Cam-Trax proves Wii might still be the future of gaming

Cam-Trax offers highly accurate and responsive tracking of random colorful objects you hold in front of your webcam and tell it to track. Simple as that. You can see from the film that it embraces casual games such as PS3 Eye-Toy style pong as well as more demanding racing and FPS combat games.

It's very impressive stuff that will allow game developers to make cheap, nay free, peripherals rather than plastic, white Nintendo style kit. It could also finally see the Gauntlet style of navigation that Hollywood have been pushing since The Lawnmower Man.

"Human art is dead, long live the electronic art of the machine"

Christian Cerrito has created small robots adorned with brushes that scurry, twirl and bounce their way across canvass and create chaotic illustrations with blobs of paint. As interesting to watch as the work they produce, you can see them hard at work here. At this time no work is for sale but we hope that changes.

The MP3 Mixdown

As a keen vinyl collector, it was going to take a lot to get me to start downloading MP3 rather than buying records, but these two bits of tech have got me knocking down trackitdown.net for my latest electro fixes. Vinyl has been relegated to the albums and special editions for the time being, while I buy 4 MP3s for the price of a 12" to jam on the Virtual decks.

Virtual Vinyl technology is an amazing bit of kit that keeps the traditional DJ techniques but brings them bang up to date. A special box and tracking vinyl plates feed through software in your laptop to which allow you to play MP3s and interact with them physically on your decks. Numark have gone a step better and added video scratching into the mix as well. Check out their demo below, featuring Beardyman and his DJ JFB. Cool scratching aside, it shows that there is no latency issues with the software, making this £250 bit of kit an affordable way to start mixing your digital music collection.



More gadgety and portable, but still interesting is the new Pacemaker, a huge bit of kit that allows you to mix live on a device slightly larger than an iPod classic. Two headphone jacks, pitch shifters and crossfader means that after a bit of practice mixing house and breaks are pretty easy. Trickier stuff like Hip Hop and Drum & Bass are much harder, maybe even impossible, but its a great, if expensive, way to bring a house party to life. It even has an 120GB hard drive, so you won't be filling it up in a hurry. Check the demo below. These types of innovations are the future of interactive music playback.

Amazing navigation #1

The disappointingly named 'Flickr Related Tag Browser' is a fantastic bit of navigation, serving up image data from Flickr remotely and displaying images via search keyword.

The initial keyword serves up images in the center of the ring, while related words encircle the images. Clicking on any of the new words serve up a new set of images. Very simple and a great deal of fun to play with.

#F9B005 & #FE9C00

Those are the colour codes of our sQuarebrains site landing page; 2 of the best shades of yellow you're ever going to see!

I like your colours is a neat little site which gives you the colour palette of your favorite websites, which can be great if you're trying to source a colour or create your own colour schemes for website design and the like.

Spectrumising the Future

A 2 part post today, each about a small resurgance in the "Glitch Art" movement inspired by primitive computers and data storage devices.

Visually:
My friend Justin happened across some fantastic "glitch art" a while back when he tried to install his webcam on his new Vista machine with XP drivers. Naturally the whole thing screwed up, but not in a totally nothing happened way, more of a decoding error which made every image look like a loading screen from a Sinclair Spectrum. The colours and splashes of detail are quite striking, I think they're beaufiful and a great example of random, almost naive digital art. The full set is here, my personal favourites are below:












Musically:
The ZX Spectrum Orchestra make skatty, glitchy music by writing new programs and breaking existing ones for the ZX Spectrum. They create insane visuals to go with the loading sounds and primitive voice synthesisers of the late 80s. To see them live is a truely awesome experience, but for those of you unable to do this their myspace has a lot of their best tracks on it. I've included below a more musical track and also something more raw and glitched up.

I hope you find it possible to enjoy.

Toyota's Unbreakable ScreenSaver

How about that? I say I hate screen savers then 2 come along that are great at once. Perhaps this marks a new golden age for the screen saver, or maybe if I say I hate money enough I'll win the lottery?

Anyway, Toyota have made a cool little screen saver to demonstrate their tough 4x4 (ick), the Hilux. You could argue it is a bit of a niche concept as to run it you need to have an apple laptop, but it still makes use of Apple's motion sensor even if Apple themselves have never done so.

Flinging your laptop about causes the car to act as if its in an earthquake, however you tilt your iBook, that's how the car reacts. Fun.

For a film demo check out the film: http://oursites.co.nz/cannes08/motion_sensor/video.html

Desktop BBQ

I'm not a big fan of screen savers, they usually come over as self-indulgent, promotional vomit. However, this one has been gracing my desktop for a while now.

Somehow it is able to take a full screen grab of your desktop, no matter whats open at the time, and create pixel fire around it, making your desktop appear aflame. As you can see from the pictures, each icon and even my wallpaper has its own little torrent of fire.

Very cool. Grab a copy here.