News

The AZ Labs res­i­dency at Espaço do Tempo in Montemor-o-Novo is sadly over for now. Folks have been work­ing hard to fin­ish things up for the proto exhi­bi­tion of projects we had on Saturday.

A few projects were shelved or aban­doned for dif­fer­ent rea­sons. Not sta­ble enough, not enough time, no right mate­ri­als, not enough beer. In the end were left with 9 projects.

AR Cubes — André Sier devel­oped a few exper­i­ments with cubes glued with printed aug­mented real­ity fidu­cial mark­ers. Dif­fer­ent mark­ers trig­ger dif­fer­ent effects. You can play with them to make dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions of objects and lines inter­act­ing with each other.

Track­ing Head — Tiago Serra, Andrea Inocên­cio and Mauri­cio Mar­tins worked on a manequin head res­cued dur­ing a dump­ster div­ing ses­sion. They equipped a box with IR leds and use a cam­era with fil­ters to track the move­ment of the box. With these val­ues they send rota­tion infor­ma­tion to a servo motor equiped in the base of the manequin head. The same val­ues are also sent to a soft­ware that selects a cor­re­spond­ing angle photo which is pro­jected in the manequin. This sys­tem makes the freaky manequin head rotate in the direc­tion of the object.

Talk­ing Head — Next to the Track­ing Head we have a speaker box equipped wih an arduino, an ir receiver and a wave shield. When the box han­dled by the user aims at the speaker box it trig­gers ran­dom sam­ples from a sam­ple pool, giv­ing the illu­sion that the head itself is talk­ing. Mauri­cio, André, Fil­ipe, João and Rita worked on this project.

Track­ing Boids — The floor of the Track­ing Head space is cov­ered with small light spots fly­ing around. These boids, pro­grammed by André Sier may look like ran­dom disco lights on first glance but when some­one moves into the cam­era they flock towards the user.

Micro CNC — Tiago Rorke had been work­ing on a Micro CNC project, pieces printed with the Maker­bot. Tereza Car­doso gave him a hand mak­ing a project out of it by tak­ing pho­tos of the atten­ders of the res­i­dency, down­grad­ing them to vec­tor for­mat and hav­ing the micro cnc sketch them. They are drawn on the walls of the res­i­dency itself, along with qr code link­ing to video inter­views talk­ing about each per­sons involve­ment with the dif­fer­ent projects.

Paint Video Sig­nals — Andrea Inocên­cio recorded some short videos of red blue and black paint being applied to dif­fer­ent medi­ums (water, paper, table). Fil­ipe Cruz did a lit­tle pro­cess­ing sketch to extract midi val­ues from a grid of pix­els in the video and send them to reak­tor. Some gen­er­a­tive sound tests were recorded and mixed into a video dvd.

Blip Blop Blir Boxes — André Sier and Mauri­cio Mar­tins worked on a few small boxes packed with an Arduino, IR sen­sors, LEDs and speak­ers. Boxes point­ing to each other make the LEDs change their color. A third box pointed to the pre­vi­ous boxes makes them give out some blips and blops sounds.

“O mundo é em cada instante o que ele não pode não ser.” — A project con­ceived by Patri­cia Proença con­sist­ing of a hand drawn ani­ma­tion of a tree grow­ing being pro­jected into a wall. The ani­ma­tion is trig­gered when a water­ing can equiped with a cell­phone is tilted into an alien plant object. Tiago Serra gave her a hand with the tech­ni­cal implementation.

Trailchi — Guil­herme Car­taxo and Sónia Malaquias been work­ing for while on their project involv­ing long expo­sions to tai chi ses­sions per­formed in the dark with a sword and suit equipped with 12 LEDs. The cap­tured ani­ma­tions makes some beau­ti­ful light trails art. Also helps analyse the motion of the session.

AZ Labs are back in res­i­dency at Montemor-o-Novo. This time we are try­ing to have a con­nect­ing theme for the cre­ative tech­nol­ogy hack­ing insan­ity. The plan for the next 10 days is to brain­storm, con­cep­tu­al­ize and pro­to­type project ideas for tan­gi­ble objects that can inter­act with each other and the environment.

We have folks attend­ing with all sorts of back­grounds: com­puter sci­ence, plas­tic arts, per­for­mance arts, elec­tron­ics, indus­trial fab­ri­ca­tion, graphic design, sound design, sta­tis­tics, soci­ol­ogy. We barely had time to intro­duce our­selves to the first timers and new ideas are already brew­ing. Plans for infrared com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Aug­mented real­ity envi­ron­ments. Radio sig­nal tri­an­gu­la­tions. LED boards and cubes. Mul­ti­ple kinect abuse. Let us wait and see into what these ideas will mature into.

Right now it’s 2 am, some folks already went to sleep while oth­ers are hard at work on per­sonal projects. Using one of the Maker­bots to print parts to build a Micro CNC. Try­ing to get the larger CNC work­ing again. Hack­ing mal­func­tion­ing audio adap­tors to cre­ate con­tact micro­phones. Imple­ment­ing some tan­gi­ble inter­ac­tion with the kinect. Test­ing out some things with Arduinos. Fail­ing to install ofx­P­TAM. The list goes on.

True hack­ing knows no sleep.