I’m invited to LIFT11

I have been contacted to participate to a nice workshop at the LIFT 11 event in Marseille on next week.

I’ll be there on wednesday the 6th, thursday the 7th morning and friday the 8th morning.
Email me and we can meet us there to discuss a bit and have fun

The whole program is here.

The project on which I’ll work is named TOMETTES 2013.
It seems to be a very nice project coordinated by the Ph D Peter Niebert from the Laboratoire d’Informatique Fondamentale de Marseille

http://tomette2013.n…/TometteIDE.mov

As a geek/programmer, I’m very interested to collaborate and to test it.

I’ll collaborate with Nicolas Chapuis too.

Thanks to Eric Pringels who contacted me about that.

LIFT 2011, what we made!

Firstly, I have to thank a lot Éric Pringels from marseille2013.org, the VERY official Marseille Capitale Européenne de la Culture OFF because he connected me to the LIFT 2011 and especially to the Tomettes 2013 project by Peter Niebert.
I crossed Nicolas Chapuis too.
I met him this year.
He is a nice interaction designer, teacher and very cool.
We discussed a bit around those embedded systems and especially about the interaction we could have with them!

Me at lift2011
 

I met Mathieu Caralp, a future PhD in fundamental computer science research.
He’s just a mega programmer/coder and one of those guru making their own … compilers!
He’s also very cool & nice.

Some words about Tomettes

Each Tomette owns a micro-controller from 18F family (8bits stuff)
Each board (1 tomette = 1 board) owns:

• 6 RGB leds (controlled in the firmware by PWM)
• 6 inputs/outputs for communication with the neighbourood of tomettes

Basically, you can assemble a network of Tomettes.
It is an amazing system which can be considered at many scale: individual knowledge vs collective intelligence

Each micro-controller’s cycle, co-routines are executed.
It is “a kind of” parallelism, and can basically consider like that.Each tomette can write messages on its outputs & can read message from its inputs.
Each tomette can light up or down each RGB Leds and with PWM, they can reproduce 4096 colors I guess (2^12 bits coded)

What we developed
I have been invited to test & develop something I had in mind.
I decided to propose a “kind of” little social network model to use & implement into those smart Tomettes.

It is a very nice system to make model like that because you program/code a firmware for each tomette, and you let the system evolve as a whole organism or population of elements.

We decided to modelize the whole system as a big leds array (not considering really the tomette level)
The only tomette level stuff considered was cell in which one and only one character could be placed.

So, here is the model we made:
each tomette is a cell
we place one and only one person in cell, but the cell can be empty (a person = a led lighted up)
each person as some characteristics (current mood, steerability, mood trend)
mood can be 255 values (0 means very quiet, 128 neutral, 255 very nervous)

firstly, we place some person with random characteristics
secondly, those person send a message from their cell to a random neighbour one,
And then, all messages move till they reach someone (else!)

Depending on steerability, current & mood trend, the person’s mood is altered when a message touches it, and if no message touches it since several processor cycle, the trend drives the person current mood to go to nervous or quiet.

The system isn’t completely finished but works fine
The random functions use a pseudo-random system and it will be improved, for sure!

BIG Max5 installation Musee de la Buzine

Design the Media & I have been targeted & approached about a big Max5 installation project for a permanent exhibition (check this post)
This work has been featured on the cycling 74 website too:

For newbies, I used the Max5 framework provided & edited by those gurus at Cycling 74
Big up to them!

Now, I can name the place/museum.
The Museum is: Musée de la Buzine – Maison des cinématographies de la Méditerranée

It involves:
- 24 systems with OS Windows 7 64bits + 1 server with Windows 2008 server.
- 1 Gigabit Ethernet Network
- 7 touchscreen
- 10 video-projectors
- 20 rfid readers
- 7 arduino boards with 8 buttons + 8 ultrasonic sensors
- 2 multichannel (>4) sound system

I designed the whole system, integrating visuals from a graphic designer, videos from footage makers, sounds from sound designers.

I had to create several tricky systems like:
- a dynamic subtitler for video (using basic .srt files for easy maintenance & change by the customer)
- a scheduler (using UDP datagrams to shutdown the whole exhibition at particular hours all along the years & using Wake On Lan UDP datagrams to wake up all in the morning too)
- a database integration (it provides a system to make Max5 patches knowing what is the language of the visitor’s RFID Card)
- full network connections to remote control all patches with UDP datagrams (put the installation stand by mode to save energy, etc)
- specific Arduino firmwares (input reading + output writing)

This Museum has been inaugurated by the french Ministry of Culture, 2 days ago.

You can see more about this museum and about what we made on this video:

I’m proud about this big project.

I hope to make & build systems like that in a (close) future but actually, I’m on many other amazing projects and probably more personal projects.
Indeed, on my own, I wrote and sent a state of intent for a personal installation system.

The 6 rules to design the best user interfaces

“User Interface Design is the art of building the elusive missing link between you and the system you want to control and then hear the desired results.

One of the biggest challenges in user interface design is to keep the user perspective as the focal point of any Interface Design project.
As a case in point, just take a look at the grand majority of popular user interfaces, and how they are
commonly used.
Once you do, you’ll begin to understand that a lot of companies (even the biggest ones) seem to have forgotten this main idea.”

- 20 pages written by Julien Bayle (protodeck‘s designer)
- 6 items to avoid to miss the point
- fresh designed by Manuela Ciancilla
- rocky reviewed translation by Glenn Reuther

This e-book is published & distributed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license.

You can download it for FREE after have been registered here fore FREE too :

http://designthemedia.com/products/file/6-the-6-rules-to-design-the-best-user-interfaces/

IMPURE, a graphical framework for data visualization

I discovered very lately this powerful graphical programming framework.
Its main purpose is data visualization.

As Ben Fry defined the data visualization field of knowledge, in order to achieve a whole project of data viz (the short name often used), you have to process 7 tasks:
- acquire
- parse
- filter
- mine
- represent
- filter
- interact

The last step can be put on the side, as some authors made, but I consider it to be a real & strong step in this big process because it provides the human/machine interface necessary & sufficient to people to manipulate/change/alter the filter (often) and makes them better understanding the purpose.

There are a lot of librairies to achieve that on the web.
By using Proce55ing, you can “easily” grabbing data, processing them & visualize them too.

Processing provides a core .jar (BIG java library) but a light IDE too.
You can download it and test it for free here: http://processing.org/download
A bunch of examples are available and there is a strong community too.

In the case of Processing, you have to code using a JAVA overset of the official library.
A lot of functions visualization-oriented are coded especially for you but… in the end you have to type lines of code!

If you don’t want to dive into a code language but if you want to make strong data viz, just make a try withIMPURE
Please, just do it now !

Bestiaro (the startup behind it) defines it like that:

Impure is a visual programming language aimed to gather, process and visualize information. With impure is possible to obtain information from very different sources; from user owned data to diverse feeds in internet, including social media data, real time or historical financial information, images, news, search queries and many more. Impure is a tool to be in touch with data around internet, to deeply understand it. Within a modular logic interface you can quickly link information to operators, controls and visualization methods, bringing all the power of the comprehension of information and knowledge to the not programmers that want to work with information in a professional way.

Those folks are clear & precise, they just invite us & provides us a strongly art/design oriented framework to build from light to complex data visualizations!

Basically, it is all about boxes & patch cords.
You probably know Max5, another graphical programming framework with a less precise purpose, but with a so powerful & strong implementation… It is “a bit” like that.

You connect some objects between them and those objects make their job!
The framework is actually supported only for your browser (that is the fate of all applications & software one day or the other).
But it just proves that our browsers are strong frameworks to parse JS & HTML5 & Flash scripts & binaries!
We already knew that, but it is another reminder

The result, at the end of this tree of patched objects, are pretty nice visualization which can help you to analyse data, or to represent them for a public who don’t care about abstract arrays of numbers.

You can check their flickr gallery too.

I contacted them and they are nice & gave me a feedback about IMPURE.
Indeed, I wanted to know more about further implementation & especially about the fact I’d be very interested by a local implementation (I mean, outside of the browser)

As I’m beginning a big personal project about data viz inside an immersive system, I’d be very interested by plugging it to Max5, for instance.
The AS3 under the hood isn’t open-source, but I hope it will be 

Feel free to contact me, as I’m currently working a bit with IMPURE.
And spread the word for them, they just deserve that!