The great thing about Twitter is, that you can discover things (and people) “by accident”. Like I did yesterday. And that’s why I discovered the blog Dinca.org and this really nice showreel from Japan artist Hiroshi Kondo:
Hiroshi Kondo aka STNW makes live-manipulations of pictures and videos as well. Absolutely fantastic stuff. Look here:
Canabalt commerce is growing. Today Danny B made the small Canabalt soundtrack available for download for a small price (Ringtone cuts available as well). You can download the 5 tracks for 3 dollars (or more, if you want to) or just stream it on the website. Interesting pricing-model. Similar to canabalt the game itself, that you can play online for free, or make it permanent available on your iPhone for 3 dollars as well. I am wondering if they will publish sales-figures one day.
The Phlow-Magazine finally released a new compilation with love. The tunes of the Creative Commons licensed music come with a really good dose of pop-, dance and funk-flavour. A huge counterpart to all that electronic- and techno-driven stuff you often find on the netlabel-scene. Apart from that: the artwork is lovely as well, made by Cologne illustration artist Jeannette Corneille. Handmade and ready to print-out and send via snailmail to all your friends. Contains music from all around the world!
The “Graffiti Research Lab” progresses with their self-set goal: to explore new possibilities with graffiti. Technology also plays an important role for them. Their latest work is the so called “EyeWriter“. It is an open source eye-tracking system, that allows to “draw graffiti with your eyes”. In order to so so, they use a webcam and some LEDs, to light the pupil and track it. The technology is low-cost. The idea of starting that project came from a real-life event. They teamed up with Tony Quan, aka TEMPTONE, who was diagnosed ALS in 2003. Since then, he got problems moving his body – except for his eyes. The EyeWriter now brings back the joy of doing graffiti again to him.
The research lab is progressing also in other fields as well. They established the “Graffiti Markup Language (GML)“, an XML-based language, to “exchange motion data of graffiti-tags”. They also opened up the “000000book (read: blackbook)”, a social platform for exchanging works, based upon GML.
The Assemblee competition is done – votings for the submissions are now accepted. The whole Assemblee was this kind of… massive! It was a cometition based on two parts. In the first part, everyone was invited to submit graphics, sprites and all other kinds of assets to make a game out of it. Not only the number, but also the quality of the submissions (warning, huge list) was awesome. A big pool computer- and gamegraphics. There was also a part about music. In total over 170 people submitted stuff. All this content is licensed under a Creative Commons license.
In the next step of the compo, this assets were used, in order to make games. In total 73 games were submitted. And they all look extremely cool. You now have the chance to make the Assemblee-organizers a little bit of work by voting. There are votings for the assets and votings for the final games. Whatever you do – have fun exploring this stuff. Votings are open till 3rd February 2010. Thanks to all participants for this!
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Wait what, 1000? As you may have noticed, Digital Tools (this blog) finally reached the 1000-RSS-reader-mark permanently (measured with Feedburner). Having 1000 RSS-readers is like turning 18 for a blog, isn’t it? Time to celebrate this! Tonight I will have a small elite party with mostly bloggers and creative-, and cultural-activists from the region. If you are in Cologne right now and want to join, please put me an e-mail or twitter #DT1000.
Devil’s Tuning Fork: Not only beautiful, but also innovative.
The student winners of the IGF 2010 student competition were announced. As you can imagine, there are high quality works among them, some have really innvative things to show.
My interest went to the game “Devils Tuning Fork“. It’s basically a game in the style of a “first person shooter”, but the interesting detail is provided by the texturing. The game is inspired by works of M.C. Escher and the echo-sounder / echo-location communication (like dolphings and bats do). You strife through blackness, until an “sound-event” is taking place. From there a lightwave is illuminating the scene. One of your tools is a “tuning fork”, that dispatches sound waves. The goal of this game was to “explore a new mode of perception through sound visualization.” Like if you were playing with your ears.
The game was made in about six months by a bigger team. The result looks cool, polished and that new visual perception really scores! They also had some kind of storyline, not too original, but also something “above the line”:
As a mysterious epidemic causes children everywhere to fall into comas, one child wakes up in an alternate reality. It is up to this child, the player, to determine the cause of the epidemic and save the other children trapped here. By way of the devil’s tuning fork, a magical instrument that allows the player to perceive sound waves, the player must find all the children and successfully escape this alternate reality, thereby waking up from the coma.
Update:
I found just another cool making-of:
