Cleaner technologies have to be created and implemented, regardless of profit. Yet that doesn’t mean there isn’t a vast profit to be made. Today’s innovative solutions not only to the technologies themselves, but also the business models that enable them to become ubiquitous can be guides to how we can develop a healthy sustainable future.

Watch this inspring VPRO Backlight documentary (50 min) and be uplifted by the potential for a fairer, greener future.

Happy new year!

The electronic design incorporates three double H-bridge chips, an Arduino and hacking directly into the robot arm kit’s motors.

The user operates the base of the arm by twisting their wrist left or right, moves the lower motor which lifts the arm by raising their wrist and lowering their wrist to lower the arm. The middle two motors are controlled by the user’s middle finger and the ring finger by bending them into the palm. Moving the finger into the palm a little raises the arms joints on these two motors while bending them fully lowers the arms joints. The index finger operates the claw in a similar way, bending the finger a little closes the claw and fully bending it opens it. Pushing the safety switch illuminates the light on on the claw of the arm.

From the perceived usage while on display, most people go through a small learning curve  to operate the arm before they are able to lift a marker (not a set objective, but something everyone attempted to do). Many users commented on how they liked the interaction, noting that they never looked at their glove, only the arm it’s self, saying they enjoyed the sensation of becoming almost cyborg.

A back-up hard drive for Time Machine (built into the OS). Do this ASAP. Works amazingly and all you need is a drive 2-4times this size of your built in drive. Should anything go wrong, everything is there. Should your MacBook get nicked, it replaces everything, quickly, on a new machine. Oh, and should you want to find your Mac if it does get knicked, check out http://hiddenapp.com/ (and remember to set up Little Snitch, mentioned below, to allow it to do it’s thing!)

SAFETY.

Anti-virus. I know people say you are protected by having an OS X machine, but the truth is it is only a matter of time before viruses will turn up for the Mac. A free virus checker for mac is out there: ClamXav – http://www.ClamXav.com

CONTROL YOUR NETWORK.

I am very cautious about what apps talk to what, and I want to know when my computer is registering with stuff etc. LittleSnitch allows you to control and filter what apps can get access to what. IE Want to stop xxx apps contacting home? No problem. Monitor which apps are using what resources? A click away from the tool bar. Perfect for controlling what you let talk to the world and finding out what your apps are up to. Nice. http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html

KNOW-tification.

Growl. A sweet notification system. http://growl.info/screenshots.php This little system allows all your applications to notify you in loads of different ways. Can just be a small note on the corner of the screen, a big MTV-style pop up from the bottom of the screen or a Push notification to your iPhone or Android phone. Makes you aware of anything, a download complete, a mail arrived etc. Even has priority systems and makes things ‘sticky’ until clicked (perfect for when people mention you in tweets). Be sure to download the plug-ins for Mail etc.

COMMUNICATION.

Aidium, Sykpe, Tweetdeck & Colloquy. Adium is the king of all Messenger applications. You can connect all your accounts to it and configure it to look completely unobtrusive while connect to facebook chat, MSN, Yahoo! chat, ICQ, Bonjour services etc.. It also connects to skype, although I load that separately. I love it- the only decent Messenger app to me. http://adium.im/ Notifies you about everything with Growl. Be sure to download the extras for further options. http://www.adiumxtras.com/ Skype I’m sure you know. I noticed if you take Skype and .net and mash them up, you get SKY.NET- hahahaha! Colloquy http://colloquy.info/ is a beautiful and fully featured IRC client. Tweetdeck is an AIR app you probably already know of.. makes things really simple to keep up with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more or less any RSS feed sets. http://www.tweetdeck.com/

WEB (dev) STUFF.

Chrome – the lovely thing about Chrome is  the fact that each tab is it’s own process, so each page runs effectively as it’s own app on the computer, making it FAST. http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en-GB/more/features.html Also Chrome has a brilliant and detailed debugger, making Javascript dev a LOT simpler. For FTP I recommend CyberDuck, http://cyberduck.ch/ it’s great, pretty fast and easy to use. For editing text files, I use BBEdit (the oldest decent text editor for Mac) http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/ or TextMate (which brags to be OS X’s missing editor), http://macromates.com/ but Coda http://www.panic.com/coda/ also works brilliantly to edit multiple files at once. CSSEdit http://macrabbit.com/cssedit/ is the best CSS preview and editing set-up I’ve found so far. All of these link up to CyberDuck to do online editing of files on the server, but online Apps are getting stronger, if you want to try building everything online instead of having different locally installed apps, try http://kodingen.com/ to do all of the above in a browser. For VNC connections, Chicken of the VNC http://sourceforge.net/projects/cotvnc/ is free and works perfectly.

COMPATIBILITY WITH WINDOWS.

Get Parallels and you can run Windows and OS X together at once… even drag and drop between the two. Perfection!

For Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents etc – you will find iWork the perfect replacement, especially Keynote for all sorts – not just building presentations, but mock ups of all sorts can be built in the wonderful drag-and-drop environment and exported out to almost anything. Pages is the Word equivalent and works much better in my opinion, and Numbers is your spreadsheet. If you are working collaboratively, I suggest using Google Docs as it allows multiple editors and you can be on the other side of the planet working together on building documents together simultaneously.

MISC / FRILLS ETC

- VLC -http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ the most compatible media player for OS X with a huge range of features such as repeating playlists, streaming and the ability to script it.

- Boxee - http://www.boxee.tv/ a great media player for use with that remote that came with your mac or now on their own little box. Better than the built in FrontRow as it allows applications to be embedded, any type of media to be played (including youtube etc) and is open source to boot.

- Mindjet Manager - http://info.mindjet.com/ A perfect way of mind-mapping ideas and linking them all together.

- Klok - http://www.getklok.com Working on different projects? Need to keep track of what time you spend on what? This does the job perfectly and much much more.

- Transmission - http://www.transmissionbt.com/ the Bit-Torrent solution for OS X. So smooth

So there you have it, my guide to getting on with OS X, the things that are not in the manual.

Feel free to comment and update about anything I might have missed out!

Lets talk about evolution theory… from Matt Jarvis on Vimeo.

Multitasking is a complex, albeit common, human activity where we try to keep tabs on processes, information and life its self. Yet according to Christine Rosen from The New Atlantis, there is neuroscience and anecdotal evidence that multitasking is a myth. We are continually shifting our primary conscience attention from one thing to another while exercising judgement on what needs our attention the most and monitoring all the background information. There is a mental state that was christened CPA (continual partial attention) by Linda Stone, a former Apple and Microsoft executive who says we are “constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events, and activities in an effort to miss nothing” and warns “we have stretched our attention bandwidth to its upper limits. We think that if technology has a lot of bandwidth then we do, too.”

Although the affect of information overload, multitasking and our capacity to handle lots of information is under continual debate, the way we interact with data has been largely visually and/or auditory based. A haptic medium could be a route to beat unintended attention deficits created already by the latest gadgets and services. In this paper we present a haptic device in the rather new field of Human Interface Design for creative exploration.

Our approach

The introduction and the study of a haptic feedback medium suggests the existence of the medium itself. We built a loose platform which is constituted by hardware and software on which we can built different applications that are suggestive on the directions that the medium would take. So we built a haptic harness.

The Hapti Harness consists of an arrangement of straps made of elastic soft material aiming in to maximising the comfort. The basic set up incorporates a strap around the waist (“the belt”), an arrangement of a V shape strap hooked on the front side of the belt and running horizontally along the torso onto the back side of the belt. An extra strap is placed around the chest, and all the vibration units are attached on the straps using Velcro patches which allows for flexibility of placement.

The used hardware
- 22 vibrating motors 2.5~3.8 V@70mA, at 200 Hz.
- 2-axis magneto-resistive sensors compass module; HMC652
- 32 channel GPS module; LS20031
- 2 TLC5930 chips
- 1 arduino Flo
- 2 XBees 1mW Wire Antenna
- 1 UItrasonic sensor
- 2 infrared proximity sensors
- Polymer Lithium Ion Battery – 2000mAh
- 4 AA 1.5V batteries

At present, a simple API is all that is required to interact with the harness.  Current implementations such us the HAML (Haptic Application Markup Language) are indicating the path which needs to be taken for universal development to take place. It would be ideal if HAML was covering the Hapti-Harness setup, but as yet, it mainly deals with haptics as feedback devices mainly engaged in tele-presence field work or virtual reality 3D environments, with a fair degree of complexity. The Hapti-Harness project is a simpler system and could be included as a part of HAML in the future, as this could become the standard which goes on to allow universal adoption of haptics to all other future haptic technological systems.

Prototype testing

Hapti-Harness prototype testing from Matt Jarvis on Vimeo.

This project wouldn’t have been possible without the Arduino community (who have built such an accessible electronic prototyping platform), SparkFun (for getting most components in one place a wonderful documentation of hobby projects) Cycling74 (for the MAX/MSP 1software) and Apple (for nice, working computers). Thanks to Grumpy_Mike (for the electronics support), Mikal Hart (for the Ardunio NSS, Flash and TinyGPS libraries), Maarten Lamers (for support with the GPS).

Special thanks must go to the following people who have provided various assistance, help, advice and motivation: Veneta Andersen, Stijn Belle, Clara Blad, Ghislaine Boddington, Arthur Elsenaar, Stelios Giannoulis, Richard Hardstone, Firat Kara, Dunya Kirkali, Zane Kripe, Eero Mella-Aho, Zameer Razack, Simon Skinner, Heike Sperber, Linda Stone, Taconis Stolk, Lieven Van Velthoven.

We will soon release all the information open source on it’s own website. Watch this space

Day 1

I had planned the perfect schedule where I would meet friends in 3 different cities. As the morning I was due to leave approached, the first thing to go wrong was the busses not running and so couldn’t get to the train station. So I took a taxi. Getting to the airport via the solid Dutch rail network was as easy as always, however the train was late so I was worried I was about to miss the morning flight. When I got the airport, I checked in my bag with all the gifts and was informed the flight was delayed for 2 hours. I wasn’t really surprised, the snow was building up all over the country. I waited, took coffee and read my books. The flight information kept changing, 3 hours, 4 hours.. Then it said cancelled. So I went to the information desk, where I waited for another 2 hours where they tried to deal with everyone waiting. I was offered another flight to another UK city in the evening, which I accepted. My plan was back on track, I rearranged my plans in the UK, somewhere to stay and transport from the airport. The plane was due to leave at 9pm. I waited. As 9pm arrived the display’s said the flight was delayed, then.. cancelled. I went back to the information desk where the queues were so long the staff were bringing out water and sandwiches for people. At this point I knew it was hopeless to think I would be in the UK tonight. There were people saying the airline would book me a hotel near Schiphol, however looking at the queues I realised that this hotel probably wouldn’t have space for me or that there might be someone more in need of it and so tried to get back to Leiden. The Dutch train network I had so come to respect earlier on in the day was now letting me down.

None of the trains were going to Leiden. I asked the NS staff and they kept saying there will be one in half an hour, for 4 hours there was none in half an hour. I watched the displays. They couldn’t be trusted, nothing was working in this amazing rail system. Finally one old industrial looking train turned up on another platform and the driver shouted “This is to Leiden ONLY!” – I ran up the escalators and down again to the platform and made the train. On the journey I called the only person I knew left to be in Leiden and asked if they could help me out- they did and brought me a bike to the station. The snow was thick and heavy, cycling another 5km was hard work, luckily I left all the gifts in my bag checked in at the airport. I relaxed, called my Mum and told her the situation.

Day 2

I called the airline, they never answered. I kept trying. After 3 hours I got though and they told me they couldn’t put me on a flight for that night as I booked though a travel agency and they would have to rearrange the flight, but they couldn’t get though to the airlines as they were dealing with their direct customers. They also said at present it doesn’t look as though the evening flight would be taking off anyway as so might be better to come to the airport where they could deal with me directly. I cycled to the train station. The trains to the airport were out of service. I gave up for the day and went to get a nice cup of tea with my Leiden friend.

Day 3

As soon as I awoke I could feel the sunlight on my face, oh what a feeling- cold but warm at the same time. I cycled into the train station- the trains to the airport were running! I got to schiphol around 10am and went straight to the information desk. I saw the beginning of the queue. I was searching for the end of it… I walked.. walked and walked this was the biggest queue I have ever seen! When I eventually found the end of it there was a airline representative which asked my about my situation. She agreed I was in the right place and in the right queue. I was shocked. I kept calling the my travel agent, who informed me they had a lesser priority in sorting out tickets than me being at the airport and so should just wait. So I did. The queue was so slow. I finished one of my books and started a new one. I couldn’t leave the queue as I was travelling alone and so drank the provided drinks infrequently and we passed a toilet around 4 hours into waiting. Around 6pm I was getting close, I could see the desk I was going to be processed at. She told me all the flights had been cancelled to my original destination, but there is one special flight arranged for a Liverpool footballer, Ryan Babel, which had a couple of seats left but will be leaving in 10 min – she told me to run! So I did! Getting though passport control, security and getting to the gate was a challenge but they waited for me and I got on the plane! Finally, it felt like progress. I was sat on a very small plane with only 3 rows of seats, two on one side and one be the window. It had propellers! The football player was sat at the front talking to the captain just before he announced- “We have to wait to have our wings sprayed by a special chemical before we can set off.” I waited again. Two hours later 2 vans with cranes attached appeared and started to spray the plane. One stopped halve way through. Seems it wasn’t working.. half an hour later another one turned up, however this meant we had missed out flight window in the queue and had to wait for yet another one. Just before midnight the engines started, the propellers were turning and there was a cheer though the cabin.

I landed in Liverpool at 1am. I was so happy to be home. I waited for my baggage, I was almost sure it wouldn’t be there and it wasn’t. I then ran though the airport to the coach station for the last coach into the city on the day before Christmas eve. I met my friends, then family and had a very good Christmas, however no one had their presents. I called the airports and the airline several times, it wasn’t until new years eve until they found my bag, still at Schiphol airport. On the morning of the 2nd January, the day before I was to return to the Netherlands, there was a knock at the house I was staying at with my bag. I finally handed some of my friends their presents and set off for the journey back to Leiden.

This year we have heard it so many times in the news that there is Chaos at the airports. I have had first hand experience of it. We can only plan so far as one tiny thing can change every expectation you have ever made.

Today we can travel anywhere on the planet, yet it may not be as simple as you expect. The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray.

If you think about how it was perpetuated in the time of the middle ages, society was a very hierarchical one, where the natural way of thinking was to expect what happened in the heavens to affect what happens on the earth. At that time there was a lot that was a mystery to us and it was much more dangerous and hazardous world than we consider the world to be today and at that time, astrology could offer a sense of having some control over our lives. The idea that there is some sort of hierarchical system is difficult to believe today. Yet astrology is still very popular and many people are very attracted to check the readings of the stars.

Einstein, born on the 14th of March, was a Pisces. Traditional astrological Pisces traits include being imaginative and sensitive, compassionate and kind, selfless and unworldly, intuitive and sympathetic. People born into this sign are known for their ‘airy-fairy easy-going look at the world’ and it was said that actually, Einstein was said to have intuitively reached his conclusions and understandings.

However, given that personality is so complex, what influence could the position of a planet have on an individual personality? There are all sorts of possible explanations about how astrology might work, but the most likely seems to be simple co-incidence. When we look at a clock on the earth, we develop a sort of feeling about the time. We have a feeling about the day every instance we look at the clock. It’s all about reflection. Some astrologers believe that as we go through life we physically and mentally we develop a rhythm and we can see aspects of our rhythm in a sort of universal ‘clock’ in the universe.

People who call themselves astrologers are extremely perceptive people who can help us think about our psyche and how we put our thoughts together.

We do now however, understand very much about how the universe actually works, but perhaps astrology still has a use in today’s society. Science simply asks question after question and what is so satisfying to people is certainty about things, even at a pseudo-scientific level. Maybe this is the placebo affect. The great thing about the placebo affect is that it works whether or not we believe in it. There have been scientific tests to test placebo and it turns out that we have a built in mechanism to benefit from a placebo affect whether we know it’s a placebo or not. After reading horoscopes we feel as though something has been made sense of. Being such a vague system and having so many interpretations makes it very hard to disprove astrology and sort of provides a mental framework for a solution. The worrying affect of this however, is that it may be part of a slippery slope of irrationality.

Astrologers have the ability to place a blind faith into a mechanism. They don’t know how it works, they just believe that there is a connection from the positions of the stars at your time and place of birth affect your personality. The important thing is that they believe there is a connection and, if you give them a map of the sky, they will tell you what affect that has on your personality.

Mathematics is a modelling tool. The way science works is that you observe the world, you make models of that world and mathematics is a useful tool for doing that. You can predict different behaviour and look for more behaviours. It is the experimental method, combined with mathematical models has given us the 21st century world that we see today.

This ‘modelling tool’ is exactly what astrologers use. What are we doing in science other than taking a mechanism of mathematics and saying that we believe the universe can be described by mathematics, we don’t know why mathematics is true, we just know that it works. We know that if we formulate a string theorem, despite whether there is any evidence for or against it, we know that it will provide results because it’s a beautiful mathematical theory and we believe in it.

If we take a physical theory, such as quantum theory and using mathematics as a modelling tool, what we are admitting is, this isn’t true in a philosophical sense. In quantum mechanics, there isn’t a 1:1 correspondence between our mental idea of quantum mechanics and how the world actually behaves.

Quantum mechanics therefore is a model which has a relative scientific truth and we will hold to it for as long as it’s born out of successful experiments. This is the only real difference between an astrologer reading their star charts and a scientist accelerating protons at 99.99999% the speed of light in a large hadron collider hoping to see the conditions that were present at the time of the big bang when we believe the universe was actually created. Maybe at some point we will discover that in another parallel universe, everyone just believes what they read in the paper.

We are a clever species. Humanity was managed to work out so many ways of exploiting the Earth’s resources to our benefit. We have used wood, coal, gas and eventually oil to create the planet we know today. Everywhere we look we can see the Earth, in a completely new form, from ships to planes, from curtains to our wristwatches. Our discoveries can be seen in how the periodic table- the Earth’s resources catalogued and tagged- has grown bigger.  With it, so have many new inventions. Today’s microprocessors use made with more elements of the periodic table than ever before. So now we know that instead of the earth getting cooler and the beginning of another ice age, the human race, without knowing it has taken control of the Earth’s atmosphere.

We saved ourselves from an ice age accidently, now we have to save ourselves from the reverse effects. Our planet is now getting too warm and we are the only race that can save it. We can look at ways of reducing carbon in the atmosphere, but also try and find ways to put it back into the Earth. There are experiments taking place that copy how the Earth has saved it’s self before from too much CO2 in the air. The tectonic plate collision of what is now India and the Himalayas. This crash was the Earths natural way of re-regulating it’s own CO2 levels before we took control. It has shown us that we can use types of minerals to lock the CO2 from the atmosphere back in to the Earth.

This is now truly a human planet and as humans, we have the ability now to continue to reap the rewards from our planet’s resources- or we can repay them. This is the true nature of evolution of man, the choice to survive as a planet together forever or survive as a race on our own today.

They’re great when listening to popular Dutch electro music!

You can download all 10 here: http://www.mattjarvis.co.uk/downloads/MMinimalist_visualizers.zip

To install (Mac OS X):

1) unzip the file and put them in your /Library/Compositions folder.

2) Open iTunes (quit and restart if it was open)

3) Select a visualizer from View -> Visualizers

Start the visualizer!

Please let me know what you think!

Enjoy!

Sound Space Interaction 2009

MAX/MSP is a great application to build an interactive sound environment. When we realised how we could connect to external inputs to MAX MSP from a Wii-mote, we got quite excited about building an interactive game using just sound in a space.

Our plan was to build a ‘lightsaber’ purely in sound. We researched how the sound designer Ben Burtt originally build the saber sounds for the hit film series ‘Star Wars’. The lightsaber is a sword with a column of brightly coloured energy in the place of a metal blade. We learned that the sound for the device, created in the 1970s, was made with totally analogue technology from source sounds such as the static of an un-tuned television and replayed though a speaker, then re-recorded live with feedback from microphone waved around in from of the speaker.

The available data provided by the Wii-mote produces values for the yaw, pitch, roll, acceleration and it has an extra infra-red camera. This meant we could not detect values for if the Wii-mote was swung around 360 degrees, only 270. In trying to cobat this limitation we tried using the built in infra-red detection, which proved much more complicated and was using up too much time whilst not really enhancing of the experience, and so decided to create the game limited to the 270 degree angle.

Using Masayuki Akamatsu’s aka.wiiremote object, we took in the values from the Wii remote and mapped the panning and saber sound to a quadraphonic audio set up though a MUTO device. (Careful here as it seems some of the drivers can cause problems, both on Mac OS and windows systems- personally I went though no less than 12 kernel panics after installing the MOTU drivers, in part I think because of the previously installed soundflower software from Cycling 74).

Our original plan was to use 2 of the sabers in 2 rooms so you could fight a ‘fight with the invisible enemy’, however we couldn’t agree a good way on how the fight could be won or lost in this scenario and so came up with an alternative and more exciting proposition relating to when the Jedi Knights are in training. In the story, the ‘younglings’ (children born with strong sensitivity to the Force) are trained to use their light-sabers blindfolded, so they should use ‘the force’ to engage with small laser-firing drones sending out small ‘lightly painful’ laser beam to the subject which was either absorbed or reflected by the light saber.

This presented an interesting proposition to build a sound-based laser battle ground, with lasers flying in from any direction and be deflected by the soundsaber we’d built. To do this we used a quadraphonic 2D speaker set up and placed sounds between them .We used the Freeverb~ object to position the saber sound and the lasers.

The objective was to build a 1 or 2 player game in a single or pair of rooms, which meant there needed to be a competitive element in the game. This challenge resulted in a the idea of an audio representation of a haze, where the player would  have increasing difficulty in locating where the laser sounds were originating from. In a single room set-up this means for every miss there would be an increase in a futuristic noise sound, in keeping with the laser and saber sounds. In a dual room set-up every hit would increase the noise sound to the other room, making it more difficult for your opponent to detect the incoming laser sounds.

The resulting project works very well in a single room and with further development could be refined much more to give an engaging sonic battle experience. Next steps would include attempting to build the project in a 3D sound environment and further define the sound design to compensate to different sizes of playing fields and work on other solutions for turning 360 degress in the room.

If you would like to set up yourself or play with the patches, you can download the source here.

Enjoy!

Seascape features a series of gradually unfolding digital seascapes created using imagery captured in real time by webcams installed at five key vantage points along the south coast between Margate and Portsmouth. The cameras are positioned at various seafront locations in Margate, Folkstone, Bexhill, Pagham, and Stokes Bay.

Stokes bay 29/03/09 13:27

Pagham 29/03/09 13:26

Bexhill-on-sea 29/03/09 13:25

Folkstone 29/03/09 13:26

Margate 29/03/09 13:26

Susan Collins’ Seascape, from East to West.

Each reveal in real-time an image being constructed live from the webcams installed at the five locations across the South East coast. Continually collecting this data – from top to bottom and left to right in horizontal bands – these images are constantly generated and renewed pixel by pixel in front of the viewer.

To coincide with the exhibition, a publication on the Seascape project will be produced by Film and Video Umbrella. The book will feature newly commissioned essays by Sean Cubitt and Nicholas Alfrey and include an extensive colour plate section of archive seascape images. To order a copy email books@fvu.co.uk

Seascape is commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and the De La Warr Pavilion and is supported by Arts Council England and the Art and Humanities Research Council. The project would not have been possible without a large number or organisations and individuals:

Leas Cliff Hall (Folkestone), Pebble Beach Café (Stokes Bay), Slade Centre for Electronic Media, Slade Digital Print Studio, Information Systems (University College London), OK-RM (Oliver Knight & Rory McGrath) with Electronest (Jerome Rigaud & Pierre Schmidt), Nicholas Alfrey, Alex Baker, Adrian Barker, Martin John Callanan, Ian Cartwright, Sean Cubitt, Michael Duffy, Luci and Simon Eyers, Tim Head, Matthew Jarvis, James Keith, Stephen Levine, Pat Seggery, Simon Schofield, Fiona Sherriff, Graham and Antje Southern, Jon Thomson, Mike and Jane Windsor.

YouTube – Extreme Sheep LED Art.

Go on! Enter the Twitterverse!