Notes from Knut

This weeks group task is taking shape. Read the description over at Fan Fan's blog . Right now i try to code the user interaction part of it. How to move the bird with an illusion of speed and control. It is quite difficult to make the motion natural, but it will get better over the next few days. Once that code is good, the rest is a matter of filling in the emty areas of the levels with obstacles and other funny matter.... THE CODE The Code does not paste well into blogger for the moment. Will have to do it in another way later.

The classic issue with gaming is how to make a level. How to do that in processing? One way is to use images as base for levels. Important here is to use png's and not a lossy format (e.g. jpg). The idea here is to make a small image (light in bytes) that can be used as a "map editor", then processing checks each pixel and draws a square corresponding to the image, but with a rectangle that can be used as a boundary in the game. Several interesting code snippets can be found at workshop.evolutionzone.com . Line Intersection Box Collision Smooth Moving with cursors Is some of the topics covered.

In a team effort with Fan Fan and Natacha the latest assignment is to make a game using processing.org. It will be a challenge, for sure, but i'm looking forward to see the result. We need a lot of ideas to start with, so we can choose the best to develop into the final game. So my thoughts on what to do is as follows: I've got three words that i'd like to describe the final game with: Engaging Speedy Colourful I have an inspirational favorite (Never tried it, but it looks fantastic): Locoroco: One game could be about motor-/coordination skills , where you can train yourself into a rythm so that one can master operations that look impossible from the outset, like DDR or similar games. The interface needs to be simple. Another game could be more a twist on existing 3D racing games. But instead of going for realism, the enviroment and physics should be more abstract or surreal. A lot of the games out there does not embrace the possibilities of the more fantastic enviroment

Well, it takes time. While trying to generate different motions i got the above image. It's generated by several dots moving and leaving a trail. The motion is a circle modified by dot size and age. The belov image shows the evolution after 6 minutes.

We have now gone through the basics of programming java in processing.org. It is really interesting and reminds me of the days when i learned SIMULA back in '98(!). Now i just need to loosen up my creativity to make something nice. Christer  is very good at that. Just take a look at this: Good lad, that one!

Objektfotografering, saksopptak eller "packshot" betyr å ta bilder av objekter eller flate ting for høykvalitetsbruk. Til print er kompakt og slr mer enn bra nok. Til trykk må man opp i mellomformat-storformat. Digitale bakstykker til storformat eksisterer i fleng på byen og kan være verdt å bruke ved produktfoto. Men å kjøpe noe slikt til eget bruk (70K-220K) er ikke noe poeng. Nye Kameraer Tidl. Et bra kamera varte i flere generasjoner. Nye kameraer krever en ny tankegang. De må byttes ofte siden teknikken er mer komplisert og blir raskt utdatert. Levetiden til d-slr er blitt redusert til 4-6 år. De er svært utsatt for kondens som ødelegger elektronikken. Mange navigasjonsknapper som kan gå i stykker. Det har heldigvis utviklet seg slik at man kan legge investeringene i linsene som kan taes med videre til nye generasjoner hus. Linser Zoom - Mange brennvidder - Fra Tele (optikken forstørrer) til vidvinkel (optikken forminsker). For foto av mennesker bruker man gjerne litt t

Director, mobile development, NRK The battle order at NRK is TV, Radio, Web, Mobile, Teletext. At least that's how it was. Proper Internet service started 2000-2001. So NRK has a bit of catching up to do. But on mobile devices NRK started even before the first wap platform and therefor has a top 3 status in Norway on mobile devices. BBC was traditionally the biggest service provider online. In half a year Youtube sped past BBC and doubled or tripled BBC's size. Watching viewing patterns is an important thing to keep an eye on to check if changes in the service reaches the target group. The term "user generated content" is a bad term on what's going on. Usually people publish pre-generated stuff from television. How to get the content people ask for/want? Several projects on NRK focus on publishing genuine content from users (user created). Old shows in new wrapping, "Bit for Bit" f.eks. The local elections 2007 online was a huge success (why did i not kn

Knut Karlsen Pang Poster Originally uploaded by knut: Workshop poster for Visual Communication Course at AHO. Task was to communicate a story from the paper workshop at the school.

I now have changed my blog into my general blog with adress blog.bareknut.no wich will be my main focalpoint this fall. So the interactions blog will be a tag on the blog wich will contain other themes as well.

Drew Hemmet talks about his projects in "locative arts/media", some very cool projects! The most interesting in my view is Loca: Set to discoverable . With bluetooth and wi-fi there is networks independent of the big telecom companies that has yet to be used to it's full potential. "Loca" explores possibilities within the bluetooth protocol which is quite open for interesting communication. Drew Hemmet also runs a festival called futuresonic. He mention it himself, that he is not an artist, but still he uses that term. I think that is misleading and that it confuses people. Many of theese projects are very cool research projects but they are mystified and risk being not taken seriously if the always sticks the "art" sticker on them. But thats my view. Free media is all around us, from bluetooth devices to wireless (2,4 ghz) surveillance feeds. This is a source that can be explored and used more. Michelle Teran had some nice thoughts and research into

Talking av urban interface / oslo

I was trying to change to my favorite browser, Opera, but the blogspot login procedure fails! So now i will have to use both iexplorer and opera for my daily net fixes. I did finally log in with Opera, i had to click on a spescific place in the white space where the log in graphics supposed to be...

He likes it! And i get to test posting to my blog with my K610i!

by Sneve Martinussen P1. Game Design as a tool for research and development of physical interactions. http://www.pangalacticstudies.com/ The game is a standard online rpg system. The player explores the story through physical and digital experience in the city. Your game character is part real (yourself) and virtual/avatar. Tasks are given by mail and can be solved in the real world. But they focus on how to tell a story without paying too much attention to, or spend time in front of the computer or working to solve the tasks. They borrow from classic adventure games (sierra etc.), strategy games (turn based), classic rpg's(diablo), live rpg (time consuming, but funny; stalking, research, "killing"). (The concept) is to capture time in the "Sunday stroll" to give the users the time to participate. The Plot: Alien invasion, the character looks like an octopus. They shopped around for new age/conspiracy online and used parts to form the plot. The physical avatar w

a presentation of the diploma by Marianne Askheim Exploring new ways to interpret Monuments into a modern tradition. (Interesting subject, but it seems like she was a bit distracted by the formalities in writing a diploma/master thesis.) She has written a very detailed theoretical paper on the subject. A thorough research into what monuments are and how people and society interacts with monuments. She says she used too much time on the theoretical part of the paper, resulting in too little time on the interaction prototypes describing new monuments. Notes: Using HTML as language to write the resulting paper seems a bit unnecessary and resulted in a text based digital presentation, witch she says was a problem. Case; Humanisten Fritjof Nansen: Nr. 1 challenge, the huge theoretical work made the ambitions for the case maybe too big. Then the problem was how to communicate the values too the responder/user of the monument. The concept is a monument at Oslo City Hall that resemble a field

Using sensors on surfaces one can trigger sounds that gives new dimensions to your enviromnet.

I looked up the book that UIO uses in the basic course in programming. It's called "Rett på Java" (Norwegian). I think i will buy that one as a refeence tool.

Moving past the basics reveal a huge potential. But the increased complexity makes it harder to achieve what i want. And that is frustrating. I'll update later with any results. I'll probably use this a lot: http://www.processing.org/learning/index.html

http://www.processing.org/ Now things start to warm up. Processing looks very promising as a tool to quikly move into interactive realtime graphics. And it's open source. Combining programming wih a graphical output is very satisfying. Try inserting this code into processing: float x,y,rad,colourR,colourG,colourB,speed; void setup(){ size(1024,512,JAVA2D); x=0; y=height/2; rad=random(10,50); colourR=random(0,255); colourG=random(0,255); colourB=random(0,255); speed=5; } void draw() { x=x+speed+random(-2,2); y=y+(sin(x/15)*random(2,20)); noStroke(); fill((255),(y/2),random(50,200)); smooth(); ellipse(x,y,rad,rad);} void mouseReleased() { x=mouseX; y=mouseY; rad=random(10,50); speed=random(2,20); } This results in a generated image like this:

It has developed from strictly commandline programming to visual programming enviroments. John Meada at MIT developed a program called "design by numbers" for designers and visual artists (2004). Processing , was released in 2003. And has grown into a widely used tool for artists. The software is a good startingpoint for learning programming. The goal is to have people make computational machines working for they needs and purposes. Something like the GUI that made computers generally available to the public. Processing vs. Flash: Processing can do more detailed and complex animations and ofcourse not confined to browsers. But you loose maybe some control and the interface is more complex.

“Helping businesses become more successful, public services more efficient and designers more effective” BDC They have a variation of publications and do a lot of research. See Youtube for videos from them. And more interesting he suggested: Five Design Books, (must read): 1. Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte 2. The Long Tail, Chris Anderson 3. The Tipping Point, Malcom Gladwell 4. Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt 5. The World is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman

Even Westwang talking: underskog.no is a service for sharing whats on in Oslo, entered by members of the site. The idea is to catch the not so well known events so more people get access to them. The page has a relative low member count, and many users know each other. The frontpage is very long and serves a calendar and news section that is very detailed. But it can be filtered into more "relevant" content. They have no capacity for pictures so they tie in flickr accounts automatically. Meant only for one city (Oslo), but peoples creativity expanded it to not so related places, and the site has to expand, eventually, to other towns. The comments functionallity has been a hit. And by encouraging this by added functionality the discussions has grown enormously (4K commensts etc.) They have focused on how people can be positive. I.e. the problem of getting people to behave. They enable people only to be positive be not having functionallity to be negative (i.e. thumbs down). T