Early October we had the chance to have Jake Rathburn playing live at the Dingfabrik in Köln. I was asked to make a little bit of light for the live show. What turned out to be a quick and dirty videobeamer-effect became a mesmerizing visual hightlight of the show. It was the first time that I set up two beamers for a show, one beamer just for throwing a visual pattern onto the actor on stage (I named that pattern “Jaketapete” by the way…)

The whole thing was so successful, that we want to go into the next iteration. There will be another video shooting with Jake later that month and we will do something with a bit more of preperation than this first shot. Expectations are high, let’s meet them!

UPDATE: And here is the first result of the next iteration.

“Hello Snakey !!” is the name of twitter-based snake-like game, that comes in best pick-up-and-play manner. Everyone can instantly join the game and help Mr. Snakey solve interesting missions.

Background

SnakeWare is the name of a small game research-project, I started at the “Interactive Cologne Hackathon”. The topic of my hacktrack was “City Serious Games” and I came up with the idea of a game, that is always ON and where everyone (all around the city) is able to connect to. All designed in a pick-up-and-play manner. To keep things simple I started with a simple game “Snake” that almost everybody knows. It is recognized and understood by most of the people instantly, because many people are already familiar with “Snake”. Next I choose “Twitter” as input device, because many people already are using Twitter and Twitter seems to be a good way to send and interpret control-data.

In SnakeWare you use Twitter to control “Snakey”. Everybody can instantly join the game, just by sending a Twitter-message. The SnakeWare client can be downloaded and shown, videobeamed or else. All clients are always in-sync and show the same game-action running.

Work in progress screenshot (history):

I just made a small page about my VJ-work. It’s available at nodepond.com/vj. There is also a tumblr, where I post VJ-screenshots from time to time.

Finally the video from the Make Munich projection mapping has arrived… *blink, blink*

Here you can see, what we made already one month ago at the Make Munich Maker Fair. It is a showcase of the current development of the projection-mapping project at Dingfabrik in April 2013. The project is developed by Alexander Speckmann (mostly the logistics and material parts) and Martin “Nodepond” Wisniowski (mostly the code-parts).

The new features in this version are a) beat sync abilities of the projection mapping, b) new ways to program content on the projection mapping with a simplified API (still in development), c) interaction. For interaction we used a MaKey MaKey and some fresh fruits to play various programs on the figure. The kids loved it!

The current work-in-progress mini-site about the projection mapping tool “Sentinel” can be found at http://sentinel.nodepond.com. The papertoy was designed by Nick Knite.

This weekend I will showcase the latest development of my projection-mapping tool “Sentinel” at the Make Munich makerfair. We have a Dingfabrik-booth where the mapping will take place. It is about characters and paper-toys. And maybe there will be some interaction with a MakeyMakey as well.

In case, you miss this fair… Two weeks ago there was a really nice article about our projection-mapping-projects at the well read German netzine Spiegel Online Netzwelt.

This is a short feature film Alexander Speckmann and me did last year for our very first projection-mapping at Evoke2012. This film hanged around at YouTube for quite a while and I always forgot to post it here into this blog.

Meanwhile I am still working on the software-part of the mapping stuff!! It grows and grows, the name of my new software is “Sentinel” and will be shown at some more events within the next few months. Keep on watching this site and Dingfabrik-events to see it!

I participated at the Global Game Jam 2013 and came up with a promising gaming idea, suitable for disabled (blind) people (and scored the “Games for Change“-badge with it as well). It’s a puzzle game, where you have to “match” musical pattern. The game is just at a prototyping-level, but in the end, you get the idea. Maybe it is possible, to put more musical drive into that idea. The game was realized in Renoise and the Renoise Lua-Scripting-Interface (which I absolutely like)! Here is the official link to this project and the Global Game Jam 2013 entry.

And some impressions from the Global Game Jam 2013 at Cologne Game Lab.

Finally I decided to give the LuaCrumbs-project a little bit drive again. The project was 80 percent finished for an initial release and I got more and more comfortable with this situation – mostly because I still see the need for a project like LuaCrumbs for FabLabs and Makerspaces.

LuaCrumbs is an simple framework, suited for FabLabs, that lowers the barriers of coding the machines like CNC-drill, laser-cutter, plotters etc in a significant way. In its current state it has a HTML5-3D preview that works in any modern browser. This week I gave the project a new home under the domain LuaCrumbs.org. There is currently only a forum – but people can register. If you want to have a preview of the style, you will work with LuaCrumbs, check this thread with code-syntax of this thread with some example works.

Last week I had the opportunity to make a Projection Mapping again. It was a wild party – the finishing event of the GIYDA (Grow-it-yourself Design & Architecture) workshop week. The people were great and the music was, too. This time the mapping was made more or less with “found material” and some quick written lua-stuff, utilizing Love2D. The focus was on colors, beat accuracy and communicating with people and the DJ. Once again this project was made possible with the support of the Dingfabrik e.V..

YouCube is the first projection-mapping project from Dingfabrik, presented at the demoscene-party Evoke 2012 in Cologne. Demosceners at the party place were able to upload their content via intranet at the partyplace – that why the name YouCube. The object was clearly visible from everywhere in the hall.

The sculpture was made of cardboard and is three meters high at its highest point – reaching an architectonical dimension. I wrote all the software used in this project within three weeks from scratch (in the evenings!). The software-chain included lua, love2d, quartz composer, xml, php, html, css. Fun and love.

This is a projection-mapping project I made together with Dingfabrik (Cologne’s fablab/hackerspace for building things). It is the first of a ongoing series of projection-mapping projects. At every project we want to enhance the hard- and software side of the project.

The video of the mapping is a little dark – but there is another short documentary upon this project coming up shortly…

Update: This project was awarded to the “Thing of the month August 2012” by Dingfabrik.