DIY Multitouch screen

Jeroen Braspenning, a good old classmate hit me with this on the MSN's. He's busy building a multi-touch screen for his graduation project. I only can say, neato!

http://www.muhneer.nl/blog/

"On a windy day you can take a newspaper and have fun for hours"
- Max Olander

Wii communicate

Finally this week we started off with the Experience Technology main assignment. This is to make an interactive experience out of, in our case, a Wiimote.Very interesting. I took the role as project manager as I got a lot of experience doing certain interactive projects. We will see where the ship will crash, as we got somewhat around two weeks to make this happen. All I can say for now is that we had an brilliant brainstorm today.

Your 21th century fireplace replacement

Last week our group received three items to work with and develop a product. We started of with car, mouse & keyboard and heat. We ended up with a fish controlled atmosphere generator. And it sort of looks like this:


(design by vedran, modelling by me)

Basically the upper 'harp' part is an aquarium, where a few black fish reside in. When a fish interrupts a laserbeam, the algorhythm (that is used to calculate the ambient sound that is put out) will transform. So you have an everlasting self refreshing atmosphere. Next the user is able to control the type of atmosphere. The user can set the color to the mood the user would enjoy.

So here you have it: your 21th century fireplace replacement.

My first Wii artwork

made with a wiimote connected to a computer, more fun stuff pretty soon!

FAS: Foreign Accent Syndrome

Looking for a dime in a haystack

Who said Digital Media would get you rich? It would at least not be me. For those who are interested in my finacial status, here is an update:

My second payment for Hyper Island is almost due, and I haven't paid the first one as well. So there goes another 45000 swedish crowns, or 5000 euros. So from this point I got 25000 crowns, or 3000 euros left. This is every single penny I posess. I can live with this untill somewhere around Febuary if I spend a maximum 500 crowns, 56 euros a week (I calculated the monthly rent seperatly within this model). This is not much for Swedish standards, but managable if I cut down on booze, meat and other luxuries.

Still Hyper Island needs me to pay another 85000 Swedish crowns in the near future. So I am already 60000 short and so to speak, officially rendered broke.

Before I came here I figured that the Dutch 'IB Groep' would be able to lend me money for this cause. The time between admission and the offcial start of Digital Media course was shorter than the time the 'IB groep' could process my request. So with some uncertainty I took the risk. Spokepersons from the 'IB groep' were saying, "don't worry about it, Sweden is a sober country, they know what they are doing" and the website of Nuffic was saying that Sweden has the highest valuated schools within Europe.

From all the professionals around the world who came to give us a lecture, said the Hyper Island is seen as the most or one of the most highly respected and valuated school from within the Digital Media market. But for some uncertain reason, Hyper Island did not get acknowledged at the Dutch govermental instances and I ended up without a loan. I am still not really sure why.

I tried to look for other money shooters such as CSN. They can't lend me money because I need to live in Sweden for two years. Guest scholarships in Sweden need me not to be within a KY system. And for almost every scholarship, they need me to apply many months before I knew I got admitted. The swedish goverment can't pay for me because I'm following an english spoken international course. It starts to feel like I am two steps ahead of globalisation.

Now my parents are willing to help me out, but I don't want to strip them from all their money. Second they also need it to be repaid within 2 or 3 years because I am not the only child they have.

I figured that I should be old and experienced enough to stand on my own two legs. And so I am trying. I've looked desperately for some freelance work the last couple of weeks, but somehow nothing has really worked out untill now.

Maybe I should start working in a restaurant as a dishwasher, or picking mushrooms somewhere (I got at least five years working experience picking mushrooms). But that's not how I expected to end up with a Bachelor degree Communication & Multmedia Design.

But then again, David Lynch took a job as a newspaper delivery boy to get his funding for Ereaserhead around.

Podcasting, mooncasting, mixtapes from the moon, what's next?

I have been pondering why no one is interested into going to the moon anymore? Maybe everybody feels that organisations like NASA will take care of that. But now Google opened a contest, it sounds almost like a DIY trip to the moon. I love it. If I had some money to build me a rocket I would be in!

As quoted from a Computerlove blogpost:

"COMPETITION GUIDELINES: To win the Google Lunar X PRIZE, a team must successfully land a privately funded craft on the lunar surface and survive long enough to complete the mission goals of roaming about the lunar surface for at least 500 meters and sending a defined data package, called a “Mooncast”, back to Earth.
PRIZES: The total purse of the Google Lunar X PRIZE is $30 million (USD) etc.see Picasa"

Noisia Vision Studiomix

Would fit nice as a soundtrack for transformers the movie