Me and MRE were hanging out at the space tonight and decided to make it prettier.

We used the Mac OS X Server motherboard that we had so much fun extracting during the clean-up, a bunch, I mean, a freaking lot of EL Wire and a hot glue gun.

The result is a hellish THS glow-in-the-dark sign!

This is very much a work in progress. The next steps include:

- bitch-slabbing some screens on it to display error message,
- make it creepy glitter, like an old las vegas shady neon sign,
- make some LED randomly blink on it as in old sci-fi movies computers,

I've been prototyping some ideas with Unity3D and the Arduino/mbed, looking at how we can connect the real and the virtual environments for all sorts of applications. This is a prototype of a simple light dependent resistor circuit that controls the light intensity of a room light in a Unity3D scene. The connection is via Open Sound Contol (using Japanese Hacker Recotana's ArdOSC implementation http://recotana.com/recotanablog/?page_id=222 ) over ethernet to a Unity3D scene also running an OSC C# implementation.

The photo showing the Unity3D console shows the test OSC messages and how they are mapped to control Unity3D light intensity. The light dependent resistor returns a number between 0 and 1023. We send this value over ethernet via OSC messages to the Unity3D scene. Unity3D lights can have an intensity between 0 and 8, so we just use a simple scaling formula to fit the LDR range to the Unity3D light Range. I have it set up so that when the LDR is receiving more light the Unity room light is low, and vice versa.

This simple demo sets a communications framework in place to enable all sorts of wired/wireless sensors to interact and control a virtual scene, and vice versa. I'm looking forward to freaklabs wireless arduino platform for some real fun and games!

Unity3D is a multiplatform game development tool designed for Rapid Application Development and ease of use. In addition to games, it can also be used to develop serious games, simulations, virtual worlds, interactive art and other applications. Unity Basic edition is free. http://unity3d.com/unity/licenses.html

Here's a little photo essay to accompany Akiba's short summary below of our trip to Kamogawa last weekend. Click on the slide show to access the album along with geotagged google map view of the Kamogawa Valley. More photo's and video to follow. Thanks for a great time everyone!
Paul aka sonicviz aka Komuso Tokugawa

Trip Summary from Akiba aka Freaklabs:

Thanks to everyone that participated in the Kamogawa trip! The trip itself
was amazing and I got the chance to see a completely different side of
Japan. Everyone we met was so nice, helpful, and curious about the strange
otaku group that was interested in the process of rice farming and charcoal
making.

A big thanks also to Chris Harrington who organized everything for us. He
took us around the whole area, introduced us to many people in the
community, and gave us the chance to see what I believe is the real Japan.