She’s cute, she sings, but she’s not real. Instead, her voice is your instrument and you’re the composer/lyricist and through Hatsune Miku, you’re living through song too. Want to add vibrato? Change the pitch or warmth of the voice? You can here. Voice simulation taken on to another level. Her creator’s songs get replayed, resampled, and reborn into endless remixes, music videos, and parodies on Nico Nico and YouTube. She even had a real concert staged in Tokyo. Fujita Saki is the original voice of Hatsune Miku providing the foundation of the computer program that composers use. Hatsune Miku is the most recognized Vocaloid singer but there have been spinoffs. It brings up some interesting issues as Japanese singers have refused to contribute to Vocaloid software, saying they were afraid their careers would be endangered. Instead, the computer programmers behind Vocaloid dipped into Japan’s voice actor community to find talent. Aside from Fujita Saki, the other voices contributing to the different Vocaloid avatars can be tightly secretive – even more interesting, they sign the rights to their voices to be used in the programs. Would it be weird to hear variations of yourself singing unknown songs on the ‘Net?

Get a sampling of the different songs that people have created with Vocaloid: Hatsune Miku below.

This video is really striking because if I heard this playing on someone’s stereo, I WOUDLN’T be able to tell this was not a real person singing this AT ALL.

A very succinct and convincing way to quickly show people how your app works and what makes it so appealing (aside from the interesting UI/UX) to get them on board. I don’t have an iPad but gosh darnit, this isn’t helping me in the “gimme gimme” department of my brain.

As part of Team FarmBridge, I’m handling the web development and design as we gear up for the Microsoft Design Expo this mid-July in Redmond, Wa. Here’s a snapshot of FarmBridge.org. I’d like to give a shout-out to CSSEdit and Niall Doherty’s Coda Slider for being awesome. It’s the first time, I’ve really hand-coded a web design as thoroughly as I have (now I’ve done SocialDrinkster, StreetSnaps, etc but this was on a different level) on a front-end level.

The written content will be updated as we draw closer to showtime but if anyone’s curious to poke around, feel free. Just realize it’s under construction, sssssh.  Also, as a social media ninja, I’ve started up FarmBridge on Twitter and it now has its own Facebook Fan Page. Join us there too!

Chris O’Shea’s Audience installation with rAndom International for the Deloitte Ignite Festival at the Royal Opera House.

Personification of inanimate objects take an eerie, surreal turn with Chris O’Shea’s Audience Installation. Made up of 64 mirrors, the reflective installation reacts to a human presence by following their movements and displaying humanistic quirks. By using a multitude of mirrors that reflect back on the audience member, you have to ask yourself, who’s watching who?

I’ll let the artist explain: “When members of the audience occupy the space, the mirrors inquisitively follow someone that they find interesting. Having chosen their subject, they all synchronise and turn their heads towards them. Suddenly that person can see their reflection in all of the mirrors. They will watch this person until they become disinterested, then either seek out another subject or return to their private chatter. The collective behaviour of the objects is beyond the control of the viewer, as it is left entirely to their discretion to let go of their subject.”

Brian Jones and I were interviewed about SocialDrinkster by Matt Danzico, a BBC multimedia journalist who was touring the ITP Spring Show. Check out the audio slideshow, we appear around 2:49M among the other student projects featured. It’s our first press mention! So excited and feeling fortunate that I have this opportunity to showcase our mobile app to a broader audience outside of school.  Our website is linked on the bottom of the web page. Click below to see and listen.

BBC Audio Slideshow: Technology and art fuse in NYC

Love the Bolts-and-wrench crown. A play off the well-known British “Stay Calm and Carry On” poster, this poster is an homage to tinkerers, digital or analog, everywhere. Spotted a Microsoft Social Computing Symposium attendee wearing one and immediately went to Google to see what I could find out. Find the shirt here or print out the poster for yourself from moleitau’s Flickr page(it’s under Creative Commons!).

How to get people to game in public spaces seamlessly and turn it into public entertainment? Try MegaPhone.  MegaPhone inspires interactive gameplay between digital billboards and people  by turning their cellphones as game controllers. MegaPhone makes gaming fun and easy: remove the stereotypical gamer stigma, cut away unnecessary hardware, and make the game accessible to the common public. Who doesn’t have a cellphone in America? It is the brainchild of two NYU ITP graduate students: Jury Hahn and Dan Albritton. After graduation, they decided to take their thesis idea and spin it off as a digital marketing concept for companies (Adidas, LG, Palm, Gamestop, are among their clients). The games inspired by this concept are quite fun: voice-control and button-play from a multi-player perspective.

Tech Wow! video of the day via Gizmodo. Obscura Digital is the interactive firm that pulled off the technological feat of projecting those images on to a downtown San Francisco building. What is stunning is how their projection software takes into account the building’s surface and surroundings to make the projected images interact with it. According to their website, their projection software “compensates for geometry and provides corrections in real-time, resulting in a  seamless image on virtually any surface.” Peering into the company’s projects, I see that Obscura Digital is also working on many interactive video projects where the projections can become navigable user interfaces, etc.  It’s listed as one of the Top 10  most innovative ad/marketing firms by Fast Company.

Photos via Corey Menscher 

Twitter — despite its navelgazing reputation to outsiders — is quite an interesting tool for developers and inventors to play with. Unlike other social media that adopted a “closed garden” approach to developers, Twitter has been friendlier then its peers from the get-go. As a result, there’s been a ton of Twitter mashups but none have pushed the boundaries on physical computing quite as memorably as Corey Menschler, an NYU ITP graduate student. An expectant father, Corey wanted to share the joys of fatherhood and getting a sense of connection with his unborn kid. Why should his wife have all the fun? Meet his invention, Kickbee: a wearable maternity belt for moms that sends out tweets every time her baby kicks. 

The tweets, themselves, read hilariously: “”Wow I’m being very active! I kicked Mommy 84 times at 03:44AM on Thu, Dec 11!” 12:46 AM Dec 11th from web. The belt is made of sensors that are powered by an Arduino Mini microcontroller, a Java application that translates the sensory information, and Bluetooth which helps upload the data to Twitter. Nice!

Sure, it may seem like fun-n-games but you think about how useful this could be to health, fitness, and other useful applications. 

Can someone nominate this guy, Geek Dad of the Year?