Raising funds for “Super Street Fire,” Toronto Site3 hackspace’s magnificent real-world mind-activated flamethrower game: “

Arnon sez, “Super Street Fire (Championship Edition) is the latest project at Site3, the same folks who created interactive fire installations like The Heart Machine and Flux & Fire (all viewable at site3.ca). This time, we’re combining mind-activated flame-effects and power-glove control to let people live their fire-bending dreams! Electronics and controls have all been tested and are go, but we need help for the full-scale install, and are down to the last couple of days before our fundraising period ends and we lose the existing pledges! Pyrokinesis and immersive video-games! What could POSSIBLY go wrong?!’

Each participant wears a pair of gloves that reacts to specific gestures, and a headset that reads their brain activity. A punch or throwing motion will send a single wave of fire towards the other player’s side; raising a hand in a blocking gesture will create a stationary pillar of fire that will block the oncoming wave; a consistent focused thought will send a rapid pattern of flame across the entire ring. The participants get to fight in the ring for one minute, while observers watch the patterns of colored fire they create. The playing field is a full circular ring where attacks can come from either side. Players can try to win by making simple moves, or looking for moves inspired by video games they played long ago…

Super Street Fire : Turbo Championship Edition

(Thanks, Arnon!)

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Archipod: prefab garden offices: “

I once had a job where the company, which was based in a house, built me an office in a prefab shed in the backyard. I liked it a lot, but it didn’t have the pop futuristic appeal of an Archipod! But it wasn’t $34,000 either.

‘The Pod’ is an insulated sphere of approx. 3m in diameter.

Constructed predominantly from timber, the world’s most replenishable construction material, insulated to a standard exceeding that of current Building Regulations. The structure is prefabricated in sections small enough to be carried through a house. So no matter where you live, we’ll be able to get the ‘Pod’ onto your site.

Archipod (Thanks, Gabe Adiv!)

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Bloopdy wooden grid sculpture looks neat: “

Artist Cha Jong Rye ‘focuses on the dialectical relationship between wood and land, material and nature on the surface of her sculptures. There is a sense of poise and connectedness within the allotted spaces of these forms. Each component of the whole is masterfully carved to create part of a larger modular work reminiscent of an elaborate puzzle or topographical contour map.’

Notes about the artist [Hada Contemporary via Illusion 360]

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Broccoli treehouse: “

Brock Davis made this delightful thing. [via Laughing Squid]

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[Teh funny.]

Lytro promises focus-free shooting: “

A new camera sensor design from Lytro captures light in such a way that the focus can be changed in post. Check out the demonstration images at its homepage, and the CEO’s dissertation on how it works:

My proposed solution to the focus problem exploits the abundance of digital image sensor resolution to sample each individual ray of light that contributes to the final image. … To record the light field inside the camera, digital light field photography uses a microlens array in front of the photosensor. Each microlens covers a small array of photosensor pixels. The microlens separates the light that strikes it into a tiny image on this array, forming a miniature picture of the incident lighting. This samples the light field inside the camera in a single photographic exposure. … To process final photographs from the recorded light field, digital light field photography uses ray-tracing techniques. The idea is to imagine a camera conigured as desired, and trace the recorded light rays through its optics to its imaging plane. Summing the light rays in this imaginary image produces the desired photograph. This ray-tracing framework provides a general mechanism for handling the undesired non-convergence of rays that is central to the focus problem. What is required is imagining a camera in which the rays converge as desired in order to drive the final image computation.

This sounds like a plenoptic setup, similar to one demoed by Adobe here. [Thanks, Jim!]

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Spitalfields Nippers: East London street-urchins of 1912: “

From Spitalfields Life, a collection of Horace Warner’s ‘Spitalfields Nipper’ photos, of the barefoot urchins that haunted the neighbourhood around London’s Spitalfields Market in 1912. I’m typing these words within spitting distance (ahem) of Spitalfields, and I’m pretty sure I recognise some of the buildings. The kids’ expressions are a mix of plucky cheek, premature cynicism and desperation.

Little is known of Horace Warner and nothing is known of his relationship to the nippers. Only thirty of these pictures survive, out of two hundred and forty that he took, tantalising the viewer today as rare visions of the lost tribe of Spitalfields Nippers. They may look like paupers, and the original usage of them to accompany the annual reports of the charitable Bedford Institute, Quaker St, Spitalfields, may have been as illustrations of poverty – but that is not the sum total of these beguiling photographs, because they exist as spirited images of something much more subtle and compelling, the elusive drama of childhood itself.

Update: Bill Gibson’s Twitter comment on these photos: ‘Those Spitalfields nippers grew up to successfully fight the battle of Cable Street, breaking Moseley’s British Union of Fascists.’

Spitalfields Nippers

(via How to Be a Retronaut)

Why fair use doesn’t work unless you’ve got a huge war-chest for paying lawyers: “

Last year, Waxy released Kind of Bloop, a chiptunes tribute to Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. He meticulously cleared all the samples on the album, and released it for $5 (backers of his Kickstarter project got it for free — Waxy is founder of Kickstarter). One thing Waxy didn’t clear was the pixellated re-creation of the iconic cover photo he commissioned. He believed and believes that it is fair use — a transformative use with minimal taking that doesn’t harm the market for the original, produced to comment on the original. Jay Maisel, the photographer who shot the original, disagreed, and sued Waxy for $150,000 per download, plus $25,000. Waxy ended up settling for $32,500, even though he believes he’s in the right — he couldn’t afford to defend himself in court. He’s written an excellent post on copyright, fair use, and the way that the system fails to protect the people who are supposed to get an exception to copyright:

In practice, none of this matters. If you’re borrowing inspiration from any copyrighted material, even if it seems clear to you that your use is transformational, you’re in danger. If your use is commercial and/or potentially objectionable, seek permission (though there’s no guarantee it’ll be granted) or be prepared to defend yourself in court.

Anyone can file a lawsuit and the costs of defending yourself against a claim are high, regardless of how strong your case is. Combined with vague standards, the result is a chilling effect for every independent artist hoping to build upon or reference copyrighted works.

It breaks my heart that a project I did for fun, on the side, and out of pure love and dedication to the source material ended up costing me so much — emotionally and financially. For me, the chilling effect is palpably real. I’ve felt irrationally skittish about publishing almost anything since this happened. But the right to discuss the case publicly was one concession I demanded, and I felt obligated to use it. I wish more people did the same — maybe we wouldn’t all feel so alone.

Kind of Screwed

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University of Michigan to stop worrying about lawsuits, start releasing orphan works: “Bobbyg sez, ‘The University of Michigan Library will be sharing digital copies of their orphan works, that is, copyrighted works which have no identifiable owner, with the University community. Paul Courant, the University Librarian, says that the project is integral to the mission of the library, and that the sharing of the orphan works is a ‘fair use’ of the material, stating that ‘sharing these orphan works does no economic harm to any person or organization, while not doing so harms scholarship and learning…”

The Orphan Works Project is being led by the Copyright Office of the University of Michigan Library to identify orphan works. Orphan works are books that are subject to copyright but whose copyright holders cannot be identified or contacted. Our immediate focus is on digital books held by HathiTrust, a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future.

This effort is funded by the HathiTrust and is part of U-M Library’s ongoing efforts to understand the true copyright status of works in its collection. As part of this effort, the Library will develop policies, processes, and procedures that can be used by other HathiTrust partners to replicate a task that will ultimately require the hand-checking of millions of volumes.

Orphan Works Project

(Thanks, Bobbyg!)

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Phone-tree navigator waits on hold for you: “Fonolo automates navigating stupid, complex corporate phone menus: browse through its maps of large companies’ menu-systems, decide which department you want to speak to, and give it your phone number. It calls the company, navigates to the appropriate spot, and waits on the hold queue until it reaches a human, then calls you and bridges you in. They use online forms to gather the information the person on the phone is going to ask you and transmit it to her/him. I don’t know how secure or private the system is, but it’s basically what I’ve wanted since the first time I encountered a hold-queue (if it works, I’ll even forgive them ‘cloud-based’ and ‘voice 2.0’ buzzword-compliance).

(via /.)

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