Thanks LA Flash; still working on the new Swing distro
Events, Flex, LA Flash, Wii
1/27/09
Last week’s event at LA Flash was a lot of fun; thanks to all who attended. I promised while I was there that I would make Swing 2.0 available for download—at the moment this is proving more difficult than I hoped, mainly because as soon as I take the project files out of their Flex project folder, they stop working. It’s not a matter of files being missing or anything, and I’ve seen this with other projects, where the project files must be in the folder FlexBuilder has blessed as the official project folder to work. I’m sure there must be something really simple I’m missing here, but I’m stumped at the moment. Any suggestions would be welcomed!
“Music, Lyrics and the Wii Remote: Creating ‘Swing’” this Wednesday at LA Flash
Announcements, Flash, Flex, LA Flash, Wii
1/19/09
SoCal folk: come on out to 2009’s first meeting of LA Flash, this coming Wednesday, January 21st, from 7 - 10 pm—I’ll be giving a talk called “Music, Lyrics & the Wii Remote: Creating ‘Swing,’" followed by Amir Fischer covering “The Emerging market of 3D in Casual Gaming,” a raffle, and networking. I’m going to cover some background relating to the creation of “Swing,” and provide a brief introduction to WiiFlash, the ActionScript library that allows Flash to talk to the Wiimote, nunchuk, classic controller, and balance board. Would love to see you there!
Postmortem: “Swing” at LAFlashapaloozastock III
Events, Flash, Flex, Interactive Design, LA Flash, Music, Typography, Wii
12/9/08
“Swing" was briefly installed outside next to a Wii running
Wii sports, but otherwise spent most of its time inside.
LAFlashapaloozastock III was another well put-together event—I enjoyed Ralph Hauwert’s talk on Flash effects and 3D as it was one of the best at bringing some perspective outside of the immediate world of Flash. Hauwert wove Escher, Pink Floyd, and the Amiga demoscene into the mix in a talk that otherwise would have just been a sequence of “ooh, cool!” demos (though they were quite cool… fluid dynamic bump maps on 3D objects, for instance...).
It was a challenge getting people comfortable enough with “Swing” to try it out—I had only one song request ("This Is How We Do It” by Montell Jordan) and that came early in the day, before a lot of folks started showing up. Over the course of the day I started calling the piece “karaoke for introverts” since no singing was required, but all the same people seemed reticent to pick a song and give it a go, just as if I had brought a real karaoke machine to the proceedings.
A student asked if I had considered adding greater variety to the visuals (color, etc.)—a valid question, given the apparent simplicity of the display. I explored this both during the original development of the piece and for this new version, but in both cases found that adding additional visual elements or processing made the experience too complex cognitively. While the YouTube video makes it look easy, trying to synchronize motions, syllables and pre-recorded music is actually a pretty challenging task for a novice, and glitz just makes it harder.
All in all, I came away with three keys to a successful “Swing” experience:
- You’ve got to feel comfortable
- You’ve got to love the song you’re performing and know it inside and out
- You’ve got to be tuned into the rhythmic implications of whether your text is broken down into words or syllables
All of these things are easier to realize at home than in an installation space, so I’m planning to post the new version of Swing (which will now run in a browser for both Mac and PC users) soon, probably after Ruben & Lullaby is released.
Speaking of which, I met a lot of great folks during the event and got a lot of interest in Ruben & Lullaby (my upcoming iPhone/iPod touch game). I’ll be putting the finishing touches on over the next week or so, so stay tuned…
New version of Swing, the Wii Remote typographic karaoke Flash experience, to debut this Saturday
Animation, Announcements, Events, Flash, Flex, Fun, Interactive Design, iPhone, LA Flash, Music, Typography, Wii
12/5/08
For those in the Los Angeles area, stop on by LAFlashapaloozastock III in Venice this weekend for a full day of Flash goodness, including the debut of a new version of Swing. Swing has evolved into a typographic karaoke experience—we’ll use online services to stream your choice of song, download the lyrics, and get you waggling your way to Wii happiness. I’ll also have a number of “tuned” song/lyric combinations for you to play (yes, your dream of finally seeing a type animation of every single “ee-oh-oh” in Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic is about to be realized).
I’ll also be handing out postcards and generally talking up my upcoming iPhone game “Ruben & Lullaby,” which should be released in the next few weeks and has already garnered notice in TouchGaming. For more information visit opertoon.com.
Hope to see you there at LAFLashapaloozastock!
Viewfinder, Precision Targets shown at HASTAC II Conference
Digital Humanities, Events, Flex, Viewfinder
6/5/08
HASTAC II, the second annual conference of the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, was held at UC Irvine and UCLA on May 22-24. The theme? “Technotravels.” Unfortunately scheduling conflicts prevented me from checking out many of the sessions (would love to have seen Brenda Laurel’s provocation, as her book Computers as Theatre was an early inspiration for me), but happily I was able to attend Curtis Wong’s presentation entitled “From Beethoven to Betelgeuse, 20 Years in the Quest for the Holy Grail of Interactive Storytelling.” It was great getting to hear about what Curtis has been up to since the Voyager days, and to get an introduction to his latest project, Worldwide Telescope—a kind of Google Earth for the sky that seamlessly integrates astrophotography from a variety of sources into an experience with lots of hooks for user-generated content.
The scene at HASTAC II; getting the Viewfinder presentation set up on the HIPerWall.
I presented two projects at HASTAC II, the first of which was Viewfinder. The presentation was done on UC Irvine’s HIPerWall, the extremely high resolution display consisting of 50 30-inch Apple Cinema Displays linked together. I was able to distribute the presentation materials (slides, two videos, the Viewfinder web interface, and Google Earth itself) across the width of the screen, and while we weren’t running at the native resolution of the display, it was still pretty cool to be able to play with a visual field of that size. During the show I was able to give a look at the evolution of the Viewfinder web application UI since our initial release—in this version, we had the complete workflow running as a Flex application using the new Flash Google Maps API released the week before. The first session was very well attended, and I’m told there was some lively discussion afterwards. Thanks to David Theo Goldberg for inviting me to present on the HIPerWall, and Sung-Jin Kim for invaluable help with the presentation logistics.
Caren Kaplan and I presenting Precision Targets at HASTAC II.
The following day, Caren Kaplan and I presented our upcoming piece Precision Targets as part of the demo sessions at UCLA. Precision Targets combines six narratives about GPS and its movement from military to civilian use in a comic-book-inspired format (featuring art by Ezra Claytan Daniels) that places the narratives inside a navigable 3D cube with commentary written by Caren. The work was very well received—we got a lot of great feedback that we aim to translate into momentum to complete the project in the next few months.
Next up: A report on the Electronic Literature Organization conference in Vancouver, Washington…
