It’s that time of year again, and one of the best online resources for Halloween is the Instructables Halloween Costume collection. Since these are instruction sets teaching you how to make your own costumes, I figured I should post now so you had the lead time to start building. Another great place to get ideas and help on creating costumes are any of the Cosplay groups, including Cosplay dot Com or the Cosplay Lab.
Cory Doctorow worried that folks might not find the 404 Wine Bar for his pre-Play performance meet-and-greet the other night in Chicago. But everyone can find his latest story, serialized at TOR Online, and read it as each chapter gets uploaded. The story is Makers, and for those of us who get cross-eyed after staring at the screen for 18 hours a day it will come out in print in the fall (what date in the fall is a variable dependent on which continent you live on). Or perhaps for those of us who can’t wait for the serialization to finish up in Jan 2010. But there is an extra, Online-Level draw on this one; the images with each chapter! Download and collect them all, then download the Flash/Java App that will allow you to create your own image structure for the story. This is the extended (I.E., Complete) story originally told on Salon as ThemePunks. Now you can finally find out how it turns out! The folks at Barnstorming are doing the graphics, and they are building them to inter-connect. Which means the Flash App, whenever it gets released online, will allow you to take the various tiles and build your own cover for the book. All in all, this looks like a fun ride!
I am both a Geek and a Guy, which gives me two counts of wanting to know about, and play with, new toys. So I hang out at web sites like EnGadget, and skim the short version from DVice, and check the new stuff at Gizmodo. I also stop by the more specialized (and therefor lesser-known) sites like Dev Hardware or Girls N Gadgets or TechOn to name a few, because they cover things the monster sized sites miss. When I get seriously into Geek Mode, I hit the MIT Technology Review or the IEEE Explore sites.
Now there is a new player in town; GDGT is a hardware junkies forum, with a twitter-like community twist. It just launched in the last 11 hours or so, which means I can’t even hint at what it might grow up to be. But I love the premise, the interface is intuitive, the layout is clean, the posts are frequent and informed (quantity AND quality, my favorite combination!), and I am signing up for an account there. I recommend you do the same.
Three of the first sites mentioned here included an announcement about Asteroid Storm in the last few hours; a game played by raising your arms while siting in the theater. The tech works by mounting two cameras on the ceiling on either side of the screen and pointed at the audience. As the screen shows them the pilots-eye view, they can modify the spaceships trajectory by raising their hand. If 25 folks to the left of the screen raise their hands, and 22 on the right, the ship will gently steer left. If the count is still 22 on the right, but only 4 on the left, the ship will jackknife right… (It might be amusing to build a virtual version of that movie theater and use the voting of the House and Senate to steer, to see how many orbital rocks our government has tried to slam us into over the years.). This group game environment (NOT an MMORPG, but it should function a lot like one in some respects) will be introduced in UK theaters on July 10th, meaning next Friday. I can’t wait to see how the first few games go, and whether the audience works together to save the ship, or against each other to take it out. The next logical step would be two ships, with the two sides of the audience competing against each other.
Now play that game with a pair of Open Source Data Gloves, which you can build yourself for $23 in parts if you don’t want to buy the $400 commercial version, and you are ready to take over the theater!
Miku Hatsune is the name of a Virtual Idoru, or Idol. She sings whatever you program her for, because she is software that takes your input and generates custom made anime music from it.
Miku was sampled from anime vocal artist and singer Saki Fujita, who brought to life characters in Bleach, Speed Grapher, Shuffle, and many others. Including Zoku Sayonara ZetsubÅ Sensei, the show where she actually played the character Hatsune Miku. The software she (and a number of others) was sampled for is Yamaha’s Vocaloid2, a program that lets you enter the lyrics and notes for a song, select the singers, and generate the music. Or you can input the lyrics and play the computer keyboard in realtime to generate the notes. Unlike most software (OK, pretty much all software) I mention here, this program isn’t free by any means, and the crippleware version you can download to try is limited to 5 words and very truncated song length.
But I had to post about it, because very few news reports out of Japan make it to the US. There are Widgets for Miku, multiple CDs released, large user communities, dedicated music players to embed on web pages like the one below, entire anime’s built around the Miku songs generated, other anime voice artists who have since been sampled and call her Big Sister; and for the entire month her sample set was released it was the number one best selling item on Amazon Japan in any category. Pretty impressive for someone who doesn’t actually exist, isn’t it? Rumor has it there is a newer version of the software as well. You might also want to download the MikuMiku Dance animation software to make your own dance videos to go with the songs you create (that one is Freeware, and you probably want the multi-model English version).
Watch Hatsune Miku 3D Bleach Ending Song Remix PV in Animation | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com
A brand new update to one of the best free 3D tools has just been released: Daz Studio 3.0. This is a well-rounded software package to allow you to import and modify models, create scenes and animation sequences, and render them into video. If you are looking for 3D Animation training, you can visit their YouTube channel for a collection of free tutorial step-by-step videos. If you try the free version and want something even more powerful, you can upgrade to the Daz Studio 3.0 Advanced. Download the 30 day free trial of the Advanced version; it decays gracefully into the Free variant if you don’t purchase the license. Happy creating!
This is impressive, a project and tool set everyone can benefit from. For once, it is the future I am encouraging everyone to build, rather than science fiction. I found out about this courtesy of the Daily Galaxy Snag Films entry, and what a tool it is. Billed as The Planet’s Documentary Indie Film Widget (VIDEO), it will allow everyone to promote and distribute their own personal subset of documentaries or other independent films. If you haven’t created a film of your own, you can still promote your favorites by embeding a virtual theater onto your web pages. The baseline link is at Snag Films, and the widget works for all recognized browsers. The number of contributing movie sources is huge, and growing every day. And yes, you can add your own independent movies to the growing collection!