modulus

By David Cox

Cover Showing ILM Annual Company Ritual, INCITE Journal, Fall 2014

INCITE Journal

INCITE Issue #5: BLOCKBUSTER

Fall 2014

ISSN 2163-9701

• Edited by Peter Nowogrodzki
• Founding Editor and Publisher
• Brett Kashmere
• Art Director
• Eliza Koch
• Contributing Editors
• Christina Battle
• David Burnham
• Walter Forsberg
• Peter Nowogrodzki

INCITE is also available online at www.incite-online.net

INCITE media and technology journal number five’s theme is “Blockbuster”. A central topic is simulation and entertainment in contemporary culture.

The Game of the Future by Anna Ialeggio is about a collection of plywood Middle Eastern ‘everytowns’ built in the California desert near Barstow. The subject of the excellent documentary Full Battle Rattle (2008), this distributed collection of towns is operated by the US military and is used for role-play-based on-site training. The towns, Ialeggio explains, sport more or less everything, but in rather basic plywood and rudimentary form, that the US needs for its troops to pretend that they are already in the Middle East.

Amy Sloper’s Lab Bags is an article about the fall of film processing labs. It lovingly discusses the promotional illustrations found on the side of those plastic bags that accompanied cans of film sent to and from processing labs. There are several illustrated in the magazine. The witty and stylish designs speak to a time when film professional spoke to film professional about dependability and reliability of service. Now these illustrations are collected as precious ephemera of a disappeared historical moment. Lab Bags and its testament to this doomed form of industrial photochemical film culture is poignant indeed.

The ghosts of old thus media thus fade, and new ghosts take their place. INCITE nails it again with On Mimetic Polyalloy by Gregory Kalliche which takes a spotlight to the now legendary Bay Area based special effects company Industrial Light and Magic and its annual corporate bonding ritual performed somewhere in the desert.

The ILM team forms a giant circle, then Kalliche explains, members pour molten metal into cavities in the desert sand. The team-building metal-pouring gesture echoes visually one of the very first digital motion picture special-effects moments—the creation of the humanoid T-1000 Terminator in the film the Terminator 2 in 1991.

In this James Cameron sci-fi action blockbuster epic, a humanoid robot (whose default disguise among humans is as a sly police officer) is made up of liquid metal that can sample or replicate any object or life-form nearby, occasionally also dispatching them with edged or pointed weapons at will.

In the title story Blockbuster, Roger Beebe chronicles his experience as a hip independent video rental store owner in a small town. As a customer loyalty incentive, he offered free rental if his customers were willing to cut up their Blockbuster video rental card and put the pieces of the card in a large glass jar on his counter. This active boycott helped to him prevail even long after the pre-streaming media version of Netflix did in the Blockbuster chain once and for all.

Kevin B. Lee’s article Premaking a Chinese Hollywood Blockbuster: Transcultural Flows and the Culture of Anticipation in “Transformers: Age of Extinction” is a comprehensive analysis of the ways in which the demands (perceived and otherwise) of the Chinese market have affected production and content decisions in the latest Transformers movie, particularly the depiction of the Transformer robot character Grimlock, shown as a metal T-Rex in the original animated 1980s TV series, who now resembles a Chinese dragon. In this latest Michael Bay blockbuster, Lee sees, in the film and its attendant publicity trailers, evidence of emerging hybrids. Each superpower, Lee argues, by seeking a commercial advantage via the use of the massive movie blockbuster form for its own ends, is inadvertently or otherwise, colonizing the others.

Turing Complete User by Olia Lailina discusses the role of coding in software use and coding skills. She helps frame the history of the user interface in a broader cultural studies and media archeological framework. Lailina cites Cory Doctorow who warns about the “Coming War on General Purpose Computation”. In short, devices and the ‘cloud’ services they rely upon assume and reinforce a world in which the user is less and less a subject of independent agency, but rather a passive subject facing an increasingly predetermined series of experiences that render him or her a more passive subject in someone else’s advertising-driven game.

Lailina writes:

In general the WWW, outside of Facebook, is an environment open for interpretation. An effort must be made to educate users about themselves. There should be an understanding of what it means to be a user of an “all purpose automatic digital computing system”

INCITE #5 covers a range of topics characterizing our current time as one of deep ambivalence and fascination with the effects of blockbuster entertainment on our collective psyche and vice versa. It’s a rich compendium of theory and ideas and comes at just the right time for scholars and movie buffs alike. There are pieces on everything from Hollywood’s ongoing effects upon our psyches, to the reality of illusion and superheroes.

INCITE is clearly one of the most happening film journals today and reminds me of 21c, from Melbourne in the mid-nineties. It’s transnational, transcultural, interdisciplinary, and as in the UK, the digital and the real are starting to create some strange spin off hybrids. INCITE is tapping the zeitgeist energy beautifully.

Visit the journal website here.

First Published by David Cox in January 21, 2015 2:35 PM MST

The Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci

Photo by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

Pierro De La Francesca, the famed Renaissance painter and architect built arcane secrets into his pictures. Trained in the then very new technique of perspective painting, Pierro integrated systems of Euclidean geometry into the formal composition of his paintings. He even included ‘secret’ messages into the subject matter, such as five sided pentangles and so on which to those in the know at the time related to the presumed relationship between man, God and the universe. In some pictures, only recently developed techniques have enabled scholars to unlock some of the secret messages embedded in his paintings. The pictures were ciphers and cryptograms which referred back to the social conditions under which they were made in order to flatter those who could identify those codes. These conventions were considered part of what it meant to be an educated Renaissance artisan.

The cryptographic geometric and perspective-driven cosmologies integrated into his work and that of others around the same time ? Leonardo Da Vinci, and Giotto were those of high levels of mathematical abstraction, themselves at the time ‘redeemed’ from Greek antiquity. Using a system which would today be called ‘ray tracing’ and which would be done using 3D graphics software, Piero was able to calculate the appearance of objects in 3D space by numerically transposing positions of say parts of a human head tilted at an angle. The extraordinary feat was to be able to mathematically conceptualize the body as a fluid dynamic system whose spatial and positional appearance on the canvas could be represented by numbers. The numbers then could be used, quite separate from their real life referent to calculate the appearance of the same subject from any angle.

Just as computers now are used as much as cameras to deliver moving pictures to our screens, the common conceptual link between the two technologies is that of the abstract ‘plane’ upon which the perspective image is imagined to fall upon. One of Piero’s most famous images is that of a tilted head; a detail from his painting The Flagellation. The position of the head was one of many he could have settled on when he painted the picture, the subject of the picture was not present when it was painted. Rather the image of the subject had been abstractly transposed numerically by Piero first into his memory, then onto paper and from paper onto canvas. A computer graphics artist can choose to show a 3D model of a dinosaur or space ship from any angle and because the computer 3D graphics rely on the centrality of the first-person view of the universe, any graphic can be made to co-habit the orthographic domain of photography.

Film montage emerged from a certain vantage point, a peculiarly 20th Century vantage point. The idea of disjointed clashing meanings was in common circulation in Europe in the early 20th Century. The political payload which accompanied the aesthetics of montage was powerful indeed. The photo montage images of John Heartfield in Germany in the 1920s were culture jams in the extreme. The proliferation of photographs in print publishing enabled political satire to find expression through the surgical cuts of scalpel on the photograph and to cut and paste and rework still images had its parallel in the development of film editing in Russia. The Eisenstein technique was to make images clash up against each other and in colliding, give rise to combatant new images. This art of montage was the aesthetics of context migration. With film editing new meanings could be divined from the intersection where images collided in time. With photo montage the spatial field of the photograph itself rather was the terrain of a clash of opposites, where powerful hybrids of image with image could occur.

Linking these technologies was the idea that spaces could be traversed without effort, or that technology could mediate space. Photography and cinema have the aim of placing the viewer somewhere other than where they actually are ? transporting them in fact. Cinema and photography both employ spatial fields of view; the Euclidean geometric breakdown of space into geometric forms. Inside a camera, light falls on the film plane, is recorded photochemically, by means of a mechanical shutter.

Aircraft are similarly about the manipulation of forces, which in turn are therefore relatively simple to translate into code for the purposes of making a simulation. Variables like thrust, pitch, yaw, elevation, speed, flow represent the chaos of the movement of air over the wings, of the propeller through the air. Affording a view of the surroundings cartography mapping Empireâs make maps before invading. The British Empire’s first step prior to setting up India as a giant cheap manufacturing and supply colony was to divide the country up into triangle shaped segments, the better to map it. Conceptual ownership longitude.

The Space Race and the Cold War represented the fusing of political and technological imperatives toward a unified Imperial assertion of Superpower supremacy. The quest for space took on a religious overtone in both the USA and the USSR; both elevated space exploration as the pinnacle expression of modernist progress; to boldly go and get “go fever”. It is no accident that Tom Wolfe should valorize the extremes of 1960s expansionism on both the left and right.

The central view predominated in the 1960s much as it had done since the Renaissance. The privileged point of view of the Medici-funded artist was paralleled 400 years later by the NASA or USSR backed astronaut. The prize brought back to civilization from the Space Race was that of the unique view the space photograph of the earth, the moon panorama taken from space suit or Lunar Module cockpit. Neil Armstrong as Michealangelo’s David. Officialdom needs time and space measured, divided, controlled.

Joseph Nicephore Niepce (creator of the first fixed photo) was something of a photochemistry hacker as an experimenter using cameras, chemicals and surfaces. Exposure to light and the chemical fixing of the camera obscura’s image was the aim of the first photographers. The very first ‘fixed’ photo was of his own courtyard. Niepce needed to leave the camera somewhere where it could be left.

Babbage’s Difference Engine (though it did not work) had already been built when the first fixed photo was made. Computers have long been closely linked to the conceptualisation of space ? Charles Babbage’s famous unfinished prototype for a computer, the analytical engine developed in the 1830s was developed in response to a request from the British Government to generate better navigational charts for mercantile shipping. The Colossus computer developed in the UK to crack Nazi radio codes, found itself mainly decoding co-ordinate information of Atlantic submarine positions, and the like.

The miniaturization of electronic components which resulted in the development by counterculture hippies in the mid 1970s of the personal computer, was itself the result of the need by the military industrial complex for small parts for use in missile navigation and space travel. Mapping, architecture and urban planning also play a large role in the development of video games, whose elaborate labyrinths of play and dynamics in turn find eerie expression in the layout and appearance of the contemporary themed shopping precincts of our major cities.

Strategy and games both require abstractions of space, and the dynamics, which take place within them. The Situationist International’s project was that of reclaiming a rapidly modernizing Paris after its liberation in 1945 from the clutches of commercialization. Against sterile rationalist planning of inner city housing and retail areas they proposed radical alternative uses for cities, which emphasized a sense of free play, and which advocated a system of activities in art and architecture, film and writing which would ultimately render work and all forms of social control obsolete.

Early parlour toys dallied with sex and the licentious ? zoetropes and praxinoscopes and other visual tricks often were delivery mechanisms for lurid porn fantasies and devil images, rather like the proliferation of video recorders in the early 1980s. The boom in inititial VCR sales stemmed largely from the newly created home porn video market. The industrial revolution was starting to result in identifiable domestic scientific entertainment forms ? the home microscope ( a latter day home computer) offered views into other worlds ? the microscopic and the microphotographic. Microphotographs were tiny photos to be viewed through microscopes.

These images are ghostly, even phantasmagoric. At the Sony Center in San Francsico in 1999, before it became the Metreon center as it is now, my wife and I were able to have a moving white-light hologram made of us kissing embossed into a card about the size of a credit card. The image of us turning and kissing moves as one angles the card on which it is mounted from side to side under a light. To take the hologram, a video camera on a kind of four foot long conveyor belt scanned our faces over a period of five seconds as we kissed. The resultant frames were then processed in an adjacent lab, which converted the digital frames into the reflective white light hologram moving image the size of a large postage stamp. In a sense the technology of the space/time based arts like cinema and the space recording arts like photography have converged to enable moving holograms which record events, albeit short span ones, and to present those events in movie like images which can be seen in ordinary white light.

The old Sony version of the Metreon has long since given way to its more mundane shopping mall variant, but I often wonder what happened to the utopian impulse behind the while light hologram stand that was there when it first opened.

The Renaissance is still with us.

First Published by David Cox in Examiner.com

The Digital Handheld iRig Mic HD microphone

IK Multimedia

iRig Mic HD microphone

The new consumer-level multimedia iRig Mic HD microphone is innovative in that it is able to record voices and sounds in very high quality in digital form without any kind of conversion before it actually gets to the computer tablet or smart device. This is significant because the ability to do in order analog to digital conversion on board the microphone itself effectively turns the microphone into a digital signal processing device in its own right. iRig Mic HD has the 24-bit A/D converter, a 44.1/48 kHz sampling rate and a low-noise/high-definition pre-amp. The preamp means the signal is ‘good and fat’ by the time it hits the software or recording app.

Previously you needed to buy a special audio recorder in order to have this function with the audio signal being recorded directly onto a storage device of some kind such as a microSD card. I’m thinking now of the “Zoom” type recording devices, for example the H1 and Hn4 field recorders. Alternatively you could buy high-end analog microphones for use with programs such as GarageBand ProTools and other onboard computer recording studios. The problem here is that the microphones require some kind of analog-to-digital conversion hardware.This is an extra step which frankly gets in the way of a good recording idea. So this microphone in being able to record high-quality sound digitally right from the get-go puts it in a class of its own. This is probably why Apple sell it as a high profile item alongside other peripherals in the app store and why the exclusive silver car microphone is sold in the app store separate from the black one which you can get from IK multimedia on its own

I’ve been using the iRig Mic HD microphone digital microphone for several days now in a variety of settings and I found that it works just as well as a field recorder microphone recording audio effects the things such as video productions will film productions as it does for multitrack recording on songs or interviews when I’m conducting discussions from my blog. It feels nice to hold its well-made it’s as nice smooth aluminum finish there is an LED light which flashes to let you know the signal input level which is a handy way of the able to tell if you signal is too loud or too soft there is a small file on the mic which lets you adjust the input level and to set it in accordance with the volume settings suitable for the kind of recording you doing it comes complete with a microphone stand holder with the threaded screw fitting for microphone stand as well as a plastic adapter to support wires which end in a micro USB male connector. There are two cables that come with the microphone one of them is the newer Lightening iPhone cable and the other is a standard USB cable the optional third cable is the Apple iPhone 4 type standard non-lightening connector. I recommend the IK multimedia iRig Mic HD microphone. It is a another tool in the toolkit for outdoor and indoor high-quality digital audio recording for laptop tablet and smartphone use.

Features

• Handheld digital condenser microphone for capturing audio on the go
• Plugs directly into the digital input on iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and Mac/PC via its included 1.5m (59”) Lightning and USB cables
• High-quality 24-bit, audiophile-grade A/D converter
• 44.1 – 48 kHz sampling rate
• Gain control with mutlicolor LED indicator
• Handheld design — also compatible with standard mic stands
• App/software bundle*, mic clip and carry bag included
• iRig Recorder, VocaLive and AmpliTube (iOS & Mac/PC versions) included
• Available in black or in an exclusive silver version (only available at the Apple Store)
• 30-pin cable available separately

More information here:

http://www.ikmultimedia.com/products/irigmichd/

he way of a good recording idea. So this microphone in being able to record high-quality sound digitally right from the get-go puts it in a class of its own. This is probably why Apple sell it as a high profile item alongside other peripherals in the app store and why the exclusive silver car microphone is sold in the app store separate from the black one which you can get from IK multimedia on its own

I’ve been using the I Rick HD digital microphone for several days now in a variety of settings and I found that it works just as well as a field recorder microphone recording audio effects the things such as video productions will film productions as it does for multitrack recording on songs or interviews when I’m conducting discussions from my blog. It feels nice to hold its well-made it’s as nice smooth aluminum finish there is an LED light which flashes to let you know the signal input level which is a handy way of the able to tell if you signal is too loud or too soft there is a small file on the mic which lets you adjust the input level and to set it in accordance with the volume settings suitable for the kind of recording you doing it comes complete with a microphone stand holder with the threaded screw fitting for microphone stand as well as a plastic adapter to support wires which end in a micro USB male connector. There are two cables that come with the microphone one of them is the newer iPhone cable and the other is a standard USB cable the optional third cable is the Apple iPhone connector I recommend the IK multimedia I Rick HD microphone is a another tool in the toolkit for outdoor and indoor high-quality digital audio recording for laptop tablet and smartphone use. Hello as is a going well where you want me

Sampletank 3

IK Multimedia

I’m working on a mini-opera at the moment for Other Cinema fall season and I need full orchestration. Strings, brass, the works. IK multimedia Sampletank 3 brings me the samples I need. Miroslav Philharmonik is one of the finest collections of orchestral sounds out there.

The ability to bring forth an entire orchestra for a musical piece or instrumentation whose complexity and richness would only a few years ago been associated exclusively with expensive recording studios is possible now with products SampleTank® 3. The industry term for this type of product is ‘workstation’ and this one has a 33 GB sound library containing over 4,000 instruments.

A good way to think about how programs like sample tank work is the metaphor of wine and bottles. If samples like brass instruments – horns, trombones and saxophones from the philharmonic collection in the sample tank library are the ‘wine’ then the ‘bottle’ is the sample tank program itself. The program organizes the samples into tracks which in turn are organized by the composer into musical pieces.

Such is the quality and variety of the samples, and so simple and direct a tool sample tank to use that the combination, once mastered, enables the novice to become an arranger of music that only 10 years ago would have required very expensive equipment to create.

I can say that I am working on a mini opera as my output is indistinguishable, virtually from that of a composer who uses actual orchestral instruments. The same goes for non-orchestral instruments also though, such as virtual synths, which number in the hundreds, virtual pianos, organs, the list goes on.

SampleTank 3 comes with 55 effects including Chorus1, UniV and TapeEcho which greatly enhance keyboard, guitar and bass samples.

Pricing and availability:

SampleTank 3 is available now from music and electronics retailers worldwide and from the IK Online store until September 30, 2014 at introductory prices as low as $149/€119.99 for SampleTank 2 XL or Miroslav Philharmonik full users; $199/€159.99 for users of any other paid IK software, hardware or app; and $299.99/€239* for new users. Afterwards, the final price will increase to $199.99/€159.99, $249.99/€199.99 and $349.99/€279.99 respectively. The boxed version will be shipping in the second half of August 2014.

I’ve been using the Sampletank 3 samples with the iRIG MIDI 2 device which plugs directly into my legacy keyboard or MIDI controller and lets me play these samples on my mac no problem. These allow for full MIDI functionality and connectivity with any MIDI-enabled device: keyboards, hardware synthesizers, software sound modules, drum machines, drum pads, DJ controllers, pedal boards, DAW interfaces and more. iRig MIDI 2 has two blue LEDs that enable monitoring of the MIDI data passing through the IN and OUT sockets. IK make some great MIDI devices, and this new one has been pared back to 2 basic MIDI standard ports, and a collection of chords to connect to PC/iPad/iPhone or USB. It draws its power directly from its host device, which removes the need for bulky power supplies. Lightweight and durable, it features a rubberized enclosure built to withstand the rigors of travel.

For more information, please visit

www.sampletank.com

Thanks to Starr Ackerman for the assistance with Sampletank3 and iRIG MIDI2 review materials.

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By David Cox

Associative diagrams, data, space, and play find common expression in user interface design, videogames, and urban planning in contemporary culture—all those floating 3D displays in movies, the gamification of mundane daily tasks, how stores look more and more like the touch screens that are replacing them.

Bruce Sterling talks of “Atemporality.” Atemporality is the feeling you get when you experience the old and the new forced into a singular moment. Like a 3D printout of an object designed in the 13th century. Or a Babbage difference engine made with the latest materials and computer-controlled design and manufacturing techniques. These are impossible objects in the truest sense that they stand outside time. Outside of history. They are a-temporal. It’s a feeling you get when you look to the West these days, particularly San Francisco, and particularly around the edges of that city. It’s in places like the Musée Méchanique where very early 20th-century coin-operated entertainment machines sit happily next to quite recent arcade computer-games.

The collapsing of old and new find expression in notions such as the Terrative. This neologism is the hybrid of territory and narrative and has emerged from the world of locative media. This is media that self-consciously and deliberately takes into account where the user is as it presents audiovisual and computer-generated content to them. Often locative m edia is combined with augmented reality. So place and story meet real and virtual.

Many contemporary films and videogames show scientists and specialists manipulating data in 3D as holographic fields of information. Floating, glowing holograms of the solar system, say as in Promethius. The terrains of Pandora in AVATAR, displayed for military and scientist alike. The head-up display is a product of the military fighter cockpit, and is installed in many recent model cars and passenger aircraft such as the Boeing 787. It combines the real world with information about that world simultaneously.

Augmented reality apps abound for the tsunami of Chinese-made touchscreen devices; sensor-studded, Wi-Fi enabled, the modern data user is attuned to her environment much like a pilot, or a sci-fi movie or game character. After thirty years of AR in pop culture, from ROBOCOP to TERMINATOR to HALO to the windows-within-windows of every GUI you ever used. It’s commonplace now to say that your games console can see you. Patents are fought over for who can profit from devices that identity if “too many” people are in the room to view a movie for the rental price. As Guy Debord once famously argued “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people mediated by images.” Today the spectacle sends sensor data into your living room and bills you for the privilege.

This ironic conflation of real and unreal, dynamic and static is at the epicenter of our current kind of modernity.Pinball machines are flat surfaces on which balls move that the player keeps in motion by way of flippers. The playfield is the area that pinball-machine designers call that flat surface. Most videogames have the equivalent of this playfield.

Urban design has long since taken its best ideas from the controlling impulse behind theme parks, with their dominant points of attraction (usually tall dominant structures distributed around the park), and paths to channel people to and from these nodal points. The management of time and space reaches no better apotheosis than at the Disney parks, where the science of extracting time and attention from people has reached a fine art. Gamifying the playfield of life is a neat extension of the theme-park pinball approach to city planning and urban development. Everywhere we go in contemporary cities involves passing through a nodal point of some kind where data is transferred. The New Aesthetic Archive is a great compendium of this type of material in Tumblr form.

Think of the symbol used in orthogonal 3D programs—it looks like a three-pointed 3D weathervane. Point your first finger forward, your thumb up, and your ring finger to the left. Here you have a right-handed approximation of the same symbol. The X, Y, and Z axes of the Euclidean space. A universe made up of primitives: spheres, cones, cubes, cylinders. N ow this world is spread before us, and texture mapped and rendered in real time. It is festooned with colored overlays. And all the code that can be written is dancing behind it to make the physics happen. The skybox above shows a late afternoon. The long shadows, but a figment of the level-designer’s imagination. Those floating health and status bars above showing how much energy is left. They remind us, that our game world is much like the real one.

David Cox is a writer and teacher based in San Francisco. His films include PUPPENHEAD, OTHERZONE, and TATLIN. His books include Sign Wars: the Culture Jammers Strike Back, published via LedaTape.

GoAnimate – Fast Team-Based Animation with Much of the Work Done for You

GoAnimate Animation Resource, Web Delivered

By David Cox

First published in Examiner.com

GoAnimate is a new product that enables you to animate sequences on the web as an individual or in groups using a range of pre-made template type vector graphic 2D objects or to import your own such objects.

It uses a asset-list, timeline and project window format, much like a simplified version of Adobe Flash or After Effects, and among the types of items you can choose from are characters, backgrounds, props and a series of pre-made animated moves.

Animations can be shared as can the numerical information about how those animations are made up. The target market is mainly web content providers who want to add motion to their pages to attract visitors who are more likely to stay and watch if there is some moving content than if if the visuals are static.

Audio can be added via microphone, prerecorded audio or via a text-to-speech capability built into the browser interface.

GoAnimate uses a subscription model, much like a stock photo library, so you pay for it on a regular basis, and from then on can use the supplied content. Custom content can be provided by arrangement also. The vector graphic look of GoAnimate eventually can be eventually exported as an mpg4 file for delivery on the web. This means that these can thus work on iOS devices. The fact that multiple people can work on the same production online means that variations on the one file can take place and that larger productions can be done using the same assets piecemeal.

GoAnimate would be ideal for use as a storyboarding tool for TV and film productions, or in the games industry where a linear sequence needs to be communicated quickly and easily to all involved in cast and crew. Because it is easy to use, the GoAnimate user interface can be learned quickly and shots can be modified by someone with little to no animation experience. So a sequence of shots can be re-ordered, framing modified, even sound and dialogue manipulated by different members of a team, and each version saved as a different file for consideration by all.

Schools would benefit from GoAnimate by enabling it to assist with storytelling classes, or adapting it to work with theater, film or even existing animation classes as a storyboarding resource. As a design tool it could help create what are called ‘design fiction’ narratives – essentially ads for products that are not built yet but for which stories about their use need to precede the process of making or designing them.

GoAnimate would be ideal for the electronic greeting card market also – a business making custom business cards or greeting cards could revolve itself entirely around GoAnimate, as could a cartoon satire show done once a week commenting on events in the news or current affairs ready for YouTube, the blog or both.

The pre-make animated moves for characters, backgrounds etc are simple, anything more complex that involves the 12 principles of animation would be better done in Flash but for a quick animated result to visually improve a website, or to generate a vivacious looking snappy moving graphic to illustrate an idea for a client, or to advertise a product, GoAnimate is the solution.

You pay by the year or the month for different plans, each with different screen resolutions. The Full HD “Gopremium” plan costs $79 per month or $599 per year. Another plan, the “Goteam”, allows multiple users at $250 per month, or $2000 per year for 3 users or more, with escalating volume discounts and up to 1080p screen resolution. Given the advantages the system could bring to a production, these costs are minimal. On many cable TV shows, this would be the cost of catering.

But such subscription services using cloud storage and databases of assets are becoming the norm today when animated content is finding expression in more and more contexts where screens are found. I have a feeling that GoAnimate is one of those solutions to situations that problems have yet to be found. Its uses will really become better understood with use over time.

As web developers, film makers, game makers, bloggers, cartoonists and others start to see the potential of GoAnimate, the product will really start to come into its own.

Try it out. Nade a simple animation. Add some sound. Publish it.

Visit – goanimate.com

By David Cox

First Published in Examiner.com

IK Multimedia pioneers affordable motion-tracking technology

to control music apps using iOS devices with simple hand gestures

May 8, 2014 – IK Multimedia, the innovator in mobile music-creation apps and accessories for iPad and iPhone, is proud to announce that iRing™, the first motion controller for music apps and more, is now available from music and electronics retailers worldwide.

First presented at CES 2014, iRing is an affordable, wearable technology system that gives users a new level of gestural control over their favorite music apps, in real-time, using hand positioning for unprecedented music expression.

The iRing system consists of two double-sided “rings” to wear comfortably on the fingers along with a series of apps that are able to detect the iRings’ accurate positions in space using the device’s camera. Through the recognition of the dot patterns printed on the rings, the device’s camera picks up the movement and translates it into MIDI information. Users can then interact with music apps by simply moving their hands in front of their device through the precise reading of the ring position, which is converted into music commands or MIDI control messages to operate various app parameters without touching the device.

iRing includes two identical double-sided ring controllers plus two free apps for various music applications designed for everyone from music lovers to knowledgeable DJs and musicians: iRing Music Maker and iRing FX/Controller.

iRing Music Maker is a free app that gives music lovers and DJs a fun new way to create music and grooves using hand gestures, no matter what their skill level. iRing Music Maker utilizes music “loops” that always sound good together and can be remixed in virtually limitless combinations by simply waving the hands with the iRing controllers in front of the device’s camera. Users can change beats, control rhythmic elements, play synth parts and control effects providing hours and hours of quality musical entertainment. Plus, iRing Music Maker also includes lead and bass synths with respective pattern players that can be independently operated for hours of error-free musical improvisation. Creating music has never been so much fun!

iRing FX/Controller is the app for skilled musicians and DJs that is both a real-time audio effects processor and a MIDI controller with fully assignable parameters. It can be used as a touch-less outboard audio effects processor, or can be fully configured to send multiple simultaneous MIDI parameters; such as control changes, notes or any other MIDI messages.

As an effects processor, iRing FX/Controller uses the analog or digital input of the device for processing external audio sources. FX/Controller can also be used with Audiobus and Inter-App Audio compatible apps to process the audio stream from music apps running on the device to add stunning and brilliant audio effects. The iRings can control up to six effects parameters at a time. iRing FX/Controller operates two simultaneous effects, selectable from up to 16 powerful and creative effects, including: Delay, Stutter, Phazer, Flanger, Compression, Fuzzy, Reverb, AutoWah, Crush, Twist Up & Down, Brake, Spin and Tail.

As a MIDI controller, iRing FX/Controller can transmit MIDI messages to other Virtual MIDI compatible apps running on the device or to external devices using compatible MIDI interfaces (like IK’s iRig MIDI). iRing FX/Controller can send out the complete set of MIDI messages (control change, notes, program change, pitch wheel, aftertouch, MIDI system real-time, and MMC, MIDI Machine Control) with up to 3 assignable parameters corresponding to the X, Y and Z axis positions for each of the 2 detectable rings for a new level of touch-less control. Additionally, MIDI messages can also be sent to a computer application via Wi-Fi (using MIDI network). Users can configure the app to control effects, filters, notes, patches and more for creative and dynamic “never before seen” performances.

iRing computer vision technology is also directly incorporated into the entire line of IK Multimedia DJ apps like Groovemaker® and DJ Rig™ and will soon be included into other popular IK apps such as AmpliTube®, SampleTank®, VocaLive™ and more so that DJs, guitarists, vocalists, bass players, producers, keyboardists and engineers will have a new level of control to deliver powerful and unique performances.

For third-party developers who want to incorporate and implement iRing technology directly into their apps, IK is offering a free SDK (software development kit) and licensing program which makes it easy to take advantage of this new breakthrough technology. iRing can also be easily utilized beyond music for a wide variety of applications including gaming, health & fitness, utilities and more. Developers can take advantage of the technology and improve the functionality of their apps by contacting IK via the link provided on the iRing product page.

iRing features

Advanced motion-tracking technology provides remote control of iOS apps using hand positions and gestures

Includes two identical, double-sided reversible rings allowing for numerous control combinations and control of up to 6 effects’ parameters simultaneously with two hands

iRings are unique looking, light, comfortable and provide a universal fit

Free Apps are available on the App Store: iRing Music Maker app, which gives the ability to make music using hand gestures with no previous musical knowledge, and also the iRing FX/Controller app, which lets musicians and DJs create custom MIDI control setups, plus add and control audio effects, using compatible apps or external devices

iRing computer vision technology can be licensed and incorporated into other third-party apps including gaming, health & fitness, utilities and more

Pricing & Availability

iRing controllers cost only $24.99/€19.99 (excluding taxes), are available in three colors (white, green and grey) and are now shipping from music and electronics retailers worldwide and from the IK Multimedia online store.

iRing FX/Controller and iRing Music Maker apps are available as free downloads from the App StoreSM.

For more information about iRing™ for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch, please visit:

www.ikmultimedia.com/iring

To view the iRing video playlist, please visit:

www.ikmultimedia.com/products/iring/video

For more information about the free iRing development kit and licensing program, please visit:

www.ikmultimedia.com/iringsdk

By David Cox

First published in Examiner.com

It is an uncanny thing to have grown up with a solid split between the worlds of keyboards as input devices for MIDI sounds, and guitars as exotic means to do the same thing. But times have changed, and guitars are now as capable a means of MIDI input as keyboards ever were. The YouRock2 guitar is a great thing to play having enjoyed the generation 1 YouRock guitar prior for several years. The greatly improved Radius Midi fretboard with its standard fret spacing and 22 frets is also a great addition to the setup also. It feels more like a regular guitar fretboard, and its response time in relation to the onboard processor is quicker.

The YouRock Generation 2 guitar has many upgrades from its predecessor, most notably a refined pickup system for more reliability and consistency. Gone is the subtle latency which broke the spell of triggering those big samples from before.YouRock2 has an Ableton Control launch pad at the top section of the neck and the fretboard can be split into zones and layers which means that those that make heavy use of the ’tap’ function (playing by tapping the fretboard rather than plucking the ‘strings’) can enjoy the idea of the fretboard as a kind of guitarists keyboard, with different areas serving as different instruments: bass for one side of the fretboard, organ for the other. One player can thus be a whole band. Especially when the built-in backing tracks are supplying the music backing.

The latest Firmware version is V1.580. If the players wishes to adjust the YRG to her playing style she can download the Control Panel application for MAC or PC and make adjustments to your guitar from there. Its all pretty amazing stuff. I can still remember the days when a guitar synth was something you paid money to go see someone like Andy Summers play as he was likely one of the few who could afford the mega-dollar dedicated guitar synth rigs (with thick industrial cables connecting massive multi-pin connectors to the guitar and interface boxes that looked like robot control panels from a car factory) in the early 1980s that could make the kind of sounds that are packaged right out of the box with YRG, and better.

I’ve been playing guitar on and off since 1975 and I’ve been looking for a guitar that lets me trigger my keyboard samples for a while now and the YRG2 could easily be it. I can sit and play the guitar, yet at the same time be invoking symphony orchestras, mellotrons, combo organs, or even other string instruments like banjos, mandolins etc. Its all about that response time and not having latency, and the YRG folks have been putting their energies into resolving the biggest issues that dog the MIDI guitarist – the simple sense that the sounds are not being triggered fast enough. Liquidating latency, as in the gaming world, is the holy grail of MIDI interface design, for obvious reasons.

It still takes time for the onboard sounds to load IF you rely only on the onboard sounds. Punch in a number, wait several seconds for the sound to load…The truth is, most of those who use the YRG2 in studio contexts will hook it up to virtual instrument boxes and thus use it as an alternative to a keyboard, so thought of as a “keyboard you play like a guitar” that won’t break the bank, it works best on this level for say, mid-size studio scenarios. So onboard sounds not being used by those who use the YRG2 as an input device only, will not matter. It is simply a MIDI controller.

Go get a YRG and play some samples, onboard or your own.

Here’s me messing around with it on sound cloud

The official YouRock website

Roku2 Streaming Media Player

First published in Examiner.com

By David Cox

There are so many ways to stream media onto a screen these days.The great advantage of streaming media players today is that they offer a means to bring the increased number of channels into the home to the modern HDTV set which for all intents and purposes today is essentially a glorified computer monitor. But many people still use regular standard def TV sets and even non-television display systems like data projectors and head mounted displays.

Media players and set top boxes are basically devices that act as gateways to these subscription-based streaming services, and that enable the provision of an increasingly dizzying array of to-the-set media that via the players is fast outstripping linear media alone. The Roku3 for example now offers a range of games to play with its motion control Wii-mote-like remote control. I’ reviewed the Roku 3 back in November 2013 and it is a very solid system.

The Roku 2 is a dedicated streaming device that as would be expected, does not perform quite as well as the Roku 3. It could not be expected to, its processor being slower. It is just as satisfying to use as a streaming media player. It is not as quick to respond to remote button actions, events take slightly longer and this is noticeable after using a Roku 3 for while. But the inclusion of the headphone socket in the remote of both the 2 and the 3 is an innovation that sets this device apart from the others in general, including the AppleTV, bar none. Its a small design touch, but one that takes into account the intimate nature of shared streaming viewing and the simple fact that usually not everyone wants to hear the sound of “Columbo” reruns at 3 a.m.!

Roku2 does not have the motion control feature on the remote which is only an issue if you are playing games, Wii-style. The Netflix user interface has changed recently and the older Roku2 does not support it, but this is not something that affects my use of this one service particularly. The Roku 2 lacks the 3’s USB socket, which is not such a big deal if all you are doing is streaming media online, and it also lacks the 5X processor of the Roku3 which is demonstrably faster in most instances, but once a stream is running, the differences are negligible.

Unlike the Roku3 which has only HDMI out, Roku2 sports both HDMI and composite outputs which means it can be connected via an HDTV or a standard definition TV. This is a bigger deal than it sounds when you consider what we used to call in the games business ‘the user installed base’, or ‘the number of people out there with the equipment to actually use the media that earn the money’. There is no YouTube channel with the Roku2, but depending on your views on this service, this may or may not be such a bad thing.

The composite line out signal means, for example, that I can use the device with such pre HDMI legacy display systems such as an old head mounted display I have. I can watch Netflix via my Virtua IO glasses (bought for $800 in 1998 at the height of the LAST VR boom!). Forget Oculus Rift, or Project Morpheus! THIS is the real deal!

So there are advantages of using the older Roku2 over the Roku3 if the speed of the response time of the interface is not such a concern, and you have a standard definition TV and not an HDMI.

I really like the idea of being able to use the device with an older TV set, or to plug the device into something that is not purely digital even (like VHS video recorder, assuming the content is copyright free of course, as much indeed is!).

In this regard, it shares with the original Nintendo Wii a sense of the reality that many people still own TV sets that have the red, white and yellow RCA sockets in them, and that this is a legitimate section of the community who still deserve to be able to watch streaming content without having to use what are, let’s face it, oversized computer monitors.

The Roku 2 Official Website

First published in Examiner.com

by David Cox

Since the earliest days of cinema, movies have fallen into roughly two categories: ‘drama’ in which a story is told and the screen stands in for the ‘stage’ of the play or bindings of a book. And the ‘ride’; a visceral sensation-based thrill, closer to the roller coaster in which the idea of seeing the film is to experience a dangerous event vicarously. George Miles provided the narrative ride-fantasies of films like “A Trip to the Moon” while the Lumiere Brothers provided documentary thrill rides like “A Train Pulling Into a Station”.

In the early 1960s, Morton Helig developed “Sensorama”. The Sensorama was a machine that is one of the earliest known examples of immersive, multi-sensory (now known as multimodal) technology. Morton Heilig saw theater as an activity that could encompass all the senses drawing the viewer into the onscreen activity. He called it “Experience Theater”. The Sensorama in being able to display stereoscopic 3-D images in a wide-angle view, provide body tilting, supply stereo sound, and also had tracks for wind and aromas to be triggered during the film anticipated many of the ride films of today.

In 1989 I remember going to Disneyland to see the then brand new “Star Tours” exhibit. Using hydraulic seats that synchronized the movement of the auditorium bleachers with the motion of the onscreen “Star Wars” based ‘ride’ film, this type of ride/movie was new for its day as outside of commercial flight simulators, on which the technology was based, this type of themed ride/movie had not been seen & felt by many people at all.

TrioTech of Montreal, Canada and Alter of San Francisco today offer the 7D Experience at PIER 39 in San Francisco which is a 7D an interactive simulation ride featuring synchronized motion, projected 3D graphics and real time environmental special effects. As you ride and watch the 3D movie, feel wind in your hair, you battle enemies with your laser blaster and compete against fellow riders for the highest score. Its a combination of ride, movie and videogame.

The Zombie game/movie offers a ‘Walking Dead’ type scenario. The 3D movie opens with a helicopter shot flying over a ravine at night, lightening and thunder crashing. Cut to the inside of a cop car as you adjust the radio, when (of course) a Zombie jumps onto the hood of the car. The car steers off the road, down a hill into a cemetery where more zombies appear. After blasting these, you end up on a road having to shoot them off other cars, from bridges, and in rivers. Its great fun.

In addition to the 3D visual effects, riders will be immersed in an environment with wind machines, strobe lights, rapid motions seats, and personal laser blasters, where everyone interacts with the ride and competes for the highest score. I found myself getting extremely caught up in the action at times, especially during the moments where the vehicle I was in suddenly “drove off a broken bridge” 300 feet into a ravine. Some part of my brain set aside to respond to such events kicked in to warn me things were indeed quite bad. If anything the action is over all to quickly, with the audience wanting more. 20% more of the ride might help placate the sense that the whole thing is over before it starts, but I suppose the economics of the ride are balanced against the need for steady throughput of clientele. Its the old fairground adage: Roll up, roll up, and keep ’em moving!

Cinema returns to its origins with such experiences; right back to the beginnings of the days of the Lumiere brothers, even the Ringling Brotheres, Milies and (later) Helig.

Sensorama indeed!

http://7dexperience.com/