Category: Leisure
July 26th, 2009
Dead Finger Tech: Ducati Monster
Our editor recently asked ZDNet bloggers to write about the one computing device, peripheral, gadget, or software that we love or are so addicted to that it couldn’t be taken away from us unless pried from our dead fingers (Dead-Finger Tech, or DFT).
Pit stop during a Doc Wong Riding Clinic with two red Monsters in the background
Following Jason Perlow’s low tech lead, for this DFT series I passed on all the devices and apps around me, and instead picked my motorcycle, a red Ducati Monster 750 which I’ve had for the last five happy years. For the uninitiated, a Monster is a “naked” street bike, meaning that it has a minimalist design with an exposed engine and trellis frame.
When it was launched in 1993, it was unlike any other type of motorcycle, be it sporting, touring or cruising. It instantly became a hit and is now the Italian manufacturer’s most successful lineup. It has reached iconic status and can be seen and heard all over the streets of San Francisco.
2009 Monsters sport an updated design with 10 color options
The current lineup includes a 696 model for about $9K, a 1100 model for $12K, and a 1100s for $14K. Click here for a brochure download with specs.
There are countless Monster clubs all over the world and online communities like the “Monsteristi” Facebook page. To draw a comparison to consumer tech, the fanaticism and passion among Ducati owners is like that of Mac geeks.
On sunny days, when I ride the twisting scenic roads of the San Francisco Bay Area, alone or with a crew, the sense of freedom and unparalleled man-machine connection locks me into a visceral bliss that only Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi can explain.
July 9th, 2009
Music 2.0: The future of the music industry
The controversial “freemium” business model is one of several flavors of free that could support the next iteration of the music business and other digitally distributed content. Media futurist Gerd Leonhard has a new book on the subject and he recently posted an 18 minute video slide show (in two parts) that covers his concepts. He calls for a fundamental shift from control to compensation and proposes new revenue generatives for digital content that are more collaborative and based on open access. In a nutshell, Leonhard says it’s high time that the reset button is pressed.
April 22nd, 2009
Distance Lab seeking couples to test drive 'intimacy' device
Cheap air travel and the Web undermine the impact of distance, but geographically separated couples could use a better alternative than technologies like text, email, and video chat when physical intimacy is not an option.
Enter Mutsugoto, a device designed to communicate intimacy by allowing for couples, who are separated by distance, to draw in light on each other’s bodies or beds.
April 17th, 2009
Pediatric dentists create Game Boy with nitrous oxide feed
The video gaming world is jolted with news of the PediSedate, a toy-like medical device consisting of a headset with a snorkel and a nitrous oxide delivery system. It is designed to connect to a video game system like the Nintendo Game Boy or to a portable music player. Once the system is in place, the PediSedate transparently monitors respiratory function and distributes nitrous oxide, an anesthetic gas, to the preoccupied child. Then, the young patient becomes “comfortably sedated,” according to the company’s site. The system is designed to mitigate childrens’ fear and anxiety during medical procedures.
[Via Switched]
April 8th, 2009
Top 5 futuristic music interfaces and instruments
You may recently have heard about the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra, or MoPhO, a six person orchestra that uses iPhones to play improvisational pieces and chamber music. The group’s Ocarina app has been downloaded 600,000 times, which means that many people now have a 12,000-year-old clay wind instrument at their fingertips.
The creation and control of music is already democratized through cheap production software. Now, gesture-based computing is opening the door further with a new breed of music applications available on mainstream devices such as the iPhone and Wii.
Still, there are also intriguing music controllers and interfaces on the market that are relatively obscure. I contacted Kurt Biederwolf, who holds the Music Synthesis chair at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA, for his take on the state of music technology and key examples.
“So far, traditional MIDI interfaces have been limited to traditional instrument groups: keyboard, percussion, wind, string, etc. But now we’re seeing a crop of really fresh alternatives,” said Biederwolf. “We are seeing the acceptance of a new type of music aesthetic. Artists are approaching sound in a gestural way with an evocative quality.”
In no particular order, here are the coolest instruments, controllers and interfaces that are available on the market:
Designed by staunch environmentalists Brian Crabtree and Kelli Cain, the simple device has a reconfigurable grid of backlit buttons that can be programmed to trigger a variety of audio and video functions or scripts. It connects to a computer and the interaction between the keys and lights is determined by the application running. The minimal device has no hard-wired functionality, but is rather an open ended performance interface designed for customization. It uses the Open Sound Control protocol.
“All of these devices can use MIDI commands, but there is a newer protocol called Open Sound Control (OSC) which is essentially a high-res version of MIDI that is more flexible and offers no preconceived notion of what it is supposed to be for. It’s for deep shaping of audio rather than just triggering musical notes and basic controller events,” said Biederwolf. (Video)
The Lemur, from Jazzmutant, has a multi-touch-sensitive surface that can track multiple fingers simultaneously. The controller allows for users to design and assemble the interfaces themselves with sets of generic control objects such as faders, switches, and pads. Biederwolf explains: “With the Lemur, you can build your own interface on the touch screen and create anything you might need to interact with software in a performance setting or in compositional work.”
“There’s a bit of emulated physics involved. For example, you can create a ball that will follow the movement of your finger on the screen, and its movement can be set to affect a number of sonic and/or visual parameters. You can even create one for each finger and “throw” them around so that as they move about or bounce off the screen’s boundaries they affect multiple sounds and effects. You even have control over the amount of friction as they travel,” he said. (Video)
Next –>
March 30th, 2009
Med student diagnoses cultural objects with radiology art
Art critics can debate the artistic merits of this project, but its novelty can’t be disputed. Below are images of a few everyday objects x-ray’d with an old four-slice CT scanner by Satre Stuelke, a 44-year-old medical student living in New York who also holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
March 23rd, 2009
Haptic jacket lets you feel the movies
Imagine watching Apocalypto and feeling the pounding heart of the escaping protagonist tribesman on your own chest? That’s now possible with a haptic jacket lined with vibration motors that researchers demoed at last week’s IEEE-sponsored 2009 World Haptics Conference in Salt Lake City.
The jacket, created by Philips Electronics, is meant to study the effects of touch on a movie viewer’s emotional response to what the characters are experiencing. It is not meant to translate blows like kicks and punches, although it can simulate outside forces. Their goal is to investigate emotional immersion.
“People don’t realize how sensitive we are to touch, although it is the first sense that fetuses develop in the womb,” said Paul Lemmens, a Philips senior scientist who conducted research with the jacket.
December 5th, 2008
Virtual characters express their emotions
Spanish researchers have developed a computer model able to generate virtual faces which display emotions and moods according to personality traits. The team leader explains: ‘The aim of this work has been to design a model that reveals a person’s moods and displays them on a virtual face. In the same 3-D space we have integrated personality, emotions and moods, which had previously been dealt with separately.’ This model could be applied in both educational environments (virtual tutors and presenters with personality traits) and in video game characters. But read more…
You can see above a virtual character showing various universal emotions: anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise. (Credit: Diana Arellano, UIB). Here is a link to a larger version of this picture. You’ll find more facial expressions on the research project website, Creación y Animación de Expresiones Faciales where you’ll be greeted by Alice, the natural language processing chatterbot (Credit: Wikipedia). If Alice speaks only in English, the website is written in Spanish. It is focused on AFE (Affective Facial Expressions) or the creation of facial expressions to simulate emotions and personality traits.
This research project has been conducted at the Computer Graphics and Vision Group (UIB), a research unit of the Mathematics and Computer Science Department (site in Spanish) at the University of Balearic Islands. This research project has been led by Diana Arellano, a PhD student, under the supervision of two UIB professors, Xavier Varona and Francisco J. Perales.
What were the scientific basis for this project?
December 1st, 2008
Supercomputers help design better golf balls
Researchers are using supercomputers to create new balls that will improve the game of avid golfers by flying farther. They’ve used the supercomputers at Arizona State University to simulate the physics of golf balls and to model how air flows around a ball in flight and to study how this flow is influenced by the ball’s dimples. Their goal is to make a better golf ball by optimizing the size and pattern of these dimples and lowering the drag golf balls encounter as they fly through the air. ‘For a golf ball, drag reduction means that the ball flies farther,’ says one of the engineers. A single simulation takes about 300 hours by using 500 processors — so these balls could be expensive to produce. And the scientists are the first to admit that new golf balls based on their research are years away. But read more…
You can see above the results of a “direct numerical simulation of the flow around a dimpled sphere at Re=110000. (a) Side view of the wake visualized by spanwise vorticity isolines.; (b) Detail of the mesh in a dimple; (c) Visualization of the shear layers in a single dimple. The area shown is the one indicate my the circle in part (a) of the figure.” (Credit: Elias Balaras group, University of Maryland). Here are two links to a larger version of this figure and to Balaras’s research gallery. Please note that in the above caption, Re is an abbreviation for the Reynolds number. (Credit: Wikipedia) And here is an additional link from where you’ll be able to watch several movies about these simulations.
This research work has been conducted by a team of five researchers. Clinton Smith is a Ph.D. student working at Arizona State University (ASU) with Kyle D. Squires, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at ASU. The two researchers have collaborated with Nikolaos Beratlis, Graduate Research Assistant in the Fischell Department of Bioengineering at the University of Maryland led by Elias Balaras, Associate Professor of Bioengineering, and with Masaya Tsunoda of Sumitomo Rubber Industries, Ltd.
Now, let’s look at how dimples can improve the flight of a golf ball.
November 23rd, 2008
A computer composing and playing jazz
The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) has some unusual teaching programs. One PhD student, Øyvind Brandtsegg, is a graduate of the jazz program and this article describes how has developed a computer program and a musical instrument for improvisation. The PhD student is 36 years old and is at the same time a composer, a musician and computer programmer. His ‘computer instrument’ can take any recorded sound as input and split it into a number of very short sound particles that can last for between 1 and 10 milliseconds. ‘These fragments may be infinitely reshuffled, making it possible to vary the music with no change in the fundamental theme.’ Read more…
You can see above Øyvind Brandtsegg giving a public demonstration of his ‘computer instrument’ in February 2008. (Credit: Department of Music at NTNU) Brandtsegg who is a graduate of the Jazz at NTNU program, worked with scientists at the Department of Computer and Information Science for the software architecture and with the acoustics group at the Department of Electronics and Telecommunications for the development of the particle synthesizer.
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