bike helmet made for an 8 year old. This is troublesome to me. Though, I guess the label does say “8+.” I’m “+.” Sure. I made an impulse buy of the bike helmet today because I needed to buy another LCD screen for my thesis, but before I could do that, I would have to test the LCD’s I already have, which was the original idea for ordering them. I started to test for differences in quality. Then I realized I would need to test the screen under basically the same circumstances as the original one is currently employed. Which means attaching it to a bike helmet and pointing at my face. So. Before I knew it, I ended up with this. Oh boy. 8+. More about networking the two helmets later.

Proof of concept, but here we go. I’ve rubber-banded the TriAxs to my Chuck Taylor’s and stole some loops from Apple’s Soundtrack files. I’ve realized that this is funner than I thought it would be. I’ll have to spend a bunch more time on the max patch to get things smoother, but, even now, it’s a pretty decent payoff for effort. I’m ordering more accelerometers. Here’s the proof of concept.

I’ve recently been working with a couple Triple Axis Accelerometer Breakout Boards - MMA7260Q - available from Sparkfun. The process of getting these TriAxs up and running on a breadboard was a cinch thanks to Tom Igoe’s tutorial and Rob Faludi pointing out that I needed to take the sleep pin high in order to get the thing functional. I necessarily moved quickly to getting the TriAxs on to perf boards with an Xbee each. These will soon be incorporated into Experimental Devices for Performance so the implementation needs to be small and robust. They’ll most likely get a good smashing around.

Working with the Xbee API has proven to be extremely reliable and low maintenance for my needs. It certainly cuts down on hardware. No external microcontrollers are used in this setup. The TriAx gives out a range of 0 to 3.3VDC (the input voltage) on each of its X, Y, and Z axis pins. I’m sending that along via the first three ADC pins on each Xbee. The example below shows a quick test with a Max patch that parses the Xbee packet and maps the values to a gridshape’s rotation (X and Y) and position (Z).

I hesitate to post the video because there will most likely be more, better, and applicable documentation soon and because…well…the original background sound was completely uninteresting so I had to liven it up, but I know there are better uses out there for Herbie Hancock’s Rockit, especially since this demo is so very dry. I hope to do this song justice one day, but until then here it is: