nyu
Latest
Touchless music game lets you create jittery drum and bass with your face
If there was one ubiquitous item at NYU's ITP Winter Show, it was the Kinect. Countless projects were built around the Microsoft-made sensor. Max Ma's Touchless, which he built with a ton of help from Tony Lim, originally featured one, but the version that made it to the floor went with an OEM equivalent instead. But the effect is the same: a set of cameras and sensors track various parts of your face, turning your muscle twitches and eyebrow raises into raw data. While Max says this data can be used for a host of different applications, such as unlocking your door with a series of blinks and winks, he focused on bringing joy to people's lives through music creation. The sensor tracks between 16 and 64 points (under ideal conditions) on your face, and uses your movements to trigger and manipulate samples. Truth is, it's hard not to smile while making ridiculous faces, though, I was a little disappointed to find out that the tracker did not play well with my winter beard. The main method of interacting is by tilting your head, opening your mouth and raising your eyebrows, but Max added some depth by turning a Leap Motion sensor into a controller for a software synthesizer. So samples and beats are all above the neck, but you can wave your hands through the air to play a lovely lead melody. Really, the whole thing is pretty self-explanatory and quite fun, as you can see in the video after the break.
Clack-Clack FACE gives a typewriter new life as a text-based portrait painter
There's something oddly romantic about taking a piece of archaic technology and giving it new life as a work of 21st century art. Take the Royal Empress typewriter you see above. This particular model was built in 1961 and eventually landed in the hands of Amanda Gelb as graduation gift. She and her fellow classmates, Jinyi Fu and Quingyuan Chen, looked at the hunk of aging metal and saw potential instead of an obsolete writing tool. For their installation at the ITP Winter Show, they wired up each of the keys to an Arduino for tracking what a user types, then paired that with a tiny projector that displays the letters on a sheet of paper wrapped around the platen. The "face" part of the equation comes from the webcam mounted to the top of the typewriter case. It uses brightness to map a silhouette of the person sitting in front of it and fills only the darkened areas with letters, creating an ASCII portrait in real time. The code also automatically loops the letters you type, so even if you press only a single key the picture will appear. Of course, you could also type out a love letter or a quick blog post and the whole thing will be wrapped inside the confines of your outline. When you're done, you can press the re-labeled print key and a laser printer spits out your portrait. While there are already plenty of apps and sites out there that will automatically create ASCII versions of images, there's something alluring about sitting in front of gorgeous piece of hardware and creating it live. Plus, there are few things in this world as satisfying as pressing down the stiff keys of an old typewriter, hearing the titular onomatopoeia and seeing the letter appear before you. Especially when you know you're creating a work of art, even if you're a terrible writer.
Facebook hires NYU professor to lead its artificial intelligence efforts
Facebook's fledgling artificial intelligence group now has a leader -- the social network has hired New York University professor Yann LeCun to run the research division from New York City. He'll remain at the university part time, but most of his energy will now be spent researching data science, deep learning and other technologies that could refine Facebook's social stream. While LeCun's hire won't pay off for some time, it already suggests that Zuckerberg and crew are serious about competing with Google's Ray Kurzweil in the AI space.
Bird poop and Big Screens: Attempting a multiplayer world record
There's no category in the Guinness World Records for the most players in a single-screen multiplayer game. However, that's likely to change soon thanks to a group of New York University graduate students who created SPLAT, a multiplayer game designed for the 120-foot video wall installed in the lobby of the IAC building on the west side of Manhattan. The screen is a Prysm laser phosphor display and sports a whopping resolution of 11,520 x 1,080 pixels. The game was debuted at a packed showcase event last Friday night, along with the work of other students from an NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program class appropriately called Big Screens.
NYU synthesizes crystals with lifelike behavior under light
Scientists have long surmised that inorganic life is possible. New York University hasn't created any at this stage, but it just produced an uncannily close imitation through a recent experiment. When exposing hematite particles (iron and oxygen in a polymer) to specific wavelengths of blue light, researchers got the particles to form crystals that metabolize and move together like a flock. If it weren't for the lack of reproduction, the crystals would technically qualify as life -- and one upcoming test will trade mobility for that self-replication. Accordingly, NYU sees the crystals not just as having possible uses for electronics, but also as illustrating that a finer line might exist between living creatures and synthetic objects. Whether or not the university ever meets all three conditions for life at once, we may have to reset our expectations for what chemicals can do when they get together.
PBS' latest digital short explores the world of coding as art
PBS already showcased indie game creation and buggy software, so this week's digital short on coding as an art form isn't exactly what we'd call a big surprise. It is, however, delightful (also not a big surprise); NYU's Daniel Shiffman, Barbarian Group's Keith Butters, and RGBDToolkit's James George / Jonathan Minard do a great job of representing the medium. The latter folks even employ Microsoft's Kinect with their coding to magnificent effect. See for yourself just below the break.
Cat Car turns your feline into a furry RC vehicle
Lasers, Arudinos, cats doing funny things -- here's a student project custom built for the internet age. We popped by the Winter Show at NYU's ITP school to check out a new batch of works exploring the intersection between art and technology and couldn't help but be enamored by Cat Car, the "feline fitness frenzy." Designed to be a sort of exercise contraption for our furry friends, Sam Brenner's project eventually blossomed into something for more entertaining, though he assures us that "the safety and wellbeing of the cats involved [were his] top priorit[ies]." Cat Car uses a steering wheel controller with an attached Arduino and gyroscope / accelerometer, which communicate with a cat harness via an XBee. The movements control a servo on the back of the cat, which moves around a laser pointer, propelling the cat forward, thus allowing the user to remotely control the cat. A video of this magic can be found after the break.
Bricolo mechanical music system hand-on (video)
Nick Yulman has been doing the whole mechanical music thing for sometime. In fact, the first time he came to our attention was at Maker Faire a couple of years back, when he had a cadre of small robotic instruments set up on a table in a quiet corner near the food stands. For ITP's Spring Show, Nick decided to share the love and brought along his Bricolo mechanical music system. Comprised of a number of different modules, Bricolo is meant to simplify the act of incorporating robotics and physical objects into the creation of "electronic" music. The two main pieces are a drum arm, which can be mounted on a mic stand and uses and uses a simple actuator to swing a drum stick, and a platform with a small solenoid that can produce either percussive rhythms or melodic tones. All of the pieces can be easily controlled by any MIDI instrument or sequencer. The small platform that can produce actual musical tones converts notes from any MIDI source into a frequency that the solenoid can vibrate at, creating sound by striking a surface extremely quickly. In the video below you can see as an old hard cover book is turned into a bass synth. Interestingly, by opening and closing the book, varying the weight placed on the platform, you're able to create a filter effect. For the moment the tiny musical motors are largely a proof of concept -- exposed components attached to black or clear acrylic, but the hope is to eventually sell them to curious creators. Our composing skills might not be quite up to Mr. Yulman's lofty standards and we'll never write a bass line as good as I Want You Back. But, we are big fans of noise, and you can make plenty of it with Bricolo. Check out the video after the break to see it in action.
Plinko Poetry hands-on (video)
Don't lie, you love The Price is Right. There's no shame in it. Maybe you don't watch it religiously, but you get a thrill every time you see them break out the Plinko game. Now, what if you could combine that visceral thrill, with the absurdity of magnetic poetry, while juxtaposing the conflicting political perspectives of Fox News and the New York Times. That's exactly what Inessah Selditz and Deqing Sun did with Plinko Poetry, an installation on display at the ITP Spring Show. Operating it is as simple as dropping a red plastic disc, but the tech behind it is decidedly more sophisticated. It starts with a script that harvests headlines from the Twitter accounts of the New York Times and Fox News. Those streams of words then scroll across a screen dotted with yellow pegs. A simple webcam with a polarizing filter tracks not only those pins, but a red disc that you feed through the top of the display. As it tumbles, the words it passes over are selected to create mashups of the days top stories that are sometimes unintentionally hilarious or accidentally beautiful but, more often than not, predictably gibberish. Once the Processing script on the controlling computer constructs the new phrases, they're fired out into the digital ether via the @PlinkoPoetry Twitter account, which you can monitor on the iPad mounted next to the Plinko itself. To see the art in action, head on after the break.
Etch-a-Sketch 3.0 hands-on (video)
The Etch-a-Sketch. A standard bearer for childhood, and one that most of us never really mastered. While Yelizaveta Lokshina can't help you create awe-inspiring portraits from aluminum powder, she has managed to update the toy for the digital age. Using an Arduino, a few buttons and a pressure sensor crammed inside a hollowed-out Etch-a-Sketch, the 3.0 version of the doodler is able to draw in old school gray, as well as vibrant colors created by blending an RGB palette. While holding down the red, green or blue button you squeeze the pressure sensor to add more or less of individual hues. The same sensor is used to change brush width when you hold down the black button. There's even a secret mode that automatically cycles through colors and thicknesses for creating vibrant, almost hallucinatory patterns. At the moment, the dual doodle knobs need to be physically connected to a computer so that a Processing script can work its magic and render the virtual Etch-a-Sketch. But, future versions may include wireless for sketching out images from the comfort of a couch and an accelerometer for the replicating the satisfying sensation of shaking the red fram to erase your creation. Basically, it's still a work in progress. Drawing with the Etch-a-Sketch 3.0 is just as satisfying, in a tactile sense, as the original, though we struggled slightly to get the hang of the pressure sensitive selector. One thing's for sure, though, the kids love it even more than the 1960 creation. Check out the video after the break to see it in action on the floor of the ITP Spring Show.
Burritob0t hands-on (video)
ITP, or the Interactive Telecommunications Program at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU churns out some of the most reliably interesting tech-centric artists in the world. Every so often, the school opens its doors to the public and the press and, of course, we jumped at the chance to see what the grad students were cooking up... literally. Marko Manriquez took the opportunity to showcase his thesis project, the Burritob0t, a 3D printer the spits out edible piles of beans and cheese, instead of non-toxic (but, highly inedible) plastic. The base is built largely around a standard RepRap machine, with the Frostruder attachment from MakerBot. From there it's pretty simple to plug in any 3D model and build your creation from highly-processed Mexican food -- on a heated platform from the Thingomatic, of course. Marko says that his creation not only seemed like a logical way to combine "edible bits and digital bytes" but also a way to address the increasingly mechanized food industry and our growing reliance on manufactured "food." Sadly, we weren't able to get a complete demo on the show floor. The current incarnation of the device relies on air pressure to push the ingredients through syringes, and firing up the compressor was not an option. A Kickstarter is forthcoming, however, and Marko plans to upgrade the components to ditch the bulky and loud compressor. He also hopes to actually serve food from his printer, perhaps by taking up residence in a park. But, we suspect it'll be a while before you can get a Burritob0t burrito while you wait for your Concrete from Shake Shack. Check out the video after the break. %Gallery-155478%
Schafer: 'It's not that stressful to get a whole bunch of money all of a sudden'
You might be surprised to hear it, but Double Fine head Tim Schafer isn't feeling too much pressure after receiving over $3 million from fans for his upcoming adventure game. "I don't know if I could describe it ... it's kind of relaxing," he told a crowd of attendees at a New York University-hosted forum last evening, much to the crowd's delight. Answering seriously, Schafer said, "It hasn't really felt that way," referring to the stress. "It just felt like, the whole thing, all the backing just felt like a big wave of goodwill and support. It was very emotionally ... it was a big happy moment for the company." Beyond his jokes about stress and receiving enormous piles of cash, Schafer said that he was "actually terrified of making a game for just $200,000." (The final Kickstarter aimed to raise $400,000.) He questioned whether he was still capable of producing a project for such scant resources, having spent the last decade making successively larger projects – at least until Brutal Legend launched. Thankfully, fans raised well over the original target, meaning Schafer, Ron Gilbert, and Double Fine "can actually put a real team on it now and have a whole year to make it." So there you have it, folks: expect that adventure game at some point in early 2013. As for Kickstarter itself, Schafer spoke highly of the new avenue it provides game creators who want to self-publish. He stopped himself short of calling it anything beyond that, however. "I think it's a great new way to make things happen that couldn't happen before," he said. More specifically, he thinks of it – symbolically – like the Sundance Film Festival. "That changed the [movie] business a lot, but it didn't destroy all of it," he said. "It made Hollywood better. It made more diversity in the kind of movies getting made, what kind of actors were in them – it made the whole art form richer I think. I think a similar thing could happen in gaming."
New York University introduces MFA in 'Game Design,' starting fall 2012
New York University's Game Center, already a bastion of game development in the Northeastern US, announced this week that it will open a Master of Fine Arts program for "Game Design" in fall 2012. The Game Center's blog revealed the new program this week with a tentative description of the program's offerings and faculty, pinning names like Frank Lantz and Eric Zimmerman to the staff. The two-year program is said to focus on "game design, game programming, visual design for games, and game criticism." Wait, "game criticism?" According to the MFA program's website, students can focus on criticism for the game design degree, "which means writing about games with a focus on game design and player experience." The site further adds, "A student with this focus will be well-prepared to become a game journalist or critic, a theorist or researcher, or a scholar or historian." There is no mention, however, of the crushing debt you'll be unable to pay with a game journalist's salary. We kid! Regardless, between creating individual projects and working in groups, the NYU MFA program intends on educating future game devs in a wide variety of disciplines, across a varied spectrum of virtual platforms (from social to console, and everything in between) -- even game journalism, it would seem. Interested parties can find out more info through NYU's graduate program portal, but you'll probably want to read this FAQ first. That thesis sounds like a doozy!
Watch Gabe Newell's excellent Games for Change keynote in full right here
Sure, you read our thorough coverage of Valve co-founder and president Gabe Newell's Games for Change keynote last month, but we know how you like moving pictures. We do too! And that's why we're doubly happy to finally present the entire, highly entertaining speech, just above.
Newell sees no distinction 'between games and educational games'
The majority of Valve president and co-founder Gabe Newell's keynote address yesterday at the Games for Change Festival was dedicated to his perception of games as educational tools. And that was fitting for the event, which is dedicated primarily to the educational and socially beneficial elements of gaming, and fitting for Valve Software, a company known most recently for releasing a game steeped in science. Newell explained: "The interesting thing about Portal 2 is it doesn't sort of fit the traditional simplistic model of what a game is. It's not a collection of weapons. It's not a collection of monsters. It's really about science. It's about spatial reasoning, it's about learning physics, it's about problem solving. And often, during the course of the game, you're going to be solving problems with somebody else. The social model inside of it is collaborative and not competitive." After rolling a short clip of the game for audience members, Newell went on to profess, "There seems to be this distinction between games that are educational, and games that are going to be commercially successful. I'm not really sure I buy into that." Citing sales of Portal 2 as proof, Newell pointed out that Valve has seen "$165 million dollars in gross revenue" from the game since April 18. "We can do this. We can make educational, commercially successful games, which are gonna help us both on the game side and on the educational side." He reaffirmed this to me in an interview after the speech, saying, "I just don't believe in this distinction between games and educational games. A lot of times [the label] 'educational games' is a way of being an excuse for bad game design or poor production values."
Al Gore shares an incontestable truth: 'Games are the new normal'
"Games have clearly arrived as a mass medium," former Vice President Al Gore professed to a crowd of Games for Change conference attendees this afternoon. Gore gave the event's keynote address at New York University earlier today, where he looked especially sleepy from a redeye flight out of Tokyo. "This is a very large, extremely significant industry, with a radically diverse and growing audience of players on all kinds of platforms," he added, citing the ubiquity of gaming over the past few years as a result of efforts by major console manufacturers, smartphone makers, and (of course) Facebook. "Games are the new 'normal' for hundreds of millions of users every month." Gore went on to speak about his own admittedly short past with gaming, saying that the last game where he felt he "was best in the world, potentially" was Pong. He did, however, recently convert his book "Our Choice" into an eBook for iOS devices. He related this experience with the world of "serious games," where gaming is used to "illuminate issues that can seem intractable and overly complex." In so many words, it was an arduous process for him to convert the book -- just as it's difficult to convert complex concepts to the gaming medium. The secret sauce, he claimed, was in working with a group of "really good partners who know what they're doing." Identifying those partners, however, is where things get tricky. "How you insure that the integrity of the content is not in any way compromised, but rather enhanced," he pointed out, is another major issue. Without providing a roadmap for how to navigate that issue, Gore put it on conference attendees to take up the task -- not to mention the hundreds of millions of gamers worldwide. Gaming is the new "normal," after all, so shouldn't gamers be involved?
NYU medical center goes sci-fi, scans patients' palms
NYU's Langone Medical Center is getting a jump on that whole 21st-century medical care thing by ditching the clipboards and paperwork for palm scans and digital databases. On June 5th the hospital threw the switch on an electronic patient-tracking program from Epic Systems and paired it with biometric identification technology from PatientSecure, which scans the veins in persons hands using near-infrared light. Instead of being forced to fill out forms with your insurance info and social security number every time you visit, you simply place your hand on a scanner and -- ta-da! -- your records come right up. By combining the vasculature scans (which are even more unique than fingerprints) with patient photos, NYU should be able to minimize misidentification and cut down on duplicate records. Rather than go out on some cheesy pun about palm reading, we'll leave the predictable word play to the folks at ABC news -- check out their coverage after the break alongside PR from the Langone Medical Center.
Watch Valve's Erik Wolpaw lecture on Portal 2 development, nixed ideas
If you missed Valve writer Erik Wolpaw's talk on Portal 2 at New York University's Game Center lecture series event last Thursday, don't worry -- we've got you covered. NYU has uploaded the entirety of Wolpaw's massive, hour-plus talk and the Q&A session that followed in video form (which we've embedded below the break). Grab a drink and relax -- you can put that notebook away. There won't be a test or anything.
NYC: Portal 2 writer Erik Wolpaw speaking at NYU Game Center
You know that wonderful, memorable, hilarious experience you just had with Portal 2? Wouldn't you like to shake the hand of the dude who helped shape that excellent narrative arc? Well, we can't promise you'll be able to do just that at next Thursday's New York University lecture series talk with Valve writer Erik Wolpaw, but you should at very least be able to give him a rousing round of applause. Beyond his latest project, Wolpaw is known for his work on the Half-Life series with Valve and Psychonauts with Double Fine, as well as being a co-founder of lauded game humor site Old Man Murray. During the talk, Wolpaw will introduce the audience to Portal 2 with a "brief guided playthrough," before being grilled by interim director at the Game Center, Frank Lantz. Like past NYU Game Center events, this one will likely fill up quick, so be sure to RSVP (to gamecenter@nyu.edu) asap, if you're interested in attending -- it's free! Still, consider bringing a little cash, as the Game Center will be selling 18x24-inch prints of the various Rachel Morris pieces that accompany each lecture for $20 a pop. They're quite fetching, if we do say so ourselves. Head past the break for complete details, directions and a better look at the event's artwork.
NYC: Come watch thatgamecompany's Kellee Santiago speak at NYU's Game Center
We've told you about New York University's Game Center in the past -- remember that time when Chris Hecker brought SpyParty and talked about all sorts of stuff? -- and we're here to do just that once more. Tomorrow evening, we're hoping you'll join us and several hundred friends in Room 6 of NYU's lower level, where thatgamecompany co-founder and president Kellee Santiago will be speaking to the "Challenges In Evoking Unique Emotions In Video Games." Maybe she'll even talk a bit about her company's new game, Journey? We certainly hope so! Beyond her lecture, a discussion will be moderated by interim director (and Zynga New York creative director) Frank Lantz, with questions from the crowd also being solicited. The discussion begins at 7:00PM EST sharp, and we've dropped pertinent details after the break. Don't be late! Update: NYU has updated its blog with a note about attendance, stating, "Thanks to your enthusiastic response, we have reached capacity for this RSVP-only event. There will be very limited extra seating opened up on a first come, first serve basis starting at 7PM. We encourage you to join our mailing list, follow us, or friend us for updates on future lectures and events. Thank you for your understanding!" So, uh, take that as you will! We're still going!
