SENSES

In 2011 we had an amazing year full of awesome Kinect projects turned reality thanks to our OSCeleton tool.

One of our favorites was this amazing live music performance by Chris Vik in Microsoft’s REMIX11 conference.

In this performance you’re actually seeing him controlling a homemade tool “designed for electronic musicians to expand the way they control their music in a futuristic and extremely expressive way, using only the waving of hands and a small amount of creativity. It can be used to control the simplest of parameters like a filter or LFO, play notes and chords on a sampler or synthesizer, or be programmed to control an entire live-set through nothing more than gesture.”

This tool is designed primarily for use with OSCeleton which interprets data from the Kinect to track the user’s body movements.

It’s called Kinectar and now you can do it too ;)

Oh.. Happy new year! :)

The start of 2011 was a media blast for our SenseWall project. We appeared all over the national news, and although we feel very proud, there are people who deserve some credit here too. We never forget those who help us make our dreams a reality.

Thank you,

Victor Martins for Viscosity

Vadim Smakhtin for HypePaint

Thomas Hansen, Mathieu Virbel, Alex Teiche, Sharath Patali, Nathanaël Lécaudé and Christopher Denter for pyMT

WallManager team

Mário Zenha Rela

the spotlight is yours too:

Público

Sic Noticias

TVI

Exame Informática

Super Interessante

Diário de Noticias

Among many other newspapers and magazines! … and it’s only the beginning ;)

Here at SenseBloom we like to keep the Xmas spirit alive, so every time we contribute some code to our projects we get some music from our private Santa, however annoying it may be  :)

Want to do 2D or 3D animation but you find it hard and time-consuming? 
Want to build games but the artwork is your bottleneck? 

Fortunately we now have low-cost 3D cameras, thanks to Microsoft and PrimeSense. 

OSCeleton is basically a DIY motion capture system.
It sends 3D tracked body skeletons trough the OSC protocol so you can build anything easily.

So…

Grab the drivers:
github.com/​avin2/​SensorKinect

Follow the install instructions:
ros.org/​wiki/​ni

Download OSCeleton and run the binary:
github.com/​Sensebloom/​OSCeleton
(use “OSCeleton -h” in the command line for more options)

and the Processing examples in the video:
github.com/​Sensebloom/​OSCeleton-examples

Try Animata too:
animata.kibu.hu/​

… and enjoy ;)

We’ve been frustrated for some time with mobility companies slowness in updating their routes and schedules. There’s also an unwillingness to share their realtime GPS data so, there’s a huge problem we as citizens face when we want to go from one place to the other and have that information readily available in one place.

What if we gave everyone the possibility to add/edit urban mobility routes and realtime positioning of its vehicles? This is what UrbanFlow is all about.

UrbanFlow is a tool for urban mobility management. We think that by giving the means to collaboratively add our own urban mobility networks to the cloud, we can all rely on better and up to date routes of multimodal transportation.

People can obviously vote on the quality of the data being added to the system, making it sustainable.

Data portability is also a worry we have, so we support an open standard format created by Google named Keyhole Markup Language, or KML. But our main purpose is to feed Google Maps, making it available to everyone through the already awesome Google Maps geographic dataset.

Using available GPSs on our cell phones, we can track these vehicles in real time, and since we have the routes we don’t have GPS mislocationing, so ultimately, everyone has the ability to know where they are and improve our quality of life.

SenseWall - our open NUI platform

“Multitouch technology has been a closely-guarded novelty, but they’re evolving into something else: a real, usable platform that focuses on content and not just gimmicks. In the process, a hard-working community is building richer, standards-based, cross-platform, free and open source tools. The result: faster iteration, broader access of artists to the technology, and soon, hopefully, better and better work.”
- Creative Digital Motion - June 2010

Last year we set out to completely democratize the access to what is being called ‘Natural User Interfaces’ or NUI for short. We’ve installed our first SenseWall, our NUI platform, in an open academic setting where anyone is able to interact and exploit it’s capabilities and, of course, highlight the creativity of its authors. Hopefully we’ll repeat it at more places too ;)

So it’s a great pleasure for us to know that we’ve been featured at NUI group community blog from where we learned and shared so much, and Creative Digital Motion from where we also get to know so many other amazing projects.

Thank you!

http://nuigroup.com
http://createdigitalmotion.com