Getting started was a bit slow. It wasn’t the easiest interface to get used to. The first tutorial involved making a temple…sort of Jefferson Memorial-ish.

This took me about an hour to run through. Getting used to moving objects in 3D took a little time. Aligning the columns at first was awkward, but I got the hang of it eventually.

After the temple, the second tutorial involves making a Halo-ish type of helmet. I never thought to create a 3D model based off a sketch, most likely because I never think about making 3D models. Makes a lot of sense though.

This tutorial took about 2 hours. I would say the one thing I learned was when the Maya tutorial says to do something and you don’t see it easily, hold the space bar and it’ll probably be right there. After a while, following the directions was quick and easy. I found that the workflow was pretty decent, but I would’ve liked to know some keyboard shortcuts, if there are any.

Next step is to make something from scratch.

After a trip to the toy store, and a good amount of time looking at linkage games online, I decided to make my own linkage prototype system. It consists of a medium gage wire, machine screws, and screw caps. I bend each wire segment at the ends as close to a circle as I can. Then fit the machine screw under each of the wire ends and cap it to make a linkage. Pretty easy.

As the first test of a piece I’m making for tomorrow, I made two of Theo Jansen’s mechanisms outlined on this great site. http://www.mechanisms101.com/theo_jansen.html

One of the fails of this system is that the screw caps will be wound or unwound by normal twisting and turning of the linkages.  To solve this, you can hot glue the caps into place.
O

Video of the piece being uploaded now.  Will update when finished

Rooftop gardening brings with it many untraditional variables.  Temperatures are much higher on shiny rooftops which leads to high evaporation rates and even leaf scorching.  The other destructive problem is wind.  50-75mph gusts during summer storms are not uncommon and can be disastrous.  During the Brooklyn tornadoes last summer the winds were so strong that most of our epic tomato plants branches were snapped like twigs even after being heavily secured.  Regardless of the challenges it was still fun and seemed to light a fire under me fueled by nostalgia and a green thumb.

This winter, while waiting for the spring to come, we set up a hydroponic WindowFarm.   We are using complete artificial light with a 4ft T8 fluorescent strip light with 6500k bulbs.

It’s only January but it’s about time to start seedlings for spring and to think about garden plans for this year.  We’ve decided that we are going to try out SIP (sub-irrigated platers) gardening.  Essentially what you are doing it creating a container garden from rubbermaid totes.  There is a reservoir of water in the bottom of the tote that you fill by a pipe that sticks above the soil line.  Water is drawn up from the reservoir by a wicking capillary action.  The advantages of SIP gardening are water conservation through less evaporation – perfect for rooftop gardening.  Brooklyn’s own Bob Hyland has been an inspiration for this project along with GlobalBuckets.  For this project I am following the instructions put together by EarthTainer.  They have an awesome tutorial on how to build your own that is infinitely more detailed than what I’m going to show you below.  Here are a few pics of my process:

Purchased:

Two 30 gallon totes, 1.5″ PVC pipe, Smaller tupperware container, various screws.

First I measured and cut off the top of one tote per EarthTainer instructions with my handy dandy dremel.

I cut up the top of the tote I just decapitated to make a base for support.  This will make sense once we drill holes on the interior tote and secure in inside the other.

This is a wicking basket that I made from a plastic tupperware container.  The wicking basket is going to connect the water reservoir to the rest of the dirt in the SIP.  Through capillary action the dirt in the wicking basket wicks up water.  I drilled it with a bunch of holes to let water in to the potting mix.

This is essentially the finished EarthTainer complete with filling water pipe.  The initial tote we cut up goes inside of the other tote and sits on the base we made.  The wicking basket is tied with zip ties to the bottom of the interior tote and a bunch of holes are drilled for aeration.  All that is needed is potting mix in the spring and plants.  <3

Construction of your SIP isn’t an exact science and there is no “official way”.  If you want a commercial product, check out EarthBoxes. Going forward I think that I’m going to try converting last year’s 4×4′ raised bed’s with corrugated pipe into SIP plots.  People get real creative using all kinds of materials and create SIP’s out of everything from buckets and recycled milk bottles to actual cloth tote bags.  If you like gardening, you don’t have to give it up just because you live in a city.   Please do a little googling if you are interested in EarthTainers.  Other people have put together much better guides than I could.  :)

<3 rader

The museum’s proprietor, Fred Bobrow, is an enthusiastic guide to this literature, willing to talk endlessly about all the tricks the games’ designers pulled to achieve their effects. He even opened up a few of the cabinets so we could see how they worked, revealing an amazing universe of magician-caliber optical trickery and incredibly intricate hand-built analog electronic systems.

For this post, I’ll talk about a few of my favorite games and what I learned about how they worked (largely from Fred) and about the aesthetic qualities of their interactions (from playing them).

The first game I played on coming into the museum was Sega’s Gun Fight.

This is a table top format game enclosed in a glass terrine. As you can see, it pits two cowboys together in a pistol duel across an tumbleweed-strewn western town. Each cowboy is positioned behind some cover consisting of a rock wall and two cactuses.

Each player stands behind his cowboy, with his hand on a gun-shaped control, and tries to shoot his opponent when he’s visible through cover, without getting shot himself.

Players can move their cowboys from side to side along the slots beneath them. When you successfully hit another player, their cowboy collapses for a few seconds and your score is increased:

(If you shoot a cactus, it will fall over as well.)

Fred explained that beneath the surface of the machine is a series of lines of contacts. When both cowboys are lined up on the same contact line and one of them presses the trigger, that closes a circuit engaging the solenoid that adds slack to the rubber bands keeping the opposing cowboy standing up (so that the falls down) and causes the next bulb in the score display to light up.

Many games throughout the arcade used this technique of having a series of conductive lines on a circuit board closing a circuit between moving players and targets determine hit accuracy.

The next game I played was Chicago Coin’s Motorcycle:

This game’s main attraction is its beautiful projected graphics. According to Fred, inside the cabinet are a series of three circular zoetrope style screens that spin at different rates to : one with the image for the background (produce the illusion of speed), one with the slower blue riders who appear on the inside of the track, and one with the faster yellow riders who appear on its outside.

These zoetropes all project their figures onto a translucent screen that’s parallel to the floor inside the cabinet at about the height of the player’s controls.

On top of that screen is another motorcycle figure, this one directly connected to the player’s handlebar interface so that it moves side-to-side as the player steers. The final shadowbox image is then reflected by a 45 degree mirror so it can be seen by the player.

The game has a series of electrical contacts connected to the moving player motorcycle and the rotating non-player motorcycles. If any of these touch, a circuit is triggered representing a crash, causing flashing red lights and all of the rotation to stop. Also, there’s another switch that detects each full revolution of the outer zoetrope which counts as the completion of a single lap. For each completed lap, the score counter on the top of the cabinet increases by one via a rotating number connected to a low RPM DC motor.

The player also has an acceleration control on his right handlebar. Turning that causes all of the zoetrope cylinders to spin faster.

The biggest problem with this game is that it is fiendishly difficult. Unless you barely touch the accelerator, the other motorcycles crash into you so quickly that you’re constantly stopped, making for frustrating intermittent gameplay.

The quality and sophistication of the sound used in the games varies wildly from mechanical bells to simple square wave beeping to, surprisingly, pre-recorded sounds.

A great example of the latter is Bally Space Flight:

If you listen carefully over the sound of other games and Hey Jude on the arcade stereo, you can here a series of radio transmission from mission control to the pilot of this lunar lander. These sounds are, amazingly, played via 8-track tapes which are kept in synch with the rest of the gameplay via high pitched noises outside the range of human hearing that are included on the tracks and which are picked up by simple microphones in the analog circuitry controlling the game. The tapes include these sounds every 18 seconds so that the circuitry controlling the downward movement of your space shuttle won’t wander out of phase with the voice of mission control.

Then, the sensors in the game which detect whether you’ve successfully gotten your shuttle’s glowing red landing pod into the hole in each crater, trigger different tapes to play based on whether mission control should be congratulating or haranguing you with “abort” warnings.

One very common technique in these games is the use of beam splitting one-way mirrors to superimpose figures on a scene and to enhance the illusion of depth in the space portrayed inside the relatively small cabinets.

A great example of using mirrors to superimpose moving figures on a static background is Commando:

While it looks like this seascape diorama is located directly in front of you while you’re playing the game, it is, in fact, hidden in a compartment in the body of the cabinet and rotated 90 degrees to the vertical. You see it reflected in a one-way mirror placed at a 45 degree angle in front of you. This setup allows the scene to have more depth than would be possible in the standard 20 inch deep cabinet.

The flying helicopters moving across this landscape are located in the compartment of the cabinet directly in front of the player. They’re lit with black light so that they’ll shine through the one-way mirror without making anything else back there visible.

Part of the purpose of this surprising, but apparently quite common design was to keep cabinets at a size that would allow them to fit through standard doorways while still providing players with a game world that had more than 20 or so inches of depth. Since the games needed to be head and shoulder height anyway, why not take advantage of the optical path created by the long cabinet to enhance the illusion of depth.

Fred explained this principle to us by showing us the insides of Shoot Out, another Western-themed game that takes advantage of this optical path trick to portray a long and dusty western street.

Fred unlocked the bottom of the cabinet and opened the door to show us the saloon at the end of the street upside down in the bottom of the cabinet, facing up towards the one-way mirror.

He then had us look into the main area of the screen while he stuck his hand into the bottom diorama — lo and behold, his fingers descended from the sky of the western street to dance along the top of the saloon!

One of the highlights of the trip for me was when Fred opened up the bottom of Chicago Coin’s World Series baseball game to show me the nest of relays, wires, discs, and other mechanisms that make the game go. First, so you can appreciate what’s being achieved, here’s a picture of the game itself:

Now, take a look inside:

Here, Fred is pointing out the relay that chooses which type of pitch will be thrown: slider, fastball, or curve. Its settings are controlled by this interface on the top of the game:

The bank of relays and switches on the right of that picture above gets used in resetting the entire state of the game including the number of pitches available to the player and the score.

Here’s a picture of the amazing, early circuit board that serves as the brains of the operation:

Overall, it was an amazing trip and I can’t wait to schedule an appointment to go back and have Fred show me all of the workings of the various games.

The incredible beauty and diversity of the visual and other effects these games with such simple mechanical and electrical systems is deeply inspiring and the actual details of the tricks they use could be a great reference for aspiring physical computing interface designers.

I put a ton more photos and videos in my Retro Arcade Museum set on Flickr. So take a look there if you want to see more. And if you get a chance to drop by the museum, don’t miss it. It’s a truly amazing place.

Coming Back:

You can download the source and play with the app here.

1.  Watermelon Woman – Cheryl Dunye

I was captivated by this piece.  The piece included a large collection of photos from a career that never existed.  Cheryl Dunye created a fictional black lesbian actress named Fae Richards, who was wiped away from Hollywood’s memory and proceeded to make a film and a collection of historically accurate photos to chronicle her life.  I’m a huge fan of film, art, narrative, subversive material and alternative reality.  It was very rich with details, including photos of unknown friends and candid photos from throughout her life.  What excited me the most is the hope that younger generations will look at it and not realize it is fictitious.  I think the world would be better for it.

2.  Lee Bontecou – Untitled

There was one piece that stood out as one of the Coolest Things I’ve Ever Seen!  It looks like Steampunk Volcano Park. The artist in question stopped showing new work for 20 years from 71-91, which would seriously mess me up, personally.  I think the piece in question was during her ‘stasis’ period, but according to the internet it was made in 1961.  This is the best picture I can find.

3.  Master of the Universe/Flexmaster 3000 – Aurel Schmidt

Sadly, this had nothing to do with He-Man.  This richly detailed work is at once captivating.  The veins are all cigarette butts or earthworms.  I’ll forgive the explanation that it is the embodiment of creation and destruction and focus on his use of our everyday detritus as the building blocks for his minotaur.  Frakking genius.

Having never done anything with computer vision before, I didn’t know exactly where to start.  I figured I’d start with Jitter.  I downloaded the cv.jit library and started messing with face and blob detection.  Face detection was easy…trying to find an open mouth…not so much.

After much toiling, I decided to try something a little more ridiculous and fun. I decided I’d superimpose things on faces. In particular, I thought it would be fun and ridiculous to turn people into the famous man in the Magritte painting, “The Son Of Man.”

Deciding that Processing is more my speed, I started using the OpenCV library. This turned out to be much easier for me to handle.

Here’s some results:

Kind of ridiculous, mostly fun.

documentation of work on sound walk link here yuditskaya.com/pd/CannalStreetTunnel.wav

Tools:
Bic pencil 0.5 mm
Pentel Pocket Brush
Faber-Castell Pitt artist pen
Pilot Precise V5 Extra Fine pen

MP4 | Blip.tv | Youtube | iTunes

I also had the chance to interview Robert Moon about his ecofabulous wallet, Adam Parrish about his pixel linocuts, and Joshua Berry about his summer mittens. This is just a taste of the projects that are coming out of the 5-in-5 Challenge. To learn more and to watch the projects that emerge over the week, check out the 5-in-5 blog.

My guest Michael Zeltner of GRL Vienna and I worked on a Frankenface project to play with videos in the same way you can play with collages.

Etsy Street is a video series about things I see in the world and want to share with the Etsy community. Check out the first post here. Feel free to give me feedback and let me know what you think!

OK. I couldn’t let this go. Thanks to all who contributed (tried to) yesterday. Unfortunately, I was forced to take a different technical approach and, in frustration, made some hasty deletions. BUT!! We’re up and running, so please leave your cheers for people trying to use the toilet by calling 212.796.0729 ext 181.

Here’s what my extensions.conf file looks like:

The ${UNIQUEID} variable allows each message to be save with an individual name.

I have another file in the same directory (public_html/sounds/) of the itp asterisk server as the folder where the messages are being saved:

Thats pretty much it. The above links.php file lists all of the saved messages on a site. Seems simple, but man did this take me a while to figure out (permissions,etc)! I’ll go into what didn’t work some other time. But until then, don’t for get to make a call!!

OH YEA! Check out the results at andreadulko.com/rootpoops

Thanks,
Ang

It all seems a bit silly sometimes, doesn’t it?

For my first 5-in-5 project, I decided to start working on a project I’ve had kicking around in the back of my head for sometime; A completely random, spin the bottle, form of guidance system that will never, ever, get you to your destination on time, or even on purpose. The Free.P.S. System is quite simple, consisting of an Arduino, an H-bridge, a switch, and an arrow attached to a small motor. When the user opens the cigar box, the arrow is triggered to spin at various speeds, changing direction every now and then. After a random amount of time, the arrow stops, and the user heads in the general direction that the unit suggests. When the user hits a dead end, or decides that they need to reconsider where they’re heading, they simply open the box and repeat the process.

Take a look at the Free.P.S. Unit in action below. This is a rough prototype, and it isn’t working exactly as I had planned, but you get the idea. I would really like to make this pocket/keychain sized, or incorporate an actual compass of sorts in the future.

Free.P.S. Demo

restaurant list: mamoun’s, temple, cafetasia, pizza mercado, san loco, chipotle, red bamboo, little atlas, sunrise mart, rick shaw

parts modeled in rhino and exported as AI files to be lasercut

plywood pieces: 2 x interior wall, 20 x slice, 10 x side (all 1/8″)
acrylic pieces: 1 x white (1/8″), 1 x clear (1/2″), center pin
lasercut and etched slices ready to be assembled

reinforced back wall || paper secured || plastic post

spinning mechanism from the junk shelf || center piece || pinwheel face complete

here is a short video of the pinwheel spinning – now i just need a place to mount it.

more 5-in-5 photos on flickr