Hasta La Gadget!

Writing a decent story is hard enough, but taking that story and turning it into a watchable film is even more complicated. But new software called Plotagon aims to turn anyone into a one-man movie-making machine. It uses a simple menu-based interface that helps you build a script, which turns into a computer-animated video as you’re writing it. Is it perfect? Nope. Far from it. It looks really fun though.

As you can see in the image above, Plotagon is divided into two parts: on the left is where you’ll write your manuscript, and on the right is a video player that shows you what your movie looks like. You don’t need to know the proper format for a manuscript or even have a deep vocabulary, because Plotagon cheats.

Since it would take an insanely complex program to read your mind or even parse your paragraph and figure out what you’re describing, Plotagon instead has a bank of scenes, characters, actions and more. As you pick out each element, it appears on your manuscript and is visualized in the video player almost instantaneously. It’s a bit like playing The Sims.

The only thing you can’t pick from Plotagon’s stock is the dialogue, which your digital actors will speak in silly synthesized voices. I don’t know if it supports other languages besides English though.

Plotagon is currently in beta, and is available for both Windows and OS X. You can download a free trial version on its official website, where you can also see a few short films made with the program. Plotagon will make money from its store, which will sell more characters, settings, etc. Imagine a Marvel character pack or a Star Wars location bundle. In fact, Stan Lee is going to make four new superheroes just for Plotagon. Imagine sharing co-creating duties with Stan the Man himself!

[via Mashable]

The geniuses at Disney Research are obsessed with touch-based input. One of their latest breakthroughs is an algorithm that can “simulate rich 3D geometric features (such as bumps, ridges, edges, protrusions, texture etc.) on touch screen surfaces.” In other words, it provides the feeling of touching a 3D object even though the user is only touching a flat surface. Someday we’ll know what an Angry Bird feels like.

To prove that their algorithm works, Seung-Chan Kim, Ali Israr and Ivan Poupyrev of Disney Research Pittsburgh used an “electro-vibration based friction display.” The display emits a voltage that simulates the friction that our hands would feel if we were actually touching the object shown in the image or video. The researchers say that they can get depth maps from 3D models or from a depth sensor such as Kinect.

Combine this with the Oculus Rift and adult films – er videogames will attain a higher level of realism.

[via Disney Research via Reddit]

When I first heard of Facebook, Friendster was still all the rage. I didn’t care much for it and only went online on Facebook because somebody gave me these virtual pets that you were supposed to take care of. I eventually deleted my account and moved on… until I went back and signed up again to become the site’s 47,728,103th user.

So when did you get on the Facebook trend relative to other users and relative to your friends? You can find out by checking out The Faces of Facebook. The site features an interactive gallery of all the profile pictures of Facebook’s 1 billion plus users on its front page. You can click any tiny square to zoom in and see whose profile occupies a certain position.

You can also authorize the site’s corresponding Facebook app to access your account and determine if you are among the first or the last in the social network’s massive pool of worldwide users.

[via Geekologie]

There’s already an official LEGO calendar, but design studio Vitamins made a more practical version with the help of custom software. Even though the calendar is made entirely out of LEGO pieces, Vitamins were able to make it interactive and sync to the studio’s online calendar.

Each month is represented in the calendar by long rectangular panels. For instance in the image above you can see a three month timeline. Each month is divided into columns that represent the days of the week. To assign a project, employees simply attach a brick onto the proper date. One brick represents half a day alloted to a particular project, with the color of the brick representing a particular project. Should there be a specific employee assigned to a project, that employee will be represented by a minifig.

The LEGO calendar helps employees take note of their schedule at a glance, but what if they’re not at the office? That’s where Vitamins’ custom program comes in handy. Anyone can take a picture of the calendar and send it to a certain email address, and in doing so the studio’s Google Calendar account will be synced to the LEGO calendar. The syncing program was made using openFrameworks.

Vitamins said that they’ve been using their system for almost a year and are very happy with it. They love that they have a tangible representation of how much time they have – the bricks – and that they can literally share their time with each other by trading bricks. They promise to upload the code for their program to encourage more people to adapt or play with their design. Perhaps the syncing can be automated with a camera or a color sensor?

[Vitamins via Creative Applications Network]

Nowadays it’s quite possible to create and play music live using a computer. You can also use MIDI controllers to make it easier for you to interact with music software and audio files. However, pushing keys and fiddling with knobs isn’t intuitive or fun to watch. Computer Orchestra manages to be both by letting you be a conductor of computers.

Computer Orchestra was made by three students from the art and design university ECAL. Simon de Diesbach, Jonas Lacôte and Laura Perrenoud designed it to be a crowdsourcing interface for uploading samples and then triggering them on different computers using simple hand gestures.

The idea is that you’ll upload samples to or download samples from a website, then you’ll assign those samples to your “musicians” – in this case, the members of the orchestra are all laptops. Using a Wi-Fi connection, a Kinect sensor, a programming language called Processing and the software library called SimpleOpenNI, you can then trigger those computers to play by waving your hands towards them. There also seems to be other gestures that vary the way the computers play the samples.

I know it’s very impractical, but it also seems like a lot of fun. Perhaps it’s possible to make a simpler version of this with a Leap controller and an array of color or light sensors. Using one laptop per sample seems like overkill, although it’s a sight to behold.

[via Designboom]