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Airbnb offers Sarah Jessica Parker as your shoe shopping partner
Tomorrow morning, Sex and the City fans will have the opportunity to grab one of four Airbnb Experiences that will take them on a shopping trip with Sarah Jessica Parker. Airbnb is expanding its offerings of Experiences in New York City, which will include Parker's listing among a number of others. The proceeds of the Airbnb booking will go to the New York City Ballet. Parker, a NYC Ballet board member, told the Associated Press that the ballet is "one of the great cultural experiences anybody can have."
Arduino sensors let ballerinas 'paint' with their pointes
What if you could paint with your shoes? Electronic Traces is a pair ballet pointe shoes that sends a dancer's movements to a nearby smartphone. Using Lilypad Arduinos, they record pressure and movement whenever they touch the ground. This data can then be visualized by an accompanying app, allowing dancers to view their performances after the fact, or compare them to others'.
Bounden is an iPhone dancing game that gets better when you hold hands
You met on Tinder, you romanced on Snapchat, and now your smartphone can also help you to get physical. (No, not in that way, pervert.) An iPhone game called Bounden has just arrived at the App Store and it's designed (in partnership with a ballet company, no less) to instruct you on how to make beautiful shapes with another person. As demonstrated in the video below, you both hold onto the phone and then try to move some gyro-responsive dots around the screen. Get it right, and you end up with some nice twirls, a high score and a partner for life. All for $4.
Two-player ballet with iOS, Android game Bounden
This is "the most elegant" Bounden dance routine that took place at GDC, according to Game Oven designer Adriaan de Jongh and producer Eline Muijres. Sure, they may say that to every person who grabs the other half of de Jongh's iPhone, but it still feels special. Bounden is a two-player game that uses a smartphone gyroscope to make players dance together. A reticle takes center stage on the phone screen, perched on top of a sphere. That sphere spins, bringing around lines of circles that have to match up with the reticle – with two players holding opposite ends of the phone, that means moving together in smooth, complex ballet moves. Bounden is made in collaboration with the Junior Company of the Dutch National Ballet – actual, professional dancers helped craft its moves, and it shows in the game's inherent grace. Take a look at some making-of videos here. Game Oven is committed to building mobile games that encourage physical interaction, as its previous titles (Fingle, Bam fu) demonstrate. The studio describes Bounden as a mix of Twister and ballet. Bounden is due out on May 21 for iOS and Android phones (not tablets, because that would be terribly inelegant). [Images: Joystiq, Game Oven]
Do ballet like the Dutch pros with mobile game Bounden
Indie developer Game Oven has a knack for making people do odd things with their mobile devices, starting with its first game, Fingle, which makes two players intertwine their fingers in weird ways, or its third game, Friendstrap, which asks two players to hold onto one iPhone for as long as possible, providing talking points and a timer – if you let go, you lose. Bounden is Game Oven's fourth mobile game, and it asks two players to dance together, each holding onto the ends of an smart phone and twisting their bodies to make the cursor hit a series of intended bullseyes. "Bounden's initial idea was simply to make two players dance together, but after a dozen of prototypes we noticed that we were not able to make the dances ourself," Game Over designer Adriaan de Jongh tells Joystiq. "Choreography is something people do for a living, so we figured we needed one. I scanned the internet for Dutch choreographers for about 10 minutes, only to find that the people at the Dutch National Ballet were the coolest guys in the field. I called them, a week later I met them, and two weeks later they agreed on helping us."
Rise and Shiny recap: FreeJack
FreeJack is a new MMORPG brought to us by Gamerkraft. It's based on parkour, a sport that pits human against pavement -- a ballet performed upon rooftops and railways. Well, that's the theory, at least. In reality, parkour is sometimes very cumbersome to watch. If you are ever fortunate enough to catch a televised parkour competition, you'll see that there is almost no fluidity involved at all. Instead, players perform flips and spins on a perfectly laid-out track. It feels clunky, especially when the runner pauses to set up a killer move. FreeJack, I had hoped, would give back some of that fluid movement to the sport. After all, a fall in a video game does not end your life -- greater risks can be taken. When we picture parkour in our heads, we see superhero-like movements, leaping between buildings, or balancing on wires. In most ways, FreeJack delivers this experience. It also features some really cool graphics, fantastic customization and great social systems. But in the middle of all that fun, the game can just stop you and make you feel more human than ever. %Gallery-102590%
Duke micro-bots learning to dance, probe cellular architectures
We won't even front: Duke's quasi-invisibility cloak is far cooler than this, but a team of microscopic robots sure have the potential to do more good than a glorified figment of someone's imagination. Bruce Donald, a Duke professor of computer science and biochemistry, has teamed up with a few other mad scientists in order to create ridiculously tiny robots that can dance on objects smaller than a pin's head. According to Mr. Donald, they are "almost 100 times smaller than any previous robotic designs of their kind and weigh even less." Sure, watching these critters do the tango is undoubtedly entertaining, but he's hoping to collaborate with the medical center in order to "probe the molecular and cellular architectures of very small things such as cells." We appreciate the dedication to mankind and all, but don't pretend like you don't goof off with these guys on your coffee breaks, Bruce.[Via Slashdot]
"Slow Dancing" art installation utilizes slow-motion HD
Here's an interesting one. In a wild art installation destined to debut at the Lincoln Center Festival, David Michalek will be utilizing high-definition video and slow-motion effects "to show 43 dancers moving at less than one one-hundredth of their original speed." The dancers were captured at 1,000 frames-per-second, and thanks to the additional slow down, an average five-second clip has been stretched into shorts that run between eight and twelve minutes. The project is slated to be projected on a trio of screens in uncompressed HD in the New York State Theater through July 29th, but if you're a good ways from the Big Apple, feel free to sneak a peek at the (less momentous) video in the read link.
