I’ve been busy busy busy playing working on some experimental Papervision/Hype mashups which are now live on the RezzyNet site.

The Hype framework was officially released on Halloween and I took the opportunity to plug it straight into the Papervision cube thingy that I’ve been prodding and hacking for over a year now. I started by taking out all the existing functionality and used the SoundAnalyzer class from Hype to initiate the cube ‘pops’. The results were amazing so I added a FixedVibration to give it some character. It performs really well although you’ll need a decent pipe for the audio stream.

http://rezzynet.com/cube/Main.html

So, this got me psyched and itching to see what else I could do. I wanted to mix up the SoundAnalyser and the Oscillator so I created a row of 256 cubes in 3D space, set them to oscillate on the Y axis and then adjust the zScale for the SoundAnalyser range. This took less than an hour to setup and the results, yet again were impressive.

http://rezzynet.com/oscillation/Main.html

The next thing to do was to position the row of cubes in a circular path. I kept the camera in the default position … I just moved it back slightly. I liked the surprise when you first click and drag within the viewport to rotate the view.

http://rezzynet.com/oscillation/Main2.html

Finally … well, for tonight anyway … I adjusted the Math that created the circular path and created a spiral.

http://rezzynet.com/oscillation/Main3.html

Wow! I’m impressed with Hype. What I’ve produced here using Papervision and Hype is by no means complicated and full credit goes to all the amazing talent behind the scenes of the Papervision project and to Branden Hall and Joshua Davis for an amazingly accessible framework that even idiots like myself can have fun with and I will be sure to share my experiences by releasing source and doing some screencasts in the coming weeks. In the meantime though I would urge anyone interested to go and play for themselves.

http://rezzynet.com
http://papervision.org
http://hype.joshuadavis.com

I bought WoW … or ‘World of Warcraft’ at the weekend. I’ve been curious of MORPG’s for a while and have been considering ‘EVE’ and ‘Star Wars Galaxies’ as well but it was a chance encounter at the Apple Store in Tunbridge Wells that decided my fate. I went to buy a game for my MacBook Pro because I needed something for the long train journeys that wasn’t just Flex development … for my sanity you see? I grabbed a copy of ‘Call of Duty 4′ and went to pay for it. The ‘Apple Man’, as I like to call them, spent five minutes ‘out back’ before returning with a shocked and defeated look on his face; they had no software! I was gutted as you can imagine; I’d worked myself up into a gaming frenzy and was now completely deflated. How could I wait a day or two for Amazon to deliver? The moment would have been gone! I needed to play a game on my Mac tonight no matter what! I headed to ‘Game’.

Now, surely Game would have a very tiny section in the corner with some Mac games in it, right? I looked everywhere, under the bargain bin, around by the PC games section. There was nothing! There was no choice; I had to ask one of the children who worked there. My fears were confirmed. They didn’t sell Mac games but they did have ‘World of Warcraft – Battle Chest box set’ which was labeled as PC MAC DVD and was the only product in the entire shopping precinct that would run on a mac. I bought it and headed home … just after Lyra (my daughter) re-decorated Marks & Spencer’s with the contents of her stomach. She’s ill.

Grabbing 20 minutes between a sickly toddler throwing up on me and a newborn pooping up their own back for giggles I grabbed my MacBook and shoved the DVD into the drive. So confident of the installation process was I that I didn’t even have the machine plugged in … crazy. I began to install.

20 minutes later I returned and indeed it had finished the initial DVD installation. I launched the app. What’s this? It wants to just grab a few patches from the WoW site. I guess it is quite an old disk and I have got 20 minutes of juice left; I’ll pop back in a while. I began the patching process.

20 minutes later I returned and saw that it had indeed finished the first patch but was now engaged in installing another one. Oh dear, I’d better plug my machine in and come back after my tea when the little ones are in bed and I can settle down for a night of ‘fiddling’ on my beast … ooer!

I came back to see it had started another patching process; this time it wanted to install 3.5GB … some people will comment ’so what?’ but I’m in ‘Rural Broadband Hell’ and so reluctantly I gave a resigned sigh and let the patch continue overnight. My wife was upset because she couldn’t watch iPlayer and I was miserable because I had to ‘read the manual’ instead of actually playing the game.

Overall it took 14 hours solid for the software to completely install and patch on my machine. Just a warning for any ‘Noobs’ out there. Luckily I had a pretty stable connection or it could have taken a week. To anyone out there with a dodgy pipe I would suggest trying to get it off a Torrent site (the patch that is) and if anyone has any links to legal patch files that you can access via BitTorrent then please comment. Indeed I’d wanted to download WoW a while ago but it was just too huge a file to even attempt and BitTorrent seemed too risky.

Overall though, apart from the installation process, WoW runs brilliantly on my MacBook Pro. I have 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3 RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics card. You can run the game in window mode too so you can still pretend to be working. I was dubious of how it would perform over my slow pipe but it seems to be fine and am looking forward to running it over 3G on the long train journeys.

If anyone wants to kick my ass I’m a dwarf (obviously) called ‘Horsmon’. The name is a derivative of ‘Horsmonden’ which is the village we currently live in … with the crap Broadband!

Finally, does anyone have a Keyboard layout alternative for people without the extended Keyboard on a Mac?

Good luck and don’t /spit! I learnt that from the book … it’s rude apparently.

The location is leaked and it is Leake Street in Lambeth. Here’s a handy map …

View Larger Map

The BBC are already reporting this as a Banksy exhibition which goes to show just how naive the media are when it comes to contemporary fringe art. There’s so much more than Banksy on offer this weekend including the chance to bring your own stencil and DIY. See you there.

Stuck for something to do this weekend and living in London. This looks like a great opportunity to watch some of the biggest names in ‘Urban Art’ (or whatever you want to call it) doing their thang. The location is secret at the moment but check back on Friday morning to find out more. Banksy is listed as participating which should interest the media but make sure you check out some of the other artists. A good place to start is by browsing the Wooster Collective and SuperTouch sites.

More info here.

Not since Michael Jackson’s ‘Black & White’ pop video has morphing captured my attention as much as it has on Lucy and Bart’s site. Move your mouse from the left to the right side of the window area to blend Lucy and Bart together into a hybrid. An intentional metaphor perhaps for the entity that is Lucy and Bart: the artistic collaboration.

LucyandBart is a collaboration between Lucy McRae and Bart Hess described as an instinctual stalking of fashion, architecture, performance and the body. They share a fascination with genetic manipulation and beauty expression. Unconsciously their work touches upon these themes, however it is not their intention to communicate this. They work in a primitive and limitless way creating future human shapes, blindly discovering low – tech prosthetic ways for human enhancement.

Lucy and Bart create thought-provoking images of the subverted and manipulated human form. The results are shocking and intriguing and there’s a wonderful aesthetic achieved by the contrast between the materials they use and the beautifully shot photography and models they use. It’s a strange mix that has me re-evaluating my ideas of Fashion as an art-form; I don’t usually get on with it. I tend to find ‘weird fashion photography’ a bit pretentious and pathetic but Lucy and Bart’s work is experimental, sculptural and so not fake or deceptive in any way. You get the feeling that they are just experimenting and playing with ideas and materials and in the process they are twisting our idea of body-image into something new and strange. They’re also creating some remarkable portraits. I start to see these images as paintings, images Jenny Saville might be able to get her teeth into.

From looking at her blog it looks like Lucy is also experimenting with wearable jewellery with some help from Philips. It’s hard to gauge exactly what the project is about from the limited information on the site but check it out if you have more time to delve. Link.

Check out their blog and then go and subvert your own human form with some elastic bands and fish hooks. Have some fun but don’t go too far for gods sake.