NYCResistor’s Gian Pablo Villamil is working on a really interesting project with panoramic Video in New Orleans. He can’t tell us what the project will do, who is involved, or if space aliens really exist, but the few photos he has on his site look pretty amazing and he has written about some solutions to technical hurdles associated with the piece. Stay tuned for more on the project! As per Gian’s request, this blog will self destruct in 5, 4, 3, 2…

John Houck has created this really interesting installation, here’s his description of the guts of the piece:

This installation contains 35 motors that are controlled individually with an arduino microcontroller. Processing is used to send commands, via serial communication, to the arduino. The sequencing of the motors changing speed was inspired by the movement of people through public spaces.

The project is called Volumes of Emptiness and although the website doesn’t actually say where it’s exhibiting, there are some great photos and videos of the work in action. Looks like a very interesting and lively installation. I’d love to see a more concise write up about the logistics of the project.

Rob Faludi and Kate Hartman posted about the protype version of the XBEE Lilypad. The Lilypad is the incredibly small — wearable version — of the Arduino, and to borrow a phrase from a well known advertisment, the XBEE ‘gives it wings!’. Not sure how much power this require through the Lilypad, but I can think of 500 amazing projects this could be used for. Check out the post on Rob’s site to learn more about the direction of the project.

Oh, and when you’re done reading about fun electronic prototypes, you can check out their recipe for a nice glass of Vegan Pork Martini. Yes, I said that right!

The videos below were Directed and Creative Directed by James Frost, Aaron Koblin was the Technical Director, Justin Glorieux was the Executive Producer, Google stored the code, etc. etc. and they all teamed up (along with tons of other talented people) with Radiohead to make this amazing video for the song ‘House of Cards’. Aaron, best known for his Flight Patterns project is a Processing genius, and James Frost has worked with tons of amazing bands, which is all clearly evident in the video they helped create.

The about video below really shows how the entire team made this happen, but one of the most impressive parts of the shoot is the fact that they didn’t even use a video camera. The data was captured by a Geometric Informatics camera and a Lidar system, both of which determine the X, Y, and Z, coordinates of an object which were then filtered into processing to create the scenes below. The code is also available in Google Code and there’s a gorgeous interactive element where you can see the data being visualized on the X, Y, Z axis.

You can learn more about the video at James Frost’s website here.

A little laser graffiti at NYCR on the roof thanks to Max Resistor…

photos by Nick Bilton