Geo IP based User Tracking for iPhone and iPad. Your visitors visualized in clusters and cells.
Advanced data visualization desktop developed for Deutsche Telekom. The Flex Charting Components at its best.
Sketching music online. An approach to simplify the work with notes and also showcase for a complex browser application.
Engine for 3D image browsing and general framework for working with plane based contents using the z-axis.
Various touchscreen applications for q-bus Mediatektur, introducing new mobile concepts
of Deutsche Telekom at Cebit and IFA.
The popular netart project and webby award nominee 2010. Generative art with a breeze of augmented reality.
Video feedback platform using the red5 media server. A new project by ROSTLAUB, the berlin based art collective.
Visitors From Earth is a smart Geo IP based user tracking tool for your website or application. The app visualizes the visitors as pulsating cells on a nightmap textured sphere. The position of the cells is equal to the real position on earth which makes the application a very nice monitoring tool. Clusters of visitors in the same city or region are rendered as growing cells on the sphere. The app also takes account of the timezone you're in and let's you adjust the total visitor count of your website so far. Visitors From Earth is available for free on iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.
For everybody who's interessted, the longitude, latitude, city and country of each user is fetched through the IP and the MaxMind GeoIP Lite service. All the data is written to a database and sent via AMF to the application. I've used nesium, a Cocoa AMF framework and amfPHP for handling the backend.
AScape is a long-term project, which has been developed together with Deutschlandrock.
Started in 2006, the first version of AScape was part of the award winning image presentation
platform Designklicks and used for a browsable 3D image tunnel. Since then,
the engine has been more and more improved for getting a general framework for browsing
images in 3D. One core part of the engine are various three dimensional formations
such as a tube, cube or ribbon and a concept for handling huge amounts of images for an
endlessly browsing experience.
The focus during development was, beside the logic and
architecture of AScape, always on the usability. Everybody who has ever worked with the
z-axis for displaying information knows, that using the z-axis is not just an advantage,
it's more an opportunity. An important aspect of how much the z-axis
is useful depends on the ambition the user has while browsing. For explorative purposes, three
dimensional views can be more intuitive and even more entertaining. For
investigative approaches, a common two dimesional view is mostly still the better choice.
A recent version of AScape can be viewed in the q-bus exhibit. The showcase contains three
dynamic formations called tube, wall and belt. The user can switch between views with keeping
the focus on the current image index. The engine has been also used in conjunction with some q-bus
touchscreen applications. An older implementation of AScape is part of the Spiegel
Online einestages project used for a timeline visualization.
After the engine hasn't been
developed further since 2009, the framework probably gets an update with the coming GPU hardware
acceleration API of the Flash Player available in the first half of 2011.
q-bus Mediatektur is an award winning company, creating interactive solutions for several
exhibitions and trade shows such as Cebit and IFA. As a long term partner of Deutsche Telekom,
q-bus has made several multi-touch installations over the past years. In 2009 / 2010 i've
contributed various touchscreen applications focusing on new security solutions of
Deutsche Telekom such as the SiMKo 2 secure mobile communication concept.
While developing the applications i've used
a mixture of different frameworks, such as Away3D for the 3D model of a SiMKo2 mobile device and
particle flow in the box above and AScape for dealing with several formations / transformations
between plane based screens.
Another aspect was the implementation of a socket connection between a RFID controlled user inter- face and the tochscreen application. Through moving triggers on the RFID panel, the user was able to activate and deactivate different contents inside the application. FLOSC was very useful for that part.
Quality Monitor is a browser application for visualizing and sharing company intern benchmark data of Deutsche Telekom. Started as an
experiment for replacing Excel and Powerpoint charts, the Quality Monitor became shortly a real alternative to the common structures
of exchanging and presenting data inside the company. With at last more than 300.000 data records, the Quality Monitor was incurred
by a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom for making the application and backend ready for international use.
During development the focus were on the software architecture, which is one of my favorite parts, and on the customization of the Flex Charting Components. Whenever somebody will ask me, if he or she shell use Flex Charting, i will answer: "Yes, but stay strong!". In fact, i think the Flex
Charting is one the most advanced data visualization frameworks for Flash and i really like it's architecture, but it's simply not
perfected.
During development i've found tons of bugs but also a workaround everytime by using its flexible architecture. Especially
the column and line charts are highly customizable. Nevertheless the datagrid is one of the weaker parts that's why i've developed a new table component. The rest of the GUI such as windows, tabs, lists were also developed especially for the application to keep the environment flexible and fast. Through using a desktop based user interface, the application felt really OS-like at the end.
Another part of the Quality Monitor was a small messaging system for exchanging user defined objects. Those objects were the essential part of the application, each chart represented an object. It was possible to create groups of objects and to share them with people or departments. A really nice project.
IKKKO is one of my favorites. I've developed the concept together with Richard Schumann, who's also responsable for the
excellent looking GUI. IKKKO is intended to be a platform and small environment for sketching short musical ideas. The approach of IKKKO is to simplify the work with notes and to speed up the access to music. Since there is no MIDI in Flash, i've made massive use of SiON, an Actionscript framework for frequency modulated sound generation, to combine the visual with the auditive demand of the main application called "Create".
The visual part of Create consists of two major elements: tracks and instruments. The notes are created directly on the instruments and then just dragged into a track. Through using bpm based tempo and a simple beat grid inside the tracks, every note can be placed in tact. That's it in a nutshell. I think
you should try it by yourself.
Create contains various interessting features like a reverse chord lookup for key and string instruments, loopable regions, midi export and the standard file and edit functions like undo, redo, copy and paste. The project is definitely a good example of using Flash to create rich internet applications, although the performance isn't enough at the moment, especially in large projects with a lot of GUI elements. Nevertheless, for me the ECMAScript 4 specification in Actionscript 3 is still an advantage for developing complex browser applications with a well organized architecture.
IKKKO is currently alpha. Create has been last updated to 0.92 in Oct 2010. Check out the new examples including 2 Loops at 100bpm.
As an addition to the Facebook pages for Ana Somnia and 99Rooms we thought it would be a great idea, to give our fans and visitors the opportunity to make a video feedback as well.
RECORD is a video streaming platform which tries to extend the conventional ways of getting in touch with us and after 7 years of making web art, we are also really excited about the thoughts and perhaps feelings the visitors have after consuming our netart. RECORD hosts a channel for each of our projects in a very special way. By using the visitors webcam and realtime video filters, every channel continues the look and feel of the particular project and gives the user a unique possibility of being part of the art.
RECORD uses the red5 media server for recording and streaming the user feedback. The service is written in Java and based on an example by Carl Sziebert. I've also used a Java MySQL connector which is a really nice addition to red5. One of the realtime video filters uses the canny edge algorithm which was has been ported to AS3 by Eugene. Another part is the motion tracking which is based on an object detection algorithm originally written in AS2 by Baba Kanpei.
Generative art is really something to get addicted to. The aspect of autonomy created through
randomised processes is simply fascinating and not just a part of software algorithms. In fact, we are all part of generative processes, even then, while we are dreaming. In 2008 ROSTLAUB decided to get also generative and to apply the thought of randomness in our dreams to a project called Ana Somnia, a dreamworld full of creepy beauty.
Technically, the generative aspect of the project is a permanently evolving tree of animations, which is different each time. The animations are randomly put together and on top of each other. In conjunction with various soundscapes, the context between the animations changes and it arises an always slighty different interpretation of each dream.
As a web art project, we reached a lot of people in short time. Until now, Ana has dreamt more than 1.400.000 dreams with a total time of more than 4 years. This is by far more time since the launch in September 2010.
By the way, Ana Somnia is the recent release of ROSTLAUB, the Berlin based art collective consisting of artist Kim Köster, designer Richard Schumann, sound designer Johannes Bünemann and me. Since 2004 we create worlds of morbid beauty and reached more than 7 million people around the internet.
We are always looking for exhibition space, if you have one please write us.
