Lab 1,618

In the last weeks I made with my friends of D_forma a project called Émulo and we went to present it in an exhibition in Madrid for the Instituto Injuve.

The basic idea, was to give a face and a voice to the spanish bloggers and to create in this way a virtual character that impersonates people's opinion about any subject you may be interested in.

Technically everything is done by using the Google's blogsearch engine and pyTTS that is a Python's library for text-to-speech. The user interface was made in Flash and Php was used for putting all the pieces together.

You can see a Photo gallery and a short Video of the Exhibition Aptitud para las armas, and I hope that very soon there will be a web version ready to be used by everyone.

[Updated 01/03/08]

With Josué, a good friend of mine, I developed a software written in Processing that is able to paint over any image following the gravitational field created by Attractors (that are like planets placed by the user), by moving the Particles (single Pixels taken more or less randomly) according to the physics laws.

You can download the latest version of the software and you can also see some sample Images showing what this program is capable of.

Feel free to use it for any non-commercial purpose and to send me suggestion and hints for improving it.

P.s. I also added Joystickmedia (Josué's homepage) and Zuluu (a blog from a friend in Australia) to the Links section, and fixed some minor bugs here and there...

[Update]
I released a new version of the software that has also a graphical user interface that allows you to control all the parameters in a much easier way.
You can download it from here:
Particle Attractor Ver 2

After a long gestation, and with some delay due to the will of including every small but important details, Lab 1,618 is finally online!

So, what is this site? Or better, what does Lab 1,618 mean? Lab stands for Laboratory, because the nature and the purpose of this site is exactly to be a place where new technologies and new interfaces between man and computers are being experimented and explored. By navigating through the site, you'll see that I tried to create and propose a very different and innovative user interface, that aims to let you experience a new way of using a web application.
1,618 are the first 4 digits of the Phi number. The Phi is a very special and important number, perhaps with as much influence in our everyday life as the Pi. It is naturally applied by many different forms of life like the human body, shells, butterflies, the dna, and many more. It is generally recognized as a symbol of harmony and beauty, and its most famouse definitions are the "golden ratio" and the "divine proportion".
It has so many interesting connection in every aspect of the universe we live in, that would take far too much time to talk exaustively about it. I suggest you to take a look at the Golden Number website, to have a very accurate collection of interesting information about it. Or, for a general reference here is the link to the corresponding Wikipedia page. Actually, for graphical reasons I've put the phi symbol that represents the number 0,618.. that by the way equals 1/Phi ! I hope you don't mind for this aesthetical permission.

Last but not least, I have to write the credits for all the Open-Source community, who wrote all the code I used and that allowed this site to be made. First of all Valerio Proietti and all the Mootools Team, that made a fantastic job providing such a good and fast javascript framework that allows you to put in your webpage incredible visual effects with very low cost of cpu and ram usage. And the even more important thing is that it allows you to make Ajax request, inject dynamic Html, and access instantly to every element you want, with just a couple of line of codes. The second place for the credits goes certainly to the Css Zen Garden website, that offers a huge collection of very interesting Css templates. Another big part of the Webdesign templates you'll find in this site, are taken from Open Source Web Design, Css Design Templates and Kaushal Sheth. Also for sure worthing a mention are the creators of Mediabox and Greybox, and all the people that helped me realizing all this like: Josué, Gianni, Magalie, Rapha, Nico, Pedro, Paolo and David for their important feedback and useful hints, Marco for always having been a kind of mentor in my informatical evolution, suggesting me always the right thing at the right moment, and of course my family and all my other friends that are making all this possible.

Well, for the first post I think it should be everything. I hope you'll enjoy navigating through all the various sections and of course that you'll start participating in this Blog were you'll find all the latest interesting news about technology, digital art, science and everything else that will occur to my mind! Stay tuned, because the best has yet to come!