Today film tip: a documentary about the web, new technologies, social networks and their effects on politics and governments.

“New technologies and a closely related culture of collaboration present radical new models of social organization. This project brings together leading practitioners and thinkers in this field and asks them to determine the opportunity for government.

My tip for watching long films like this: bookmark them in a folder or with a tag like “to watch”, and come back to it when you start thinking of watching tv.

Brian Eno and Will Wright (Sim City, The Sims, Spore) talking about generative systems (and playing Spore afterwards). Worth the time!

Video Link (downloadable as mp4, mp3 and pdf)
written summary

via TEDBlog

As promised, meso relaunched the website: meso - digital interiors
A lot of great humour in the details - as actually expected from people naming nodes after Taxi Driver actors!

Another confirmation that future’s video editing will open up incredible solutions is presented by the University of Washington: Spacetime Fusion
The new idea is using photographs to enhance the depth of information of videos. This opens up some new possibilities, and seems to make some well known routines much easier:

via create digital motion

Dual photography? Not easy to understand…

“Let’s say there’s some hot naked chick standing by a window, except she’s facing away from it so all you can see is her back. She’s watching NBC.
Luckily, you’re the president of NBC. You make a phone call and tell the network to interrupt programming and instead send out a video that illuminates each pixel, one at a time, in order.
While this is going on, you record the wall behind her TV. Your crappy video camera has only a 1×1 pixel resolution, but this doesn’t matter. Do a bunch of math based on your recording, and you can reconstruct an image of what she looks like from the TV’s point of view. If her TV has a 1920×1080 resolution, you get a clear, 1920×1080, hi-res image.
So see? Without this technology, you wouldn’t get to see what her boobs look like.” (raldi at reddit)

The official video shows it up visually, especially at the end. Sounds amazing!

Yahoo released a very interesting web2.0 application these days: pipes.
“Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.”
It has a node based programming interface, which enables comfortable merging and editing of RSS Feeds. Some examples:

_ New York Times thru Flickr: Scans the NY Times Homepage for keywords and returns fitting flickr images. (reminds me a bit of my project “world’ notes“)
_ eBay price watch: search for a product on eBay within a certain price range.

I’m expecting it to become a very mighty tool, which enables is using RSS technology more focused and powerful.

Read more infos at O’Reilly’s Radar.

Wow, what a great idea from a multimedia team from Oberhausen/Germany:

“Tank-FX is a non-virtual effect device. The reverb is generated by
a huge 11m tank made of ferroconcrete. We put some mics and
speakers in it and connected them to a Unix box, so everybody can
use it now from the internet. To try it out, just upload some
audio material. It will be processed in real-time.”
Website

An additional very pleasant aspect of the project is that they only used free software, which is listed on the website.

List of intersting Wii hacks:

newest post:
Wow, it’s getting advanced! Watch the WiiBot:

older posts:
3. Awesome: this guy controls his whole home. More technical details here. Video
2. Bl4ckfr0g plays Halflife 2 on a Mac: Video
1. Wii RC car control: Video

see also: wii music

I’d like to present you a project I really like, from our friends from strukt:
The TagTool is an instrument for livevisuals, which enables the user to draw on a tablet, and use the so drawn elements for visuals. I saw it at the AViT>C23 in Berlin, and it’s really easy to handle. There’s no visible software interface - just 6 faders which are built in a case with the tablet lovingly. The most current documented use of the TagTool was in Linz, where they projected on huge urban objects. Take a look at the video, and don’t miss the last part with the crane!