Having just finished up my libnifalcon page, I decided to post a few replies on the novint forums since libnifalcon had been coming up over there too over the past month, and since they haven't sued me yet, I figure I'm ok.

I also decided to post some observations I had about their packaging. Reposting here to get people's opinions, since I know more than a few designers (both game and print/web) read this blog:

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First off, the packaging in question:

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So I was picking up some Falcons at a local CompUSA closing sale ($49!), and while giggling to myself that I was getting falcons for cheap (now I have 3!), a random person asked me what these large boxes I was carrying across the store awkwardly were.

It's then that I realized: there were 5 falcons left at the store. This was the last day it was going to be open. They were $49. Not even the people picking stuff up cheap the rehawk in downtown were getting them. Not good.

After setting the boxes down and trying to explain why 3 DOF haptics is important for immersion (which boiled down to "stuff like, feels, and stuff"), I realized there's nothing on the boxes to explain to anyone without some training in haptics hardware (i.e. anyone without medical or industrial robotics experience) what a falcon /is/.

I realize this is a really, really hard problem. Everyone I know that's excited about the falcon falls into two groups:

(1) They have an advanced degree and knows how much this hardware costs when packaged as a research tool or

(2) They've actually used one.

The problem here is, neither of the groups can use word of mouth to convey the experience. It usually ends up in overly technical talk ("~1/800th inch encoder tick resolution per axis!"), or wild gesticulation and adjectives that don't quite fit the experience. Good for the user, bad for the uneducated customer. The choir can hardly preach to itself.

Not that I have any insight on this, but the box seems to be taken up by lots of pictures of the controller itself, with no informational diagrams about how it's used. In situations where you can't have one out (which is often, since it's awful big), this might help a lot.

Yup, it's spring again, and it snuck up on me this time.

First off, it's year 3 of GDC for me. Not speaking during the conference, though you can at least catch me at Brenda Braithwaite's Sex in Games Roundtables on Wednesday and Thursday, plus the various parties (Here's crossing my fingers for another World of Darkness party like last year. More game conferences need dominatrixes).

Wednesday, March 5th, it's off to O'Reillys Emerging Technologies Conference, where I'm giving a talk on the usual (teledildonics and intimate interfaces). Due to the fact that I'm poor and SD is expensive, I'm only in for the day of my talk, so look for me on Wednesday if you're around.

And then... Nothing. Yes, I have absolutely no planned speaking engagements after that, and I plan on keeping it that way for a while.

Well, I finally got new LEDs in, thanks to the nice people at Renoylds Electronics, who shipped another batch of LEDs after the first got lost in transit. I replaced the LEDs currently on the yoyo with OED-EL-1L2s, which have a 60 degree beam angle. This seems to have made a ton of difference, as the drawing program now makes tricks identifiable, especially with the scribbles where hold points are.

For instance, a sleeper:

And a trapeze:

Next step is getting all of this out of Max/MSP and into either PD or OpenFrameworks, as my Max demo license ran out and I'm not throwin' down the cash until they finally announce their pricing scheme for Max 5.

Yup, it's that time again. As the year revolves around my birthday (and not January 1st, but god bless you all for getting close), it's time for me to do a retrospective of my year of being 27 (on the day before I cease being it), as seen through my public identity of aggregated 0's and 1's stored on servers around the world. It's my time to sit here and realize that I still have yet to make that great mathematical discovery, and I'm losing time quickly (it becomes impossible at age 30).

So, this year, I:

• Lived outside of Oklahoma for a full year for the first time, ever.

• Open sourced a dance accidently.

• Perverted a web service and then turned it into furniture

• Slapped together generative art

• And then slapped together some more generative art

• And some hand followy lights

• And hooked a yoyo to a wiimote

• Helped build knob boobs

• Went to my first SIGGRAPH

• Helped organize a conference after I explicitly said I'd never do that again

• Started my first open source projects (versus just helping on them) (libnifalcon, libtrancevibe, liblightstone

• Learned two new languages (Python, Max)

• A bunch of other stuff I'm not documenting here, like awesome new people I met and all that.

Well. It was no 2005, but it'll do.

Taking some inspiration from Johnny Chung Lee's WiiMote Projects, I decided I'd like to figure out something neat to do with the WiiMote's IR Camera. I didn't realize that it's 1024x768 @ 100hz for up to 4 IR points (with 4 bits of depth, even), which gives you enough resolution to do some interesting stuff.

For those of you that haven't known me a while, you might not be aware that I used to yoyo quite a bit. I still play every so often, but not nearly as much as I used to. I ended up building up quite the collection, though. Something I always wanted to be able to do was yoyo tracking. I played a little bit with blob tracking and LEDs, but didn't have the hardware or experience back then (2000-2001ish) to really do what I wanted.

After seeing the head tracking and finger tracking videos, the first thing I thought of was trying the yoyo project again. Without taking the time to actually look at my collection, I decided to drill up an old freehand pog and electric tape it to my Pyro with a CR2032 pack attached to the back of the pog for power.

This ended up being such a colossally bad idea that I'm not gonna spend much time talking about it. The yoyo was unusably unbalanced. So, digging through my yoyo box somemore, I realized I still had some Torch LED pogs.

I removed the Red LED off of these and replaced it with an IR LED and a smaller resistor. Since I didn't really have any Spintastics yoyos I wanted to throw the pog in, I ended up dismantling my already sort of broken Night Moves 2 (the plastic on the axle end had cracked on it a while ago for some reason), and hot gluing the pog in to hold it. Sure enough, the yoyo was slightly unbalanced, but completely usable for most any trick. After ninja starring the pog due to not having hot glued it well enough the first time, I made sure to do a better job, and now I have an IR yoyo!

So, with yoyo+wiimote setup finished, I fired up Max/MSP and used the aka.objects wiiremote and appleremote externals along with the LCD object to make a little drawing program. The Apple Remote works as a pen start/stop and clearing device, so I can clear the screen and start/stop drawing while standing far back from the computer. The Wiimote external is wired to draw lines depending on the first IR readout from the camera.

The above picture is a drawing from that program, of an almost-but-not-really version of the "skin the gerbil" trick by Doctor Popular.

The picture also shows a couple of the current problems with the system. First off, I've completely trashed my office getting this done, so I can't back up very far and don't have a good idea of what the Wiimote is seeing. This could be fixed by calibration, which is something I plan on figuring out. Secondly, there's some sampling issue with large swings. Either my swings are causing tilt, the LED doesn't have a wide enough angle, or some combination of the two. I've ordered 5 more kinds of LEDs to test this.

Finally, I hooked up a little sample looper in Max/MSP to the setup so that it would spit out some noise, too.

This video is a combination of the drawing and the video, processed through Jitter. Warning, the sound is VERY desynchronized from the video. 100% of my experience with Jitter has happened in the last 24 hours, and apparently I missed something about getting the video to synchronize (realtime setting, maybe?), which is why the sound doesn't match the video.

So, that was my weekend. The project still has a long way to go. I've got 2 more Torch boards to mod once the LEDs come in, and it'll be interesting to see which LEDs work best. I should have those later this week. I also plan on modding a spintastics top I have that has a torch board in it, so I can do Augmented Reality Battle Tops.

Have any interesting ideas for this project? Please leave comments! Seems like there's a million places this could go.