We’re excited to announce that Mindshare Labs has officially branched off from the monthly Mindshare.LA event and become it’s own entity called Syyn Labs, LLC. We will soon be moving over content and creating a slick new website to pimp out our creations. Watch this space 
Mindshare.LA October was a night of Costume Madness, Google Wave, Fashion Design, Fire Tech, Porno Games and Light Art! And of course there were some fun installations on display.
Eric Gradman’s and Brent Bushnell’s Space Blaster – a video game built from scratch using Panda 3D:
Edi Hsu showcased his fantastic light painting, using a mobile projector and wacom tablet:
Brett Levine from Live Spark showcased their new fire technology:
And there was just some really cool firedancing:
September’s Mindshare was an all out visual explosion! Showcased projects included:
‘Interactive Stalagmites’ paired David Guttman’s Sonic Stalagmites with Hector Alvarez’s Wii Controller hacking skills:
‘Come Hither’ was Heather Knight’s foray into real time visual imagery manipulation:
‘The Laser Obelisk‘ by Pehr Hovey – an update to his August LaserSilouhette:
‘Name The Machine‘ music visualizer by Matt David and Pete Sistrom:
Mindshare’s August event showcased old favorites ShadowSmoke & the GameTable, as well as some awesome new projects: Pehr Hovey showcased his project ‘Contours‘:
Admittedly, we didn’t invent the Force Trainer (below) – but it’s worthy of a Mindshare Labs blog mention – more fun pics in the album..:
Lab Cat Brent Bushnell demonstrates playing a gmae on ColorWall to attendees at the July Mindshare. ColorWall is a new interactive game from Mindshare Labs, built by Bushnell and fellow Lab Cat Eric Gradman.
The ColorWall offers a variety of simple games and uses proximity sensors to tell when a hand is placed anywhere on the 4×4 grid. Depending on what game you’re playing, it reacts with color and sound..
Attendees at the monthly Mindshare event, don costumes and snap pictures on Chris Nelson’s FlickrBooth. Images were then randomly displayed on the outside of the booth and sent to people’s email addresses if provided. Oh yes, and they were posted on Flickr…
Chris Hughes created a custom built talk timer to keep the presenters on schedule. It stayed green for 9 minutes, then turned yellow. At 10 minutes it faded to red, and at 11 it began blinking.. We’ve never had such an on time event!
The LazerMaze reappeared in a perfect place – a room with already wall mounted mirrors!
Projects on display at the May Mindshare event included the Heather Knight’s Sensate Bear, on loan from the Personal Robotics program at the MIT Media Lab. In this image, the huggable robot bears it all (sorry 
for the camera: 56 capacitive sensors can sense the location an intensity of a human’s touch – even from under a layer of fur. Ms. Knight is less interested in the typical function-centric robots, instead she likes to consider the human-robot relationship. Lets just hope Sensate Bear doesn’t get too attached
Also on display was a media station from the soon to be completed Lightning Temple. Attendees could manipulate both the music and the electrical arcs (in this case, just a digital representation; the finished design will have a tesla coil based sound system!) When complete “this unique installation, stage, performance team and scientific experiment invites you to participate directly with sonic playful bursts of energy.”
Of course the girls always have fun with Gradman’s ShadowSmoke…
Marshmallow Man also made an appearance!
Yo Yo Ma was the musical center piece for a collaborative project of art, music and science at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC. An excerpt from the AMNH website: “Yo-Yo Ma performs the world premiere of Self Comes to Mind, a musical composition by Bruce Adolphe, composer in residence at the Brian and Creativity Institute and resident lecturer of The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, based on an evocative exploration of the evolution of human consciousness written for this collaboration by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at University of Southern California, and author of Descartes’ Error, The Feeling of What Happens, and Looking for Spinoza. The performance includes brain images by Hanna Damasio in a film by Ioana Uricaru.”
Mindshare Labs’ David Guttman and the Meemle Labs crew (Sridhar Rao, Diego Mirales, and motion artist Jadan Duffin) were fully in charge of the visual part of the show – and rocked it! Mirales, also a professional cellist, interpreted the score and choreographed it into a visual masterpiece, combining Jadan’s dreamlike motion graphics (using Hanna Damasio’s neuroimagery) with Guttman’s Sonic Stalagmites (an acoustically sensitive ‘painting”). This proved a surreal accompaniment to Mr. Ma’s cello, the supporting percussion duo and Damasio’s spoken word interludes.
The premiere was followed by a conversation with Antonio Damasio, Yo-Yo Ma and Bruce Adolphe on mind, consciousness, creativity, and the collaboration behind Self Comes to Mind, during which Mr. Ma called Guttman a “genius” at least twice
Earlier in the week, Stalgamites was also shown at the GEL Conference at the TimesCenter. One European attendee remarked, “This project itself is worth the entire trip..”
This month our favorite circus monkey / roboticist decided to challenge himself.
Eric Gradman wasn’t just content with another AR game. Or Facial recognition. Or complex data scraping. But if he could combine all of them – well that’s more interesting. Meet ‘Cloud Mirror’.
When registering for the event in advance, attendees of the monthly Mindshare.LA we asked to provide their Facbook profile and Twitter account details. They were also asked their favorite place in LA. When then got to the venue, the were given a badge that had a unique ‘fiducial‘ printed on it so that the system could identify them. that’s when the fun began
When Cloud Mirror detected a fiducial, it then knew who you were. At the same time some computer vision trickery indicated where your face was, so it could display a thought bubble. Depending on the amount of information the user had provided the bubble cycled through the following information:
Kudos to Eric for a truly epic April You can see a video here and more pictures here..
An IR LED array calculates an approximate representation of the human standing in front of the display. This ‘marshmallow man’ figure can then avoid obstacles, jump through hoops and otherwise make the player look absolutely silly in front of their friends. Hooray!
