Radio New Zealand interview
Radio New Zealand recently did a broadcast focusing on the robotics work of our adviser, and good friend, Dr. Ajay Kapur. We were lucky enough to have them ask us a few questions about our work with the multi-touch table, and what we are up to here in New Zealand. You can find the whole story here.
Menu from AhText
As we started the AhText Project, we began to run into our first difficulties with processing. It turns out that although Processing 0136+ supports Java 1.5, it does not support any of the new Java syntax. Things like generics, and enhanced “for” loops are not understood by the preprocessor and compiler used in Processing. See this link for more information.
We have been asked to create a new multi-touch application for the Opera Ah!, created by composer-performer David Rosenboom and poet-writer Martine Bellen, and which will be performed at RedCat September 15-17th. The Opera will also be featuring the work of our friends Meason Wiley, Jim Murphy, Dimitri Diakopoulos, and Dr. Ajay Kapur from CalArt’s MTIID program. They will be building Ten Hemisphere speakers (see Plork or Slork ), an MLGI laser controller, and flying robotic drums. The opera will also use live video feed from the lobby as source material for four projections onto the floor of the performance space.
This past June, Owen and I prepared our bodies for our upcoming travel to New Zealand by first flying to Europe. There were three destinations, Berlin, Paris and the Netherlands. While the latter two were more in the vain of seeing old friends and catching up over a couple beers, Berlin (though there was time for play too!) included the Berlin Open 2009 conference as well as a presentation at the Technical University of Berlin.
So, folks! Here it is, our long overdue thanks to everyone we met in Berlin. Firstly, we’d like to thank Bernd, Nikita, Ben, Ani and the rest of the Berlin-Open organizers, for inviting us to present our work. We’d also like to thank Wilm and friends at TU Berlin, we hope you have a touchable up and running and are excited to see where you might take it in regards to wavefield synthesis. Last but certainly not least, Jasmine, Mike and Erin, THANK YOU for giving us beds to sleep on, food to eat, and amazing memories to hold onto.
Berlin Open – Knowledge, Networking, Innovation
“The primary target is to convey the innovation potential of open policies and strategies – totally independent of the areas of expertise. To communicate examples where Openness is a fundamental alternative to traditional approaches…” (Berlin-open.org)
We presented on the open nature of much our work, and discussed exciting open technologies, philosophies and techniques being harnessed by music and multimedia engineering communities worldwide– many of which drive and inspire the work we do here at FlipMu. It was wonderful to hear conversation on the idea of “openness” from leading practitioners across multiple disciplines.
Main Berlin-Open Hall
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
