A normal Flickr RSS feed will give you only the 20 most recent pictures (and only in thumb or original format) while we needed all the pictures of a whole week. Thanks to a sample on Yahoo Pipes I could create a feed with an unlimited amount of pictures and with the format of 500×500 (sufficient resolution for our demands. Unfortunately Yahoo Pipes isn’t very stable, so in the end we used a downloaded (not realtime) version of the RSS feed as a backup.

Download the composition: Flickr Polaroid stream

The code is pretty well documented, the graphic design of the polaroids needs some improvement. Let my know in the comments if you used this composition or made an alternation on it.

A video of the Students in Motion projection mapping in Amsterdam (thanks to MediaLAB Amsterdam and Escapation).

Click here to view the embedded video.

Some links to help you get started with Quartz Composer (included in the developer tools for Mac, so its free when you own a mac).

• Quartz composer userguide
• Quartzcompositions.com
• Kineme.net
• Quartzcomposer.com

Since the 4 years my colleagues and I teach Physical Computing with Arduino and Flash (see my tutorials on Flash Arduino communication). The students are not allowed to make use of standard keyboard/mouse interaction, so they used Arduino in all of the projects. Apart from that some students used computer vision as well as input. Each team gets a laptop to use in the project, but some take the challenge to make a complex installation running on Arduino only.

This year 24 groups did their presentation. The level was really high and they’ve made some really good installations. Its a touch job to make something that functions good in hard- and software.

My three personal favorites below.

Kosmic Kitchen – Digital Praxinoscope

A modern tribute to a historic invention. The Praxinoscope is a installation of 16 mirrors on a spinning wheel, when spinning it shows the 16 frames and you’ll get an illusion of movement. You can select animations and background colors with an old fashioned telephone dialer. The group made a beautiful looking and good working installation that fits perfect in the shop.

Hardware – software : Arduino Mega, 4 RGB leds, telephone dealer, record player, microphone, Sharp distance sensor, Flash, Arduino AS3 Messenger.

Comicasa – Welke actie held ben jij ? (Which action hero fits you ?)

In a few questions, a fingerprint scan and a face scan this installation detects which superhero fits you the best. The phone rings to attend you that you can see your superhero combination on the website and on Twitter. The installation is placed in the Comic book and game store Comicasa. The installation works perfect and uses the curiosity of people find out who fits them and of course the vanity of their picture on the web. Its designed like a console and they made smart use of the laser cutter to cut the frames and logo.

Hardware – software : Arduino, Switches, Pressure sensor, PIR, Ledstrip, servo motor, Flash, PHP, MySQL, As3Glue.

Bagels and Beans: Bagel Balance Board

Balancing on a seesaw you have to put together your favorite bagel. You’ll have to gather a maximum of 5 ingredients and if you succeeded a ticket is printed with the ingredients for a discount price. A simple game that works out great with the seesaw balancing board. The installation integrates nice in the environment of the shop and the combination of a discount ticket for a bagel is really motivating for the players.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hardware – software : Arduino, Sharp distance sensor (seesaw), buttons, leds, Flash, As3Glue.

De Leckernij: Cheezy

A old fashioned game where you have to feed “Boris Slagmuis” a piece of cheese. With 2 buttons you have to move a ball to the right hole. I nice hardware only installation which uses 2 Arduino’s, a Vmusic, two servo’s and different sensors. Nice design and great use of electronics.

Hardware – software : Arduino (2x), Flex sensor, PIR, LDR, arcade buttons, leds, Vmusic.

U-turm

An interactive projection for the closing ceremony of the E-culture fair, as part of the cultural capital of Europe Ruhr 2010. Dance on the facade of the Dortmunder U. In collaboration with producer Jan Scholte and the artist Matthias Oostrik.

The U-turm team made an interactive projection on the Dortmunder-U tower. When a person steps on one of the stages their silhouette appears on one of the windows of the building. Depending on how the person moves the silhouette can move to other windows, leaving a trace where it has already been before. If two or more silhouettes meet on the same window there will be some creative content coming out, symbolizing the new use of the building as cultural hotspot.

The installation uses Quart Composer the generate the visuals. I’ve helped Joost Buijs (responsible for the technical part) finding some different motion tracking solutions for Quartz Composer.

Tested options were :

• v002 Optical Flow 2.0.2 : uses a lot of processing power, so a big framerate drop.
• Webcam piano by Memo Akten : worked good, but didn’t invite for dancing too much.
• Kineme CVTools plugin : used in the end, saves a lot of processing power by checking only certain points.

The team did a good job to find and test the right way of interaction. Its a really powerful and intuitive concept I’m curious how its going to look on the big building.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Scryption – Google mirror.

The team of Scryption made a mirror that shows your digital identity. The concept was based on the theories of Marshall McLuhans ideas. From their concept document :

You enter the area and you will see two different mirrors in front of you. You will be directed to type in your name. The left mirror is just an ordinary mirror that shows the real you. The left one shows up the pictures that appear on Google when doing a search query on your name. This mirror shows you the digital you, the identity that is created by the internet (incl. other people) and by yourself. You will then be able to play with your digital shape since there are sensors installed that react on your movement. A picture is uploaded to the net.

The installation fits to the debate around technological determinism. As McLuhan puts it, “We shape our tools and our tools shape us”. But also that the medium is the message since a mirror always confronts you with yourself. And sometimes you see something you didn’t expect to see.

Saro van Cleynenbreugel was responsible for the technical part. Together with him and project coach Iris Douma we’ve decided to make the installation with Processing. I like Processing because of the ease of code sharing (mail some code and run it directly). However in the end Processing seemed a bit to slow for the task. Especially blending a camera silhouette with images and text cost a lot frames. Maybe next time I would choose and suggest OpenFrameWorks for an installation like this. In the end the application ran at 20 fps, so we couldn’t complain. Due some problems with a Nightvision camera (warning: exposure settings don’t work in that mode), there was some trouble to make a nice looking silhouette.

Libraries used :

• Fullscreen library
• OpenCV library
• Box2D library

A lot of interactive tools like Flash and Processing serve well to make visual effects. By using relative simple scripts ( re-use and play ! ) you can create complex and cool looking visuals. Most tools let you export the material to image sequences or even video. Make use of them even for non-interactive stuff. Try some examples to create some genenerative art yourself.Lets start using your creativity and start playing, ‘remixing’ and mashing up some code.

Toolkits :

• processing.org
• quartz composer (osx)
• hype framework (Flash)
• Nodebox (Python, nodebased)
• vvvv (nodebased, windows)
• Tagtool/Nodekit (windows)
• after effects expressions
• OpenFrameworks (c++)
• Cinder framework (c++)

Code examples, libraries, inspiration :

• sc/4 : realtime compositing by Minivegas
• memo.tv
• kineme.net (quartz)
• levitated : Jared Tarbell
• Joshua Davis
• incubator : Mario Klingemann
• toxic libs ( processing libraries examples
• processing learning section
• cinema redux : Bredan Dawes (2004)
• yooouuutuuube.com : David Kraftsow 2009 | Alice ( Fagottron )

Books :

Above 20 euro no shipping costs to the Netherlands and Germany !

Next to the list below I used the ‘Smart Image Resizer’ script from Shifting Pixel to make thumbnails from different gallery images.

The list below shows which plugins I’m currently using on this site.

There are 32 plugins used.

1-click Retweet/Share/Like 4.6 by LinksAlpha
Adds Facebook Like, Facebook Share, Twitter, Google +1, LinkedIn Share, Facebook Recommendations. Automatic publishing of content to 30+ Social Networks.

AStickyPostOrderER 0.3.1 by AndreSC
AStickyPostOrderER lets you customize the order in which posts are displayed per category, per tag, or over-all, in WordPress 2.3+ blog. Useful when using WordPress as a Content Management System. Now with the ability to override itself.

Broken Link Checker 1.4 by Janis Elsts
Checks your blog for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found.

Clean Options 1.3.2 by Mittineague
finds orphaned options and allows for their removal from the wp_options table

CodeColorer 0.9.9 by Dmytro Shteflyuk
This plugin allows you to insert code snippets to your posts with nice syntax highlighting powered by GeSHi library. After enabling this plugin visit the options page to configure code style.

Contact Form 7 3.0.2.1 by Takayuki Miyoshi
Just another contact form plugin. Simple but flexible.

Contact Form 7 reCAPTCHA extension 0.0.12 by Andre Pietsch, Advicio (R) ServDesk GmbH
Provides WP-reCAPTCHA possibilities to the Contact Form 7 plugin. Requires both.

DB Cache Reloaded Fix 2.2.4 by Ivan Kristianto
The fastest cache engine for WordPress, that produces cache of database queries with easy configuration. (Disable and enable caching after update). Now compatible with WordPress 3.1.

Disqus Comment System 2.70 by Disqus
The Disqus comment system replaces your WordPress comment system with your comments hosted and powered by Disqus. Head over to the Comments admin page to set up your DISQUS Comment System.

FeedBurner FeedSmith 2.3.1 by FeedBurner
Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

Google XML Sitemaps 3.2.6 by Arne Brachhold
This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.

HeadSpace2 3.6.37 by John Godley
Meta-data manager on steroids, allowing complete control over all SEO needs such as keywords/tags, titles, description, stylesheets, and many many other goodies.

Hyper Cache Extended 0.9.8 by Martin Lazarov
Hyper Cache Extended is a cache system for WordPress to improve it’s perfomances and save resources. Before update read the version changes. To manually upgrade remeber the sequence: deactivate, update, activate.

IE6 No More 0.3.0 by Jerico Veloso
Encourages IE6 users to upgrade to a more modern browser by displaying a box at the top of the page informing them that they are using an outdated browser.

Kimili Flash Embed 2.2 by Michael Bester
Provides a full Wordpress interface for SWFObject – the best way to embed Flash on your site.

Maintenance Mode 5.4 by Michael Wöhrer
Adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end. Navigate to Settings → Maintenance Mode to get started.

NextGEN Gallery 1.9.1 by Alex Rabe
A NextGENeration Photo Gallery for WordPress

Posts of Current Category 0.4 by Anup Raj
Lists (Show/Display title) Posts of Current Category and Order Posts by author,content,date,ID, .. etc Sort ASC/DESC. Go to Appearance>Widgets and Drag “Posts of Current Category” widget to your Sidebar.

qTranslate 2.5.27 by Qian Qin
Adds userfriendly multilingual content support into Wordpress. For Problems visit the Support Forum.

Show Active Category (while browsing a post) 0.2 by Dirk Jaster
When browsing a single page, this plugin adds the CSS class “active_category” to all categories the active post belongs to.

Smart 404 0.5 by Michael Tyson
Rescue your viewers from site errors! When content cannot be found, Smart 404 will use the current URL to attempt to find matching content, and redirect to it automatically. Smart 404 also supplies template tags which provide a list of suggestions, for use on a 404.php template page if matching content can’t be immediately discovered.

Use Google Libraries 1.2 by Jason Penney
Allows your site to use common javascript libraries from Google’s AJAX Libraries CDN, rather than from Wordpress’s own copies.

Viper's Video Quicktags 6.3.4 by Viper007Bond
Easily embed videos from various video websites such as YouTube, DailyMotion, and Vimeo into your posts.

WP-phpMyAdmin 2.10.3 by Roland Rust, Christopher Hwang
Provides phpMyAdmin from the WordPress admin console

WP-PluginsUsed (kasper mod) 1.50 by Lester 'GaMerZ' Chan (mod by Kasper)
Display WordPress plugins that you currently have (both active and inactive) onto a post/page.

WP-reCAPTCHA 3.1.4 by Jorge Peña
Integrates reCAPTCHA anti-spam solutions with wordpress

WP CSS 2.0.5 by Halmat Ferello
Automatically GZIP your CSS files and puts all @imports into one file. Also add CSS files to specific posts/pages.

WP Database Optimizer 1.2.1.2 by Matthew Price
Ever wished that you could take some measure to speed up your Wordpress site? Have you created and deleted a lot of posts as well as experimented with plugins? All these deleted entries leave overhead on the database that should be routinely cleared out. This plugin allows you to have your Wordpress tables to be optimized on a schedule. It uses the Wordpress Database Class to do the work, and you can set the number of days in between optimizations.

WP JS 2.0.6 by Halmat Ferello
Automatically GZIP your JS files and applies jsmin algorithm. Also add JavaScript files to specific posts/pages.

WP No Category Base 1.0 by iDope
Removes ‘/category’ from your category permalinks.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin 3.4.3 by mitcho (Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine)
Returns a list of related entries based on a unique algorithm for display on your blog and RSS feeds. A templating feature allows customization of the display.

Yoast Breadcrumbs 0.8.5 by Joost de Valk
Outputs a fully customizable breadcrumb path.