Thanks to everyone who came out to the Google I/O 2009 After Hours party! We had a wonderful time meeting and talking to you, and hope you enjoyed interacting with Bricktable. Big thanks to Google for putting so many great people and exciting projects in one room. Also, the food was great 
If you have more photos or video’s, please share them with us.
Spaces Multi-Touch Music Environment from BricK Table on Vimeo.
Firstly, I would like to give a big thanks to everyone who came out to the RedCat lounge for an evening of some of the finest electronic music happening right now. It was great to meet a lot of new faces, and I had a really good time.
Roots Multi Touch Tangible Installation Teaser from BricK Table on Vimeo.
For those of you who have browsed our vimeo group, you might have noticed the teaser video of Roots above. We apologize for not making a formal announcement sooner, as the video has been up for a while, but without further delay, if you haven’t seen it yet…enjoy!
Many of you might be wondering… why haven’t we posted in a little while? Perhaps no excuse is good enough, but we DO have lots of exciting news for you. Yes, we know, we’ve been holding off for too long, but we hope you will forgive us because there are lots of exciting things going on.
Brick Table, the actual physical table has come a long way since we first made it. It has gone from velcro support and resting the projector on a Digikey ordering catalog to a fully welded support system, with a custom projector and camera positioning system. Setting it up went from over an hour to a matter of minutes. But even with all its improvements, we realized that perhaps we weren’t using the actual surface of the table to its maximum potential. It had a relatively large footprint, and we feel that we can better use its real estate. Instead of tearing it apart and trying to make it work for a new set up, we are building a NEW Brick Table! The new Brick will have a much larger usable surface, which means better application support, more functionality, and the ability to support more people at a time. Thats good for us and YOU! We are just about wrapping up design and materials and will (hopefully) be building the new table this week. More on that soon.
Brick Table + MahaDeviBot + ESitar from BricK Table on Vimeo.
We just got back from Stanford and man was it a great time! Everyone was extremely nice and very inspiring. It was also great because we had a lot of time to demonstrate how we are interfacing the BricKTable with the MahaDeviBot– Dr. Ajay Kapur’s Indian folk drum and percussion playing robot.
While browsing through flickr photos of Yuri’s Night Bay Area 2008, I came upon a few photos of some of the cutest kids in the world playing with Brick. Not only could I not stop smiling, but I started thinking about what I saw when kids played with the table and made music. While with adults there are often plenty of questions into the technology behind the table, what it is doing, how it works…etc, what I noticed with younger kids is that none of that matters all that much. They just pick up the fiducials, or press their fingers on the screen, and listen to what it does. The pure wonderment in having something so physical be represented both visually on the screen and audibly through
Brick Table @ Yuri’s Night Bay Area 2008 Lightning Round from BricK Table on Vimeo.
So we just got back from Yuri’s Night Bay Area 2008 late last night (or should I say this morning) and the whole thing feels sort of surreal. Owen and I are extremely lucky to have had Brick table as an installation for people to come and play with, and we were also part of a new performance interface competition sponsored by Create Digital Music.
Brick Updates:
Well ladies and gentleman, it is official…Brick is going to be at this years Yuri’s Night Bay Area 2008, the so called “Burning Man meets NASA” event sure to make history. For those of you who aren’t aware of Yuri’s night, it is an amazing event put on by NASA bringing together the best in science, technology, art and music.
Brick Table “Weather Report” Tangible Multi Touch Interface from BricK Table on Vimeo.
The video above is Owen Vallis and I demonstrating Weather Report, our first installation utilizing Brick at Sea and Space Exploration gallery in Los Angeles this past weekend as part of their Sound and Space series this month.
We developed a custom interface that would allow the user to sonify real-time weather data and make music! Heres what it’s doing:
