prosthetic knowledge

Gocen 

A developing handheld optical device which can read and play handwritten musical scores in real-time - via DigInfo:

The Gocen is a device which scans and plays handwritten sheet music in real time. It is being developed by a group at the Tokyo Metropolitan University led by Assistant Professor Tetsuaki Baba.

“First, the system looks at the stave, then at the notes, then at the position of the notes, to determine the high notes. In addition, it directly reads words such as piano or guitar. The computer automatically recognizes them, and changes the instrument. Also, for example, if this melody is in F minor, rather than C major, when the system reads the letters Fm, it has the ability to add four flats.”

The sheet music image is analyzed using the OpenCV library in combination with a unique algorithm. While the play head is above a note it will continue to sound that key, and in the case of stringed instruments, if you move it up and down it can make the pitch fluctuate. Also, the size of the notes determines the volume level and it can handle chords as well.

More at DigInfo here

CraftStudio 

Described as “a game to make games” … or a real-time collaborative game-making tool for the MineCraft generation. Here is a trailer featuring it’s developer, Elisée Maurer:

Games with user-generated content like Minecraft, Little Big Planet or Trackmania have made it clear that lots of gamers are creative at their heart and that, provided with the right tools, you guys can and want to build awesome stuff.

User-made maps are great, but we can do better! Introducing…

Real-time collaborative game-making, for the masses

CraftStudio is a multiplayer platform to create games and interactive movies. It’s about empowering gamers and blurring the line between playing and creating.

It makes a few trade-offs (a low-poly, pixel-arty look) to allow gamers with no particular experience to:

• Create, paint and animate 3D models (characters, objects) out of blocks.
• Craft infinite maps (think Minecraft’s creative mode), painting your own blocks to create whatever universe you want.
• Give life to their worlds using a visual scripting system.

It’s all real-time, you can collaborate with friends or strangers over the Internet. You can set up your own server or join an existing project.

It’s currently in Alpha build and Windows only, but you can get hold of it and find out more at the project’s website here (and more info at it’s old IndieGoGo page here)

Point Cloud 

Mechanical installation is a wireframe form which adjusts it’s shape according to a weather data feed. Video below:

Point Cloud is an attempt to reimagine our daily interaction with weather data. Weather has always had a unique place in our lives, because it has a multiplicity that encompasses both the concrete and the indeterminate. It is the intangible context within which we build our lives and our cities, but it is also the physical element against which we create protective shelter. Most of the time it is an invisible network that we can see but are not aware of; yet it can manifest in a spectacle or disaster, come forward and activate our senses, make us forget our rationality in delight or fear. With modern scientific and technological developments, we can now deploy sophisticated monitoring devices to document and observe weather. Yet despite these advances, our analysis and understanding of meteorology is still largely approximate, and in many cases, inaccurate. Weather continues surprise us and elude our best attempts to predict, control, and harness the various elements.

In contrast, however, the nuances of weather’s continuously shifting states are largely oversimplified as the information is transmitted into our daily experience. Our various home and mobile devices most likely distill a forecast into static representations, such as numeric values or simple infographics of sun, clouds, or rain. There is a deep discrepancy between the flatness of the visualizations we are accustomed to, and the rich mixture of tactility and perceptibility of our immediate physical experience. As a critical response to these issues, Point Cloud emerges as a sculptural form defined by a thin wire mesh, driven asynchronously by 8 individual servos controlled via Arduino. As whiteness of the hanging structure begins to disappear into the background, the viewer is treated to a constantly morphing swarm of black points dancing through midair.

More at the project’s Vimeo page + Flickr page

sketchPatch 

Browser-based real-time coding environment which is a great introduction to programming:

sketchPatch allows people to play with programming in a easy and fun way. You can write your own programs and run them in the browser, share them, or collaborate with other people making new versions of their programs.

You can use the site as a scrapbook, a portfolio, coding collaborations, hacking, jamming, jiving.

Also, we have invited featured artists to develop fresh and inspiring works for sketchPatch. We hope you will enjoy and be inspired by featured artists, as they are by you, and not be afraid to contribute to their code sketches.

We decided to use Processing as the programming language for sketchPatch, because it has been developed with ease of use and immediate visual output in mind. It is also open source and available to anyone. So, if you begin to learn Processing here, you can download the original Processing software from here, and run your sketchPatch pieces in it.

You can find out more about the project here