[Andrew Magill] just added his Orientation Aware Camera to the Hack a Day Flickr Pool. It uses a 3-axis magnetometer and 3-axis accelerometer. He didn’t want to spend too much effort on the USB side so he picked up USBMicro’s U421. It’s a fairly well documented preprogrammed microcontroller for USB. He later regretted this; his final sample rate was only 5Hz because of all the overhead. Using the positional data the, webcam image can be corrected for any sort of shaking. [Andrew] took this one step further by using OpenGL and stitching all of the video frames together live into a full panorama. Be sure to watch his excellent video demo embedded below. Read the rest of this entry »

[Peter Kirn] from Create Digital Music has an article up highlighting many of the great music and visual performance pieces planned for The Last HOPE on Friday night. If you are around New York and not accustomed to hacking conferences, this could be a great excuse to go check it out. Here are some of our favorite projects.

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[Markus Kison] built a device called Pulse, which is part art installation and part data visualization tool. What the emotional visualization organism called Pulse actually does is scan new posts on Blogger.com blogs for synonyms of keywords related to 24 distinct emotions from eight emotional groups. A red cone in the center expands when keywords are detected, in effect acting as a mood indicator for Blogger.com blogs.

The 24 distinct emotions are based on [Robert Plutchik]’s psychoevolutionary theory of emotion, and the device itself is built from a glass case, various servo motors, and custom controller for the servos. This is a compelling idea, but we wonder whether it scans for modifying words or just the keywords alone. It wouldn’t make a lot of sense to have the sadness region expand drastically if many people simultaneously post the sentence “I’m not sad at all.” Video embedded after the break.

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