After weeks of speculation, the Eigenharp is live! This crazy instrument is part woodwind, part drum, and part piano. You can blow it, tap it, and stroke it to make music and it includes a case and strap. It costs $5,800 dollars and is customizable at the new product page.
Interestingly, they also released the Eigenharp Pico for about $500. It’s more like a recorder (a simple flute) and has 18 keys and one slider.
A colorful and delicately woven tapestry is transformed into a poetic, almost surreal, musical instrument by artists Myrto Karanika and Jeremy Keenan.
Strings 2009 is a novel musical interface that combines rather disparate arts: the traditional craft of weaving, printmaking and embroidery with electronic music.
As is the case with any other musical instrument, the experience, for performer and audience alike, is visceral.
But unlike most other musical instruments, the interface is soft, supple and certainly unfamiliar. Gesture is key in creating sound at specific “touch nodes” creating with woven and embroidered conductive thread.
LA graffiti writer Tony, aka TemptOne, has a rare neuromuscular disease that has caused progressive muscle weakness and eventual paralysis. Despite not being able to move a muscle, his eyes still function normally. With the help of the Not Impossible Foundation, he was once again able to get back to work:
Design artist Mike Thompson has developed a one time use lamp that works by a flourescent reaction between human blood and an active chemical component dissolved in water.
Words and photo via medgadget.com. Interesting way to get light, emergency or otherwise.
His Ghost Detector is a musical instrument built by ‘hacking’ any electronic device that generates sound. Random lengths of wire are connected to randomly chosen places on its circuit board. The wires receive radiation of all kinds, and the results are translated into sound. The device becomes a “synthesizer”. It is unstable, responsive to slight influences and what it synthesizes can therefore not be controlled. A larger Ghost Detector randomly interconnects several such individual devices. Positioned all over a wall at HMKV, the network of “ghost detectors” read the “auras” of the audience. Rumour has it that the bodies or even the moods of visitors walking around the installation might affect the sonic output.
Now we have the Hap.tickle Greeting, designed by Lina Saleem, that allows us to send a tickle to our loved ones and dearest friends.
Since “tickling” strengthens social connections (according to Charles Darwin), Hap.tickle Greeting can help you connect with separated friends. The wearable itself is decadently designed with ruffles, frills and vibrating motors (of course) on the backs and sides of the garment. When the garment receives a message via SMS, the motors gently begin to pulse sending loving tickles down the sides and spine of the wearer.
Hugs, massages, and now tickles. The catalog continues to be built.
Regular velcro helps the slow and undexterous keep their shoes securely on. But steel velcro? Well, that stuff can support up to 35 tons of pressure.
Developed by German engineers, this new version of Velcro is dubbed Metaklett, and it can support 35 tons at temperatures up to 1472 degrees. It’s made from “perforated steel strips 0.2 millimetres thick, one kind bristling with springy steel brushes and the other sporting jagged spikes.”
The lush, white carpet is interwoven with conductive thread and transforms anyone who stands and walks across the carpet into a human antenna.
The carpet picks up the radio waves which your body receives and makes them “hearable.” When walking on the carpet you can tune it to a certain frequency, similar to the tuner of a radio.
Perhaps most perplexing is the question of legal responsibility. If someone wearing a neural prosthesis were to punch someone, who is to blame? The action may have been deliberate, in which case the patient is to blame, or the chip may have been malfunctioning and the responsibility would lie with the manufacturer. Discovering where the truth lay would be no easy task. The law has had trouble catching up with the self-parking car, never mind an electronically controlled limb gone wild.
MIT Professor Missy Cummings (a former F-18 Hornet Navy Pilot), and her team of 30 students and undergrads, have successfully demonstrated how an iPhone could be used to control an Unmanned Area Vehicle, or UAV.
As part of their work at MIT’s Humans and Automation Lab (HAL, heh), the team thought about ways to improve on the suitcase-sized controller that soldiers must currently lug around to control hand-thrown Raven UAVs.
The iPhone app they developed sends GPS coordinates to the craft, which then in turn can send photos and video back to the iPhone.
Thinking like a criminal is Tobias’ idea of fun. It makes him laugh. It has also made him money and earned him a reputation as something of the Rain Man of lock-breaking. Even if you’ve never heard of Tobias, you may know his work: He’s the guy who figured out how to steal your bike, unlock your front door, crack your gun lock, blow up your airplane, and hijack your mail. Marc Weber Tobias has a name for the headache he inflicts on his targets: the Marc Weber Tobias problem.
Lock-breaking is equal parts art and science. So is the ability to royally piss people off. Tobias is a veritable da Vinci at both endeavors. His Web site’s streaming video of prepubescent kids gleefully opening gun locks has won him no points with mothers or locksmiths, and his ideas about how to smuggle liquid explosive reagents onto commercial airlines spookily presaged the Transportation Security Administration’s prohibitions against carry-on liquids. Over the past 20 years, Tobias has been threatened by casinos, banned from hotel chains, and bullied by legions of corporate lawyers. And enjoyed every minute of it.
But to Tobias, pissing off The Man isn’t the point, not entirely. Nor is it, entirely, to make himself famous or rich—not that he’s allergic to either outcome. The point, he says, is to “make shit better.” Tobias thinks of himself as a humble public servant. When he attacks the Kryptonite bike lock or the Club (or those in-room safes at Holiday Inn or Caesars Palace), he’s not a bad guy—he’s just Ralph Nader with a slim jim, protecting consumers by exposing locks, safes, and security systems that aren’t actually locked, safe, or secure. At least, not from people like him.
The problem, if you’re a safe company or a lock maker, is that Tobias makes it all public through hacker confabs, posts on his Security.org site, and tech blogs like Engadget. He views this glasnost as a public service. Others see a hacker how-to that makes The Anarchist Cookbook read like Betty Crocker. And where Tobias sees a splendid expression of First Amendment rights, locksmiths and security companies see a criminal finishing school. Tobias isn’t just exposing problems, they say. He is the problem.
Web, file transfer, email and peer-to-peer networks all use TCP, which ensures that data packets are received securely by making the sender wait until the receiver returns a “got it” message. If no such acknowledgement arrives (on average 1 in 1000 packets gets lost or corrupted), the sender’s computer sends the packet again. This scheme is known as TCP’s retransmission mechanism – and it can be bent to the steganographer’s whim, says Mazurczyk.
Their system, dubbed retransmission steganography (RSTEG), relies on sender and receiver using software that deliberately asks for retransmission even when email data packets are received successfully. “The receiver intentionally signals that a loss has occurred. The sender then retransmits the packet but with some secret data inserted in it,” he says in a preliminary research paper (www.arxiv.org/abs/0905.0363). So the message is hidden among the teeming network traffic.
Could a careful eavesdropper spot that RSTEG is being used because the first sent packet is different from the one containing the secret message? As long as the system is not over-used, apparently not, because if a packet is corrupted the original packet and the retransmitted one will differ from each other anyway, masking the use of RSTEG.
One application of the RSTEG technique might be to help people in totalitarian regimes avoid censorship. The Warsaw team plans to demonstrate it at a workshop on network steganography in Wuhan, China, this November. “We are aware that organising this event in China may be not only a scientific challenge but also a political one,” says Mazurczyk.
Lights On is an audio visual performance created for the Ars Electronica museum in Linz, Austria, which has a facade that contains 1085 LED controllable windows. The windows’ colors are changed in realtime with music that’s broadcasted on speakers surrounding the building.
Visuals coded in openFrameworks by Zachary Lieberman, Joel Gethin Lewis and Damian Stewart (yesyesno). music by Daito Manabe, with support from Taeji Sawai and Kyoko Koyama. We made this in three days :)
This is an edited performance, link via makezine.com.
Last night I built a haptic compass, also known as the Clown Belt. This is a belt which features twelve vibrating pager motors equally spaced around the perimeter of the belt. The control box uses a digital compass to determine which way is north, and continuously buzzes the appropriate motor. The effect is subtle but noticeable. I feel like I’ve been granted a strange new sense of direction.
The belt has additional features: it can be connected via serial to my iPhone which delivers up a bearing to an arbitrary destination. I have a first generation iPhone, which means my current location is highly approximate, but for distant locations it works great. It can also be controlled wirelessly over an XBee RF link, but the peculiar application of that is the subject of a future post.
The $250 proof-of-concept device – which researcher Chris Paget built in his spare time – operates out of his vehicle and contains everything needed to sniff and then clone RFID, or radio frequency identification, tags. During a recent 20-minute drive in downtown San Francisco, it successfully copied the RFID tags of two passport cards without the knowledge of their owners.
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Paget’s device consists of a Symbol XR400 RFID reader (now manufactured by Motorola), a Motorola AN400 patch antenna mounted to the side of his Volvo XC90, and a Dell 710m that’s connected to the RFID reader by ethernet cable. The laptop runs a Windows application Paget developed that continuously prompts the RFID reader to look for tags and logs the serial number each time one is detected. He bought most of the gear via auctions listed on eBay.
