Click here to view the embedded video.

Read more about how to get the app and view the color options.

How do I get it? Access the Android market on your phone and search for Repulsion as the key phrase.

Or use this QR code (clickable if you are on an Android phone).

Color schemes available:

Android

Day at the Beach

Candy Man

Easy Peasy

Pea Body

Brunch Anyone?

Stanky Leg

Video Coming soon.

Please feel free to leave any questions or comments.

I have not posted in a while, but that is because my partner, Bruce Drummond, and I have been working on our MFA Design + Technology thesis called social sqncr. It is an audio visual installation that allows users to create virtual musical creatures through body movement that act as sequencers. More information, including photos, videos and a more thorough description can be found on the site, sqncr.com/social. I coded all of the visuals in OpenFrameworks and Bruce coded all of the audio in SuperCollider and we talked to each other via OSC.

Can’t find the navigation?

It is hidden until you move your mouse over the bottom portion of the red bar in the header. I am very glad they chose this navigation coded by Eduardo Menendez to trigger the exploratory navigation.

Some more screen shots.

Floating keywords.

Pop-up visuals on program or school click.

Tweetcatcha uses the New York Times Timeswire API to load the latest news for the last 24 hours. We use the title and the url of the articles on nytimes.com to search through Twitter. There is a lot of data, so please be patient with the load time. Searching through Twitter for url was made much easier by using BackTweets, a service of BackType. I wrote a AS3 class to wrap the BackTweets API, more information in this blog post. The tweets are arranged around in the center based on the time difference from the article posting to the time the tweet was created. So, if a tweet was posted less than an hour after the article, then it would be very close to the inner most ring, and if it was posted 20 or more hours later, then it would be closer to the last ring, (there are 24 rings, one for each hour in the day). Bruce Drummond and I collaborated on this project.

We began collecting data on November 13, 2009 and continued until February 9, 2010. We set up a cron job on one of our computers to pull and store the data locally. Over this time period, the database grew to 107 MB, with 15,327 NYTimes articles and 311,885 tweets related to those articles. That is a lot of data, so please be patient if it takes a while to load!

I understand there are probably many ways to do this, but this works for me, so… try out the code below.

EXPORT DATABASE FROM MAMP

Step One:

• Open a new terminal window

Step Two:

• Navigate to the MAMP install by entering the following line in terminal
• cd /applications/MAMP/library/bin
• Hit the enter key

Step Three:

• Write the dump command
• ./mysqldump -u [USERNAME] -p [DATA_BASENAME] > [PATH_TO_FILE]
• Hit the enter key
• Example:
• ./mysqldump -u root -p wp_database > /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/symposium10_wp/wp_db_onezero.sql
• Quick tip: to navigate to a folder quickly you can drag the folder into the terminal window and it will write the location of the folder. It was a great day when someone showed me this.

Step Four:

• This line of text should appear after you hit enter
• Enter password:
• So guess what, type your password, keep in mind that the letters will not appear, but they are there
• Hit the enter key

Step Five:

• Check the location of where you stored your file, if it is there, SUCCESS
• Now you can import the database, which will be outlined next.

IMPORT DATABASE INTO MAMP

Step One:

• Open a new terminal window
• CAREFUL: This will replace all tables in the database you specify!

Step Two:

• /applications/MAMP/library/bin/mysql -u [USERNAME] -p [DATABASE_NAME] < [PATH_TO_SQL_FILE]
• Hit the Enter Key
• Example:
• /applications/MAMP/library/bin/mysql -u root -p wordpress_db < /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/backupDB.sql
• Quick Tip: Don’t forget that you can simply drag the file into the terminal window and it will enter the location of the file for you.

Step Three:

• You should be prompted with the following line:
• Enter password:
• Type your password, keep in mind that the letters will not appear, but they are there
• Hit the enter key

Step Four:

• Check if you database was successfully imported
• Navigate to phpMyAdmin in a browser
• http://localhost:8888/MAMP/

I hope this helps, please let me know if anyone has any errors, questions or comments.

Boids in 3D

Boids in 3D from Nick Hardeman on Vimeo.

This project utilizes flocking and Craig Reynold’s boids to move about a 3D environment. The boids circle around sphere and a repulsion force from inside of the sphere is applied to the Boids using the space bar. There is some perlin noise that is applied to them as well. The tails are generated based on some code by Robert Hodgin. The camera movement is handled by a nicely bundled class called Camera by Tobias Jewson.

Techno Tentacles

Techno Tentacles from Nick Hardeman on Vimeo.

This project responds to audio, as well as, video. I am not very good with audio or the terms used, so excuse me if this doesn’t make any sense. But I do know that the audio analysis code by Zach Lieberman uses FFT Analysis. Each tentacle is assigned a certain range of audio, if there are more tentacles, the ranges are shorter. The loudness in each range corresponds to the outward force from the center that each tentacle feels. If all of the channels are really loud, then the tentacles form an image that looks similar to a star fish.

The tentacles attempt to attach themselves to people who enter the frame, it can be either live or recorded video, in this case it is recorded. The sorting of the points on the contour was a tad tricky since they are not returned in order of x, y values, so the a point in one frame might have a completely different index on the next, not to mention that the number of points changes from frame to frame. The tentacles follow the user around and react to audio, look out Dr. Octopus.

After some searching on the web, we found BackTweets. This is an extension of BackType that stores data for various social media. BackTweets proved most effective at handling url searches. We could pass in the url that we were searching for and BackTweets would return a list of tweets. It is also possible to pass in something shorter, like nytimes.com and it will return tweets that have that inside the url. For example, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/world/asia/13eikenberry.html?_r=1&hp, could be returned when providing nytimes.com as a query term.

Earlier in this project we wrote a class in AS3 for Flash, and thought that someone may benefit from it.

Download Source

It is a simple wrapper that you can pass in arguments and get an array of tweet objects returned.
The constructor takes one argument, your BackTweetAPI Key

var _bt:BackTweet = new BackTweet("Your-BackTweet-API_Key");

Now that we have a BackTweet ready, we can use the search function to search for something. Don’t forget to add a listener so that we know when it is finished loading;

_bt.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, _onBtLoaded, false, 0, true);
_bt.search( "Your-Search-Term" );

The search function is defined as

search($q:String, $itemsPerPage:uint = 20, $page:uint = 0, $since_id:uint = 0);

The $itemsPerPage, $page, and $since_id optional arguments do the following
$itemsPerPage defines the number of tweets returned (from 10 – 100);
The $page argument determines the offset of the tweets returned.
The $since_id can be specified to search tweets after a certain id.

For example:

var _bt:BackTweet;
_bt = new BackTweet("Your-BackTweet-API_Key");
_bt.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, _onBtLoaded, false, 0, true);
_bt.search( "Your-Search-Term" );

Now we must define the function that is called when the tweets are loaded

private function _onBtLoaded($e:Event):void {
	trace(bt.toString()+'\n');
	var tweets:Array = bt.tweets;
	bt.traceTweets();
}

The BackTweet class overrides the toString function to print the BackTweet information.
The traceTweets function inside the BackTweet class is a convenience function that traces out all of the tweets to the output panel.
And calling bt.tweets returns an array of Tweet objects that contains the following

public var tweetId:Number;
public var userId:Number;
public var user:String;
public var profileImage:String;
public var createdTime:String;
public var tweetText:String;

All of these vars are public, so once the tweets are loaded, you can access the vars in the tweets array,
for example, to access the user who created each tweet:

for (var i:int = 0; i < tweets.length; i++) {
	trace(tweets[i].user);
}

So here is all the code so far:

var _bt:BackTweet = new BackTweet("Your-BackTweet-API_Key");
_bt.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, _onBtLoaded, false, 0, true);
_bt.search( "Your-Search-Term" );
 
private function _onBtLoaded($e:Event):void {
	trace(_bt.toString()+'\n');
	var tweets:Array = _bt.tweets;
	_bt.traceTweets();
 
	for (var i:int = 0; i < tweets.length; i++) {
		trace(tweets[i].user);
	}
}

However, loading xml files from other domains can cause problems. So, we have to use a php file that loads the xml for us. Check this blog post for more information on loading external xml files. The example contains this php file.

_bt.setXMLLoadFile( "loadXML.php" );

Download Source

Hopefully someone will find this useful, and any questions or comments are welcome.

The easing equations are from both Robert Penner and the Tweener class by Zeh Fernando, Nate Chatellier and Arthur Debert.

Download ofxTweenzor

The source includes a basic example file, and most of the following is included in there.

Don’t forget to initialize the class.

void testApp::setup() {

Tweenzor::init();

}

Remember to update the class in one place only, since it is a singleton

void testApp::update() {

Tweenzor::update();

}

——————————————————-

Adding a tween

// add a tween that uses frames as time, by passing in an int for $delay and $duration
Tweenzor::add(float* $property, float $begin, float $end, int $delay, int $duration, int $easeType);

// to add a tween measured in seconds, pass in a float for delay and duration //
Tweenzor::add(float* $property, float $begin, float $end, float $delay, float $duration, int $easeType);

——————————————————-

If you would like to call a function when a tween is done, you can add a listener to the tween for when it is complete. We can get the tween by using the getTween function of Tweenzor. Tweenzor indexes the tweens based on the property you initially use to create the tween.

Tweenzor::getTween( property )->addListener(  Tween::COMPLETE, this, &testApp::onCompleteFunction );

——————————————————-

OnUpdate calls are also available, to add a Listener, do the following

Tweenzor::getTween( property )->addListener(  Tween::UPDATE, this, &testApp::onUpdateFunction );

——————————————————-

The setTimePct function available on tweens is useful for getting values at certain times

This function is best used with frames.

float property = 0.f;
Tweenzor::getTween( &property )->setTimePct( .5f );
// we must update the property to make sure, in case the update function is not called on the function //
Tweenzor::getTween( &property )->updateProperty();

float value = Tweenzor::getTween( &property )->getPropertyValue();
float pct = Tweenzor::getTween( &property )->getPropertyPct();

Check out the quick demo.

Puff Daddy Dancing with Mase in the black tunnel.

Much of the detail in the above image is lost. So here is a detail.

I was also able to print this render out at 24″ x 36″ on photo paper on a large format printer. I am intrigued by the zoomed in close up and may get that printed as well.

Some other renders.

You can check out some more renders in the Mo Money Mo Problems photoset on flickr. Made with the amazing open source C++ library OpenFrameworks.