Remember Virtual Reality, all hyped to hell, back yonder in the pre-millenium bug era? Promising all sorts of entertainment, communications and medical uses, it evaporated – mostly remembered now for adding ‘teledildonics’ to the english language. Googling ‘Augmented Reality’ will reveal where some of that energy has been reinvested – a global movement of tech-heads currently pushing the idea of graphics overlaid on top of your field of vision. A-Rage is an Adelaide company developing both software and hardware for AR, and creative director Joe Velikovsky is quite excited about it’s potential for making computer games which can be played outdoors. ( www.a-rage.com )

> What thrills about A-Rage and it’s possibilities?
Just how `sci-fi’ it is, I guess… except it’s happening right now. As a kid, I’d often (more…)

Snapshot of the live-pixel zeitgeist, circa August 2005:

Grid Pro 1.0 ( MAC )
www.vidvox.net
Flavour of the VJ month, GridPro is testament to clever coder co-operation with a community of (more…)

Experimental musicians, motion graphic designers and game-heads will love the possibilities suggested by Fijuu, an impressive 3D audiovisual performance engine and interface put together by Pix & Julian Oliver, Aussie ex-pats new-media slumming it in Europe. Fijuu allows dynamic manipulation of 3D instruments using Playstation2 style gamepads to make improvised music – which combined with the tightly synchronised motion graphics and spatial explorations, forms a highly compelling and unusual audiovisual experience. At the bleeping heart of Fijuu? – The open source game engine ‘Nebula’, running on Linux, and a desire for live audiovisual improvisation.

“During performance, you quickly start to think in terms of the sound and the image and not the interface in between,” explains Julian, (more…)

VJs are necessarily tech-literate folk, and unsurprisingly online VJ communities thrive across a range of bulletinboards, mailing lists and websites. VJ Falk probably pops up on most of them from time to time, ever the provocative pixel enthusiast. Fresh from the AVIT UK global gathering of VJs, he emailed about his recent VJ Blog development – ‘The world in VJ vision’ at http://vjblog.prototypen.com.

>What lead you to start VJ-Blogging? (more…)

It takes different strokes to rule the world, yes it does, it takes different strokes to rule the world. And if game culture is to be believed, theirs is an empire already larger than Hollywoods. However, the networked creation of games is also steadily infiltrating the worlds of art, design, music and film. Snapshots 1-5: Fijuu, Augmented Reality, Video Blogs, VJ Blogs & You Are Beautiful >> (more…)

((*article pitched to Remix magazine (glossy, saturated with half-naked models & innuendo ). The editor loved it, and the finished article, but the producer baulked at last minute, claiming “ethically I can’t promote porn”. Saga lasted 6 months, printed up later in 3D World instead. ))

Half of our once standing forests have already been lost. And they continue to tumble, compounding the actual terrors of climate change and accelerating species extinction. Media-savvy eco-activists have been telling us this for decades, but we get easily distracted. However, not many environmentalists have public relations strategies like Tommy Hol Ellingsen and Leona Johansson of fuckforforest.com. (more…)

‘Rearview thinking’ has been described as the way humans sometimes try to grasp the road ahead by looking through the rearview mirror rather than the windscreen at the actual road in front of them. Put another way, we are always filtering our understanding of the new, through what we expect from the old. Add statistical analysis and you get Polyphonic HMI ( www.polyphonichmi.com ), a company dedicated to the science of hit predictions, who claim they can accurately recommend which music will appeal to an individual or entire market. Record companies and artists are already hiring them to improve their chances of a hit. CEO Mike McCready explains your taste in music: (more…)

Another notch along the dizzying climb of human evolution – calling the local multinational pizza parlour can now divert us to someone from another country, happy to recite a menu and take our delivery order. There’s a stoner sci-fi novel in there somewhere.

Call Centre Chaos
“..Call me any anytime…
…Call me, call me for some overtime”
- Blondie, back in the days before mobile phones.

As well as the large number of impoverished people India holds, it’s population of 1 billion people also carries an educated middle class larger than that of the United States, and a booming IT industry. The combination of IT saturation and cheap labour is fast gathering India a reputation as the call centre capital of the world (more…)

Instead of double-clicking our way to the afterlife, there’s a wealth of mouse alternatives worth considering – for both health and their enhanced functionality. And learning a few preventative wrist yoga techniques is probably also preferable to having to wear those pesky RSI slings and bandages further down the track.

The Power Mate
www.griffintechnology.com/products/powermate
Like most contemporary interface add-ons, the power-mate is a USB powered device which will plug straight into most computers. Essentially, it’s a large metallic clickable knob which allows the user to finely control the scrolling functions of software applications. It’s clicks and circular movements can be mapped to different functions within different applications and some useful examples of these might include the volume levels of the computer, or allowing a fine controller for scrubbing back and forth on a video or audio clip, or especially within timeline based applications which can be particularly gruesome on the mouse-hand when repetitively scrolling back and forth along a time-line to edit or adjust clips.

What’s it like? While nothing as versatile as a multi-knobbed midi controller the Power Mate is actually quite a useful controller – it feels very nice to use, allows quite fine and smooth control, and feels solid and reliable. It’s a snap to adjust settings, and customise to suit various applications – eg make ‘click and scroll right’ = one thing, make scroll right = another etc etc. And what else you can’t help notice about the PowerMate ( US$45 ) is the kinda daft but cute blue light embedded all around it’s base – which steadily throbs (u can switch the pulse mode off ), and emanates an eerie blue all round. As an added bonus this’d also presumably be an effective deterrent to prevent any junkies shooting up next to your computer.

Game Controllers & MIDI
Most gamers would appreciate the limits of a mouse compared to how many more buttons and what better intuitively designed control a good joystick or handheld control can give you. Combine a simple USB convertor for one of those easy to find secondhand joysticks, and some MIDI or keyboard mapping software – and presto – you’ve found yourself a multi-buttoned controller for much more nimble control of your favourite live audio or video tool.

PSmaX
www.mikec-psmax.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk
PSmaX is a Cross-Platform capable applet that allows a user to connect a Playstation control pad via a USB interface to a machine. Configuration is easy though the applets interface. Each key of the control pad is pre-assigned four MIDI control values each assignable via a 1 – 4 layout selector.
This data is then accessible to any audio/video software running on a Win XP or Mac OS X machine that accepts MIDI control through external devices, or MIDI mapping; thus allowing a user to map each key. Effectively allowing mapping over some 48 (on/offs) or 16 X-Y analogue controls.

Junxion
www.steim.org/steim/junxion.html
junXion is a Mac OS X data routing application that allows the connection of any USB game controller and defines, in an easy user interface, the translation of each key or joystick action into a specific MIDI event. The resulting MIDI data is then available to any audio/music software that runs on that Mac or can be send to external MIDI interfaces.

Skillz USB Pad Connection
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/iklett/gamecube/main.html
* Connect your Gamecube Joypad to your PC or Mac
* Supports DirectX and Force Feedback
* Works with Windows 98/ME/2000/XP / Mac OS
* Two or more Skillz Cube Connection USB can be used to connect more than one controller

Wrist Yoga?
While hunched over a number crunching beastie isn’t generally the best place for approaching mystic states (the word yoga originates from a Sanskrit word referring to a union of the individual soul with the cosmos ), there are unsurprisingly many useful sites online dedicated to preventing RSI, strengthening your computerised wrists, and all that tofu eating, herbal tea drinking jazz.
Squawk at these and digest a few simple techniques though, and you’ll gain some useful tools for helping release bodily tensions ( make sure you go to the right site ) and maintaining mental and muscular relaxation:

www.mydailyyoga.com/yoga/yoga_and_carpal_tunnel-rsi.html
www.mydailyyoga.com/yoga/rsi.html
www.abc-of-yoga.com/yoga-practice/yoga-wrist-bending.asp
www.officeyoga.com ( it’s funny animations are worth a look too )

Jean Poole

((( *This is a bit dated now, but it was a fun interview to do… published in 3DWorld back in er.. March 05.. which means the backlog of articles alone should keep this blog humming a while.. )))

Like a David Lynch soundtrack waiting to happen, Amon Tobin has consistently managed to weave menacing bass, intricate sonics and exotic rhythms into a dark and jazzy-cinema of sound. Unsurprisingly then, when espionage game makers Ubisoft went hunting for an audio sculptor, Amon got nailed.

Your Mission ( if you choose to accept it ) : scrub those precious eyeballs across a fan-laden re-enactment, dripping with the usual hyperbole and superlatives, of a brief 15 minute phone call to the Montreal home of 1 x Amon Tobin, somehow stretched out across an entire page to cover Amon’s recent mission to infiltrate the headphones of gamers worldwide by soundtracking the Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Chaos Theory computer game – itself a sprawling monster of an action thriller framed against a backdrop of International espionage, global surveillance and information warfare. Stick to the keyword for the piece – ’soundtrack’ – and you’ll be fine. And for matters soundtrack, we’ve gotta head back first, to the ninja womb. (more…)

Didn’t know it would feel so strange to *not-post* writing online for a few months, and didn’t expect it would take so long to shift my web-ass, but am finally here. What was formerly ‘Blog De Jean Poole’ can continue apace, and stretch out in this new space. Am looking forward to expanding into some more visual terrain here, and setting up some collaborative & remixy project spaces. More soon, have to slash away at some of the template jungles now that ze architecture’s in place…