When the 2014 Winter Olympics end tomorrow, where will you get your late night curling fix? Easy: Google Earth + Leap Motion. The folks over at MyReadingMapped have created a detailed digital tour of the icy alpine ski and bobsled venues of Sochi, so you can soar above the Men’s and Women’s Downhill and skate through the air with your hands.
In the olden days, before the rise of high-speed Internet, LAN parties were the best way to bring PC gamers together. Now, as gamers tire of being cursed out by foul-mouthed 12-year-olds, LAN parties are making a comeback. Fighting for glory and prizes, they come together under the same roof, often for days at a stretch.
Last month, hundreds of gamers converged on the wired cavern of Baselan 26 in Winnipeg for the thrill of digital competition. Amidst tournaments including StarCraft 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Minecraft “hunger games,” and a retro Super Smash Bros. throwdown, players also reached into tech demos like the Oculus Rift and Leap Motion Controller.
Hello again! I’m Bastien Bourineau, project manager and lead developer at OpenSpace3D, and I’m back to introduce the new OpenSpace3D release with improved Leap Motion support – including how we got around the perennial indexing issue.
Last time, we saw how you can easily build 3D interactive environments using our free, open-source platform – designed with a visual programming system to be a tool for all creative minds. This time, I focused on hands and fingers to find a correct way to get their indexes sorted. This is an important issue in building augmented and virtual reality apps, especially if you want to combine Leap Motion and Oculus Rift functionality.
Every day, we’re surrounded by invisible connections that create an alternate landscape of data highs and lows. This week in Airspace, reach into five invisible cities around the world and watch the terrain warp over time. Plus, four new games, a musical journey through the stars, and an app to help you hand-eye coordination.
Like many developers, Chris Galzerano is a creature of the late night. Fuelled by quick afternoon power naps, he typically codes straight into the early hours of the morning before going to bed. After all, he has school in the morning.
One of three young developers with apps in the Leap Motion App Store, Chris is the creator of Sky Muffins – an arcade-like game about a muffin who has mastered the art of space travel. It’s a concept that he first developed at 14, and his inspiration was simple. “There weren’t any games about skydiving muffins,” he says, “so I made one.”
Andrew Maxwell-Parish is a maker and hardware hacker who manages the Hybrid Lab at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. A version of this post originally appeared on Instructables. You can see more of Andrew’s work at electricslim.net, or watch his recent talk about how experimenting with hardware can change the world.
I manage a creative technology lab at California College of the Arts, where I assist students with a wide range of skills and create a wide range of projects. One of many parts of my job is to show current and prospective students why these are valuable skills to learn. I can and do tell them that even a basic understanding of how to develop technology is going to put them above the pack as a designer.
But this isn’t a very entertaining argument. So, what is an entertaining way of getting them excited about electronics and technology development? Showing them projects that have only been made recently possible and blowing their minds!
This is one of the projects that I use to do this. Without touching anything, it allows you to control the functionality of a 3D printer (or anything that uses G-code). Without touching anything, you can control a machine. Waving your hand in the air, allows you to control a complex machine. That’s some Tony Stark future stuff right there. Future stuff in the present moment.
From bringing the Wu-Tang style to interactive hardware to designing printed circuit boards in Uganda, Andrew Maxwell-Parish’s explorations into open-space technology have taken him to interesting places – both conceptual and geographical. Earlier this month, Andrew talked about his five-month artist residency at Autodesk’s Pier 9 in San Francisco, and we were there to hear all about it.
In the early 20th century, a radical modernist art movement known as Vorticism erupted in Britain but soon withered after the First World War. The distinct style of the Vorticists was about combining machine-age forms and energetic modern beliefs to “Blast” and “Bless” the environment around them – expressed through geometric abstractions.
Recently, I was asked to design a response to this short-lived movement, with a focus on blasting (opposing or being unhappy about something) or blessing (being happy about an aspect of life). I decided to focus on how I never have enough time to do anything.
When you think about it, time can be a very annoying aspect of life. Waiting, wasting, loitering, queueing, decaying, inefficiency, biding, aging, being late – these are all things that irritate me. I blast time!
In this post, the second of my three-part series on LeapJS plugins, we’ll take a look at Proximity Alert, an audio feedback plugin which gives beeps based upon your hand position. It can be used in any app, and is fully open-source.
