Blog


I'm currently working on a project with Greg Borenstein and Zeven Rodriguez, trying to use HTML5 video and the Processing.js javascript library to create a more interactive way of documenting electronic projects... more about that later.

This is a small example showing how to overlay a canvas element on top of a video element. The ultimate goal is to control both the Processing canvas and the video via JQuery. In this example I'm basically just setting the 2 elements to overlay each other via absolute positioning. The example is tested in Safari 5.02 and Chrome 6.04 on Snow Leopard.

Update: Greg tweaked the code to allow control of video canvas from within the Processing.js canvas. His code basically uses the mouseX variable in the processing.js javascript file and calls normal javascript (JQuery) methods embedded in the html page. Check out the link to the Github repo to download the code.

See the Example Source Code on GitHub

This video shows a light sculpture I built with Peter Holzkorn and Don Miller. The idea was to create a sculpture that uses light as the primary medium of communication. We created the sculpture with 4 long light bulbs hanging from the ceiling. The lights turns on and off in patterns, showing the almost flaming glow from each bulb when lit up. The idea behind the pattern was this: A digital byte consists of 8 bit, that is eight zero's or one's. The Arduino controlling the bulbs is converting a single letter from the alphabet at a time into an ASCII number and signaling this number in a 2-step sequence (a half byte at a time). This creates a continuous light pattern with similarities to morse code.

Growing up watching Tour de France with Danish film-maker and commentator Jørgen Leth on television has made  me a life-long fan of bicycling. From the history of bicycle journalism to the extreme sacrifices the riders must live through to perform at the top level, I am completely in love with the sport. This is also true when it comes to bicycle design. When my beautiful Fuji Track bike was smashed by a car a couple of weeks ago, I started looking at the 2010 bicycle designs and found this beautiful Eddy Merckx EMX-1  road bike that I completely fell for. Though I almost love everything about this bike, there is on thing that I - as a graphic designer - hate about most modern bicycle design: The amount of ugly logos and colors that destroy the beauty of the bicycle frame. I feel there's something ignorant about these designs, especially when considering the bicycle design from the past. Bicycles that people like Fausto Coppi, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault and Luis Ocana rode. These were simple, elegant and beautiful designed sculptures.

Just to make a simple test I removed all the logos from the beautiful EMX-1 in Photoshop, and I must say that the difference is enormous. It actually doesn't look like a bike for bowling team any more. Imagine what could be done with the color scheme to make this bike elegant. The biggest difference for me is the fact that now you actually see the beautiful, subtile logo on the front of the bike. Oh god, I would like to have my hands on one of these.

Before

After

I just released 4 new tracks with my band Silence is a Virus. The tracks can be streamed for free via Facebook, or downloaded for free via www.silenceisavirus.com. The genre is a combination of post rock and alternative metal, something between Sigur Ros and Deftones. You are free to distribute the tracks as much as you like, and if you enjoy listening to them, please join our page on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

Yesterday I participated in TechCrunch's HackDisrupt with a team of 6 other fellow students from ITP. The idea of the event is for teams to come up with an idea, create it and present it on stage within a period of 20 hours. Our project was called API For the World and consisted of a physical device and an API build in Ruby on Rails. With this you can turn anything with a power cord into a networked object. It allows the electric appliances around us to communicate with the internet, filling the gap between "smart" and low-tech devices. We're calling this a social network for everyday objects, because you can use an online dashboard to create unique profiles for different objects in your house and connect them to a variety of web services (e.g. let your lamp post to Twitter or you oven post directly to Patchube every time it's being used).

When the day started, we split into 2 groups: a group building the physical device and another group building the Rails app.

The group building the physical device started the day by building their own current sensor. Sofy wrote a great blog post about this (http://yuditskaya.com/wordpress/). The box have a current sensor, an Arduino and an Xbee to wirelessly communicate with a Processing sketch on your computer. The box was meant to post directly to the internet, but we couldn't get a static IP on the network. The box also has a power outlet, so you can connect the box to your power outlet and any electric appliance to the box. See Shahars blog post about setting up the code, and download the Arduino code via Github.

I started the day designing the webpage layout and converting this to static HTML pages. Cameron Cundiff scaffolded away in the Rails environment, and pretty soon we had a good looking website API. We used Github for working on the Rails code at the same time, and you can download the code for the Rails app on our Github repository. For hosting the application we used Heroku, which is an online hosting service you can push your code directly to using Git.

By the morning we had a fully functional prototype: By turning on a lamp we could post tweets to Twitter. We had a fully working dashboard, where you can create new devices, browse their messages and create new behaviors (connecting them to external API's like Twitter, Facebook or Patchube - basically all sites with an API).

It was definitely a great 20 hours of hacking, and it's surprising how fast you can actually build a prototype of your idea. Sometimes people tend to think a great project also require a great deal of planning (skethes, diagrams, user stories, etc..), but this weekend was a great reminder of how important it is to start producing immediatly. It gets you so much faster to the restructuring process that will eventually come in every project. It also makes you a lot less scared of it, because you haven't spent half a year getting to it.

Photos on Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/imagima/sets/72157623994972293/

Press Coverage:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/22/inside-disrupt-hackathon-video/
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/weblife/best-of-techcrunch-disrupt-hack-day-demos/1743

Visit the API for the World Website:
http://www.heroku.com