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Camera Apps: Ghost in the Shell, FiLMiC

The folks at Production IG have released yet another sci-fi app in the form of the Ghost in the Shell: Optical Camouflage Camera. This one allows you to snap pictures or capture video that turns transparent against the background, as the characters did in the original GITS movie. To make it even tastier, they are throwing in free backgrounds from the GITS: SSS movie for you to position your people and objects in front of, to maximize the fun. It is currently on sale for $1.99 during the roll-out period, but expect the price to go up after a bit. While you are in there, you might want to grab their previous two apps which are running at 99 cents each. The first is the Character Music Player from Ghost In The Shell: S.A.C. Section9, the second is the 3D Cyber Clock. While I like all of these apps, only the first allows you to create your own original video.

The other app worth mentioning is FiLMiC Pro, which gives you a bunch of functionality for enhancing your HD video capture. It is a bit pricy at $2.99 compared to most other apps (or at least most I find interesting), so check out the new stuff it gives you before making your decision. *grin*

The Radioactive Orchestra

The Radioactive Orchestra has an assortment of over 3,000 radioactive isotopes which you can use to create music. Strange as that sounds, it is a first class way to get an instinctive understanding of radiation decay behaviors and patterns, allowing you to directly perceive the activity. And, with a little mixing of isotopes and adjusting your BPM rate and root frequency you can actually end up with an interesting music bed from which to build your own compositions. They also have some wave filter functions; it defaults to a sine wave, but try a square wave or sawtooth for some interesting acoustic variations. Thanks to the folks at New Scientist for the heads up on this one.

Build Your Own web video series

You can make your own online videos, to share whatever drives your enthusiasm with the world, and lots of you have done so. If you want to build your own, I recommend you check out the two videos on the page. They will give you a few good rules of thumb and tell you about some excellent tools to help you succeed, many of which are even free (the software ones, at least; there are very few free video cameras or microphones, although there are a number of cheap but high quality hardware options). Thanks to Epic Fu and The Fine Bros. for some good insight into the process.

Hatsune Miku Live in America

Now that we have virtual Idols, between Vocaloid and the 3D RL holographic projection process that displays them live on stage, it is time to get creative with our live concerts. Mikunopolis is coming on July 2nd to the stage in LA as part of Anime Expo. Besides being Virtual Idol Hatsune Miku’s first performance in the US, she will be the first ever Virtual Guest of Honor at an American Con. In case you were wondering, her back-up band on stage with her will be non-virtual, but there is always the chance some of the other Virtual Idols will be joining her on stage. SEGA is doing the 3D imaging tech work for the show with Crypton Future Media, the creators of Hatsune Miku, supervising. The videos here were taken at the Miku’s Day Thanksgiving live show in Tokyo on March 9th 2010, and the reports are the 3D tech for the on stage presentation has gotten even better since then.

If you are interested in creating your own Virtual Idol, it was announced today, or yesterday depending on which side of the date line you are on, that Vocaloid is finally being updated (the last new version was released 4 years ago). The program itself has come down in price, and version 3 will be retailing at around $125, but they have not announced what the voice packages are going to run yet. This is supposed to be the most realistic singing voice engine to date, and comes with multi-language support. That means your English language songs can be built from English phonemes now; I am sure anyone who programmed the previous versions to sing in English when it only came with Japanese phonemes is going to be quite excited about that. I think I will save the resources to create your 3D Idol for another post; enjoy the music from the old version of Vocaloid.

DosBox Games in Chrome

Over at NaClBox they are hosting a port of DOSBox to Google’s Native Client playground with one goal in mind: allowing you to play classic DOS games in Chrome. He currently has a limited number of titles set up in demo mode for you to try it out, including Alone in the Dark, the Secret of Monkey Island, and SimCity 2000. All of them play just like the originals, which tells me this VM implementation works great. I was able to play them on a 32 bit XP box, a 64 bit Windows 7 box, a 32 bit Xubuntu box, and just cause I could I then did it on my 64 bit box booting a Knoppix LiveDVD. Not that I recommend that, since all my settings evaporated when I took the disk back out, and Knoppix has its own DOSBox implementation bootable from the xStart GUI or command line menus anyways. I did not have a MAC box to test it on, but it claims to work on them as well.

I am unsure if the goal is to host a bunch of games at that site, but I suspect not. I believe he is trying to develop ports of open source projects like DOSBox for Chrome (the browser and the OS), and that belief is supported by the fact that his source code patch is available for download since this Tuesday so you can figure out how to compile and run your own. My project for this weekend is to see if I can get it built and working here. If I can, I have a few of my own favorite DOS games I look forward to playing again; Gibson’s Neuromancer, Zelazny’s 9 Princes in Amber, and Adam’s Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Thank Ghod I copied the original 5.25′ floppy’s to 3.5′ floppy’s in the early 90s, and then to CD in the late 90s, because I sure don’t have a working floppy drive of any flavor now. I even still have the original packaging on a few of them, although Leather Goddesses of Phobos looks a lot more sedate than my earlier self remembered.

How does this stuff work? The Google browser Chrome has some built in functionality called Native Client, which basically allows you to embed C or C++ code into your web app. This is currently in Beta, and one of the things that will determine whether it gets widely used or abandoned is how it will overcome the obvious security problems you generate by letting random remote people run programs on your machine. Java already solved that issue with the sandbox and restricted code subset approach to running C online, so there is a good chance Google will get there as well. While having DOSBox in the Chrome browser is an easy fix for windows and apple folks looking to run classic DOS programs in those environments, the real power of this port will be realized by people running those programs on their tablets and smart phones.

Build Your Own: TV Show Animation Software

This is a definite Build Your Own kind of project. The folks over at the NHK have launched a new set of tools, all to make children’s ability to create their own animations easy and educational. Being their countries equivalent of Public Broadcasting, all of the software is free, and they also throw in a lot of video resources to help folks build from. The core group developing all this is the Software Technology Research Laboratory, which has been building new toys and tools since at least 1995. The specific software package we are talking about today is the TVML, or TV program Making Language, a software package you should download now. You can get all the details at the TVML Applications site. You really do want to add this free software to your build-your-own collection, even if you don’t speak Japanese. The TV4U software suite might also be useful for your development…