Fun with PhotoBooth

Happy spring everyone! The weather had finally changed, and winter is gone. Allergy season is right around the corner! Although it feels like winter dragged on far too long this year, even with global warming, it also feels like time has flown by, that it was just the holidays and I just started my new job. But I’ve been there coming on three months now.

The big activity last weekend was getting the yard ready for spring, part one. Or another way of saying it, the start of yardwork season. I had wanted to start the weekend before, but it seemed pointless as there was still piles of melting snow on our lawn. And the weekend before that we spent the whole time shoveling. In any event we made good start. Raked off all the debris, and I filled in some low spots in the back corner which are prone to flooding with dirt. Not particularly creative, but it’s constructive at least. I have a project in the offing to re-level the patio I made 3 years ago, as the stones have begun to heave and settle in one corner. I think when I get around to that I’ll blog about building the patio, since it was a creative project and a major effort.

Meanwhile the main topic for today is fun with PhotoBooth. A few weeks ago Jeannie brought home one of those MacBook Pro computers from work, the ones with a built-in camera and a cute little app called photo booth. You gotta hand it to Apple, they’re good at making computers fun, and this app is a good example of that. Not a lot of depth to it, but easy to use and engaging. Let’s you take pictures of yourself (or whatever else is in front of the computer), with some cool realtime effects. It’s the kind of thing we might have made at Interval Research back in the 90’s.

The girls really got into it, and Lizzy in particular, who likes photography to begin with, explored the creative dimension. She took over 400 pictures. Presented here is a gallery of some of our favorites.

Origami By Children

Every year Origami USA sponsors an exhibit of Origami By Children. You can learn about it here. The deadline for submissions is fast approaching, so last weekend I was able to get my kids to sit down and focus on coming up with something. Lizzy, who is 7 now, started to take an interest in origami 2 years ago, when she invented her first original model, a picture frame.

Last year she did the traditional Lily. It’s more complicated than it looks, but the hardest move in is a squash fold, and she’s good at those. I coached her, showing her the model and encouraging her to take is slow and fold neatly. She did a nice enough job that her model got in the exhibition, and OUSA donated some origami books to her school.

This year she’s had more exposure to folding and knows how to follow diagrams, so I let her decide what to do. She folded a bunch of things out of John Montroll’s Christmas Origami, including the candle, bell, and candy cane. I guess no time of year is the wrong time to think about Christmas when you’re seven. She decided to do the ring from the Twelve Days of Christmas, and put five of them together. Of course it’s not a hard model technically — the folding style is know as “Pureland” meaning it’s only mountain and valley folds, but there’s some art to it in terms of color and composition. I think she did a nice job. I hope she gets in the show again.

Michelle, at three and a half, wants to do everything her big sister does, so she was along for the trip. I tried to teach her the bell, but the reverse fold just blew her mind, and 11 steps is about 4 too many for a 3-year-old to handle. So I scaled back and taught her the classic cup, on which the bell is based, which was just in her range.

Origami Butterfly

A fitting topic for the first day of spring. I had thought I might blog about something else tonight, since origami keeps coming up, and I have been doing other things too, honest. I could say plenty about my new job, but I think I’ll wait until a project goes live. Or I could talk about how I almost made it thru the winter without catching cold this year — until last weekend!

I could talk about my ongoing music work, and how painstaking it is to sequence good drum parts for a jammin’ sounding track. I’ve worked with some really good drummers over the years (you know who you are, Mark, Larry, and Pat), and boy do I miss them. On the other hand, I’m not really set up to mic a drum kit in my little project studio, so it might not come out any good anyway.

I could talk about how I am looking into changing my workout routine, mainly by moving it downstairs. The major reason I’ve been working out upstairs all this time is that I have high ceilings in my living room, and do some exercises where I lift weights over my head. I could do it downstairs, but I’d need to do those sets sitting, which means I need to get a bench. Which has led me to rediscover why I hate shopping along with the fact that modern workout equipment is super-expensive and way more complicated than I need. Like hundreds of dollars just for a bench! When I was in high school I had a bench that came with an exercise machine and I bought the whole system for something like $100. It was really simple, just a board covered with vinyl and foam and some legs. Good for dumbbells and situps. Probably worth $20. I gave it to my brother. I wonder if he still has it…

But I’m not going to blog about any of that stuff tonight. Nope, for now the main topic is origami butterflies. I normally don’t do insects, because that branch of origami has evolved into something like speed metal in music, very focused on one particular dimension — developing lots of points. Not to say it isn’t amazing, cuz it is; but it’s not really my thing. But a butterfly seemed like a good subject because it’s more lyrical than your average bug, and I had an idea for an approach. I’ve seen a bunch of really beautiful butterfly designs, notably Michael LaFosse’s, that are great wings but don’t have legs. I’ve seen others that have legs but are a bit to technical, given the subject. Granted some of these models are from the era where any insect at all was pioneering, but hey. So I wanted to something simple and sculptural, but still complex enough to have legs.

I actually came up with the design midway thru last year’s OUSA convention. Every year I seem to come up with one or two new designs, usually manifesting something I’ve been thinking of for a while but hadn’t had the chance to fold yet. I showed it to a bunch of people and the response was great. It’s based on a waterbomb base, with two of the flaps forming the wings and the other two forming the legs. It’s easily doable from a 6″ square, and only the only hard part is 2 closed sinks in a row. The thing I like best about it is it pretty successfully captures the moment of spreading its wings and taking flight.

I’ve been refining the model over time, an last fall I went to the butterfly tent in the American Museum of Natural History. John Montroll had told me that butterflies really only have 4 legs, the front ones are vestigial and you can’t really see them. Shaw ’nuff he was right. Looking at dozens of butterflies, they all looked like they have four legs. So a redesign is in the offing. Ah well.

Still, I’m happy enough with this design that I’m working on full diagrams for it. Every year I try to diagram one model to donate to the OUSA annual collection. I’m not quite done, but I’ll be sure to post it when I’m done. For now, enjoy this pics and the Crease Pattern for the base.

GE Music Player

My good friend Erik runs a recording studio and music production house in the city called GE Music, after him and his partner Glenn. Recently he asked me to design and build in interactive music browser / player as a way to present his scores and tracks to clients, potential clients, and casual listeners. It was a fun project because I could do all the development functions my self, including visual and interaction design as well as programming. As of last night the application programming is done, and the thing is pretty cool if I say so myself. Here’s a screen grab of a test deployment on my server.

Of course a static screen grab doesn’t really do it justice. The site integration and live deployment remains to be done. So watch this space, and soon I’ll post a link to the player living in it’s natural environment, serving Glenn and Erik’s awesome tracks!

Origami Sunday

Yesterday I taught at a Special Folding Session with the Origami Society at the American Museum of Natural History. I taught my Turtle, and diagrammed the crease pattern just for the occasion. It’s a model I like alot, and it makes good use of my Hexagon Base. I’ve gotten a fair amount of request for diagrams over time, and one of the organizers of the session asked for this model. One reason I never diagrammed or taught it is that shortly after I finished it, Robert Lang’s Origami Design Secrets came out, and his Western Pond Turtle is not unlike mine in appearance. My model, however, uses a very different folding sequence that is both much easier and roughly twice as efficient in its use of paper. Like many of my models from my Elephant to my UFO, it follows a sort of “upside-down-bowl-with legs” approach, with the greater part of model being only a single layer of paper thick, and the bulk of the paper going to form the legs, head and tail, with the rest gathered near the edges and providing strength.

The Museum is such a great, fun place, and it’s a happy circumstance of history that OUSA is based there. My class was pretty small, 8 people, but 3 or 4 were teenage boys and one in particular was really annoying in a mostly funny kind of way. They’re origami geeks, all into debating which model out there is the “hardest”, and asserting “Satoshi rules!” and that sort of thing, plus a lot of, uh, less mature banter. I didn’t know any origami people when I was growing up, but if I did, I’d have probably been like that.

The model went over well, but all those toes took a long time to fold, so I didn’t get to spend as much time as I’d have liked on the sculpting at the end. It’s pretty advanced model, so not everyone could pull it off with enough precision, but most did pretty well. A fair amount of sculpting can’t really be diagrammed anyway, it’s up to the expressiveness of the artist. It was a fun time, and I think I’ll teach one of these sessions again.

Jeannie and the girls came, and Lizzy stayed and folded while I taught, to the delight of the ladies who like to make ornaments and boxes — she made a bunch of that kind of stuff. Jeannie and Michelle took in the museum, and at the end we had a whirlwind tour of the dinosaur lobby and main African hall. Didn’t make it to the whale room, but otherwise a great day.

And, as a bonus, as I was putting together the CP, I came up with an armadillo, using my hexagon base. I had been thinking of a way to fold an armadillo since last summerwhen we were in Florida and they were in the yard of the house, living uder the hot tub. I had a concept that was similar, but using 45 degree symmetry, that I made from a (rectangle) Animal Kingdom map, but when I got home and tried to reproduce it I couldn’t get it to work. Don’t know why I didn’t think of the hex base sooner; it’s perfect for animals with equal-length legs, and toes. So the approach was solid although the first attempt was not prefect. Made a 2nd attempt with refined proportions, head and tail. It’s pretty close, I probably need one more try, mainly to fine-tune the head. So watch this space.

Blast From the Past: Talking Head

I’m on a mailing list for my old school, and the topic came up of if there are any good online text-to-speech tools. Someone posted this link. Wow, I thought. I immediately recognized the application.

Back in 2001 I worked for a little internet startup called Oddcast Entertainment. I was one of the main developers for an online character application, a prototype that we were fashioning into a product, complete with end-user authoring tools. One of the first things I did was integrate a text-to-speech engine into the system, and as a proof-of-concept I made a demo, which, although re-skinned, is essentially what you see here. I always thought it was a cool little thing that shows off the technology, and is fun and interactive in the sense that you get to hear it say what you type. My original version had a much larger text entry box, and I used to test it on the poetry of Robert Frost and Lewis Carroll. On the way to being productized, the text to speech part was buried in a much larger feature set, and I did not know they kept around a link to this app. So I’m happy to have found this page.

Origami Polyhedra: The Stellated Dodecahedron Part 2

A little while ago I posted some pictures of Stellated Dodecahedra I made in origami. Here the crease patterns for them. You see, in addition to folding origami, I’ve taken an interest in diagramming, and someday I hope to publish a book of my models. But I find diagramming so laborious that I only do one model a year! (Although they do tend to be pretty complex models.) I’ve also been developing crease patterns, which is particularly useful for polyhedra and other complex subjects where there is a lot of prefolding.

I do my diagramming and CP’s in Flash, and I’m not aware of other people doing this. One reason is I use Flash a lot in my day job, so I know it and can work in it quickly. Another is that I can use to make animated diagrams and CP’s. You can see some of them on my main origami page. This is an experimental format which I am refining over time. It had its origin in the Foldinator Project. Foldinator was originally envisioned as a full-on authoring tool for modeling origami and creating printable diagrams. However, to get there is a rather major development effort. So instead I wound up with this little hacker-level tool that I use. I still hope to finish and release Foldinator someday, but I’d need to treat it like a professional software development project and devote something like 6 months to a year of full-time work to it. Ah well, maybe if I’m lucky I can do like Robert Lang and retire young to do origami full-time.

Meanwhile, you can see the various approaches for the Stellated Dodecahedron.

Here is the one made from two squares. As you can see it’s the simplest of the bunch.

Next up is the one folded from a 2:1 rectangle. This one is remarkably efficient in it’s use of paper, to the point where I had to set it into a larger area to have paper to do the joining. It’s also kind of cool because it has a sort of zigzag layout. I plan to publish an animated CP of this one shortly.

Lastly is the “classic” version, from a single square. This is foldable but very difficult. I like the CP a lot because of the way the layout maximizes the root pentagon and underlying square. Vertices of the finishes form touch 3 edges of the paper. This one would be a good for an animated CP as well.

Happy Valentine’s Day

Although Valentine’s Day was in the middle of last week, today was the much-coveted day off from work, which are rare nowadays since I just started a new job. Thank you George and Abe! I got caught up on my rest and had some good quality time with my kids and their legos. My daughter Lizzy (age 7) and I came up with this:

Happy Valentine’s day everyone! The squares represent chocolates, or candies of any conceivable variety. Lizzy also came up with this:

A house and yard with a swimming pool for her favorite Littlest Pet Shop pet, Chippy the Hamster. This kind of mirrors her online world these days. She’s really into WebKinz and just got a yard and swimming pool for her pet Buttercup, an alley cat.

Extreme Yes for Strings

If you’re anything like me, and I know I am, you’ll fondly remember Yes as one of the all-time great prog rock bands, known for their sweet harmonies and expansive, even epic compositions. Their radio-friendly sound served as a gateway prog band to turn kids on to other, weirder, edgier groups like King Crimson, and, well pretty much anything Bill Bruford has ever done.

Back in the 80’s I was in a prog rock band, Infinigon, that did our share of Yes covers. The bass player in the group was the inimitable John J. Neumann, who is also a recording artist and accomplished classical violin player. He recently completed an adaptation of Yes’s Tales From Topographic Oceans for string quartet. Unlike the original, which is a bit long and rambling, John’s version features only best parts. You can check it out here, along with a bunch of his other musical projects.

Enjoy!

Origami Polyhedra: The Stellated Dodecahedron

As long as I can remember I’ve liked geometry.

I’ve been doing origami polyhedra for quite some time, and you can see some of the ones I’ve designed on my Origami Page. My approach is mainly from single sheet, in contrast the more common modular approach. When I first started, I thought that it was new, largely unexplored territory, and I could do something really interesting. Soon I could see it was a rich area of endeavor, but also very challenging. Around that time I met John Montroll, and he was way ahead of me down this path. In fact he was about to release a book on origami polyhedra, and was working on a second one. This was great for me, because he was eager to have people test his diagrams, and was very generous with his ideas, and I learned a lot from our discussions. On the other hand, he pretty much had the basics covered and then some, like several versions of the platonic solids, and some prisms and Archimedean solids and other shapes. So I had to go a good deal further to get into original territory.

One of my all-time favorite shapes has always been the Stellated Dodecahedron, which is the 3-D analog of the pentagram. (Which, BTW is the 4D analog of the Tetrahedron, but since no one folds 4-D origami, that’s a bit outside the scope of this discussion.) I’ve designed and attempted to fold various versions of this shape over time.

Here is a design from a single square. I actually succeeded in folding one, from a giant (24″) sheet of foil paper. It worked, but I would not call the result great in terms of the level of craft. I tried another from a smaller (14″ or so) piece of thickish (for origami) paper, but never completed it. The problem is that once you get towards the end, there are many flaps of extra paper to deal with, and the model wants to spring apart. This, combined with the limitation of having only two hands, makes it very tricky to close. I may give this design another try, but I’ve been exploring other avenues.

Last summer at the OUSA Annual Convention I was playing around with ideas for this shape again, and it occurred to me to try it from a 2:1 rectangle. It was still a single sheet, but provide more edge relative to the paper’s area, so it ought to reduce the problem of extra flaps of paper to hide. I have a design for a 2:1 icosahedron which is really efficient and easy to fold, and it didn’t take too long to come up with a regular dodecahedron, which is the base for the stellated version. When I went ahead and folded it, it realized it was so efficient that there was not enough paper to make a lock, so I’d need to go back and modify my design be setting it into a slightly larger rectangle. So I tried again. Still making the model close was a bit of a challenge. Doable, but requiring some effort.

Then over Christmas vacation, I finally had some origami time again, and this time I went for a version made from 2 squares, each of which comprise half the finished model. This is much easier to fold because you can reach inside each half as you’re making it, and the leftover flaps of paper become tabs that fit into the opposite half, nicely solving the problem of what to do with the leftover bits. At the end, the two halves lock together tightly and securely. The resulting model is quite attractive, because it’s much easier not to crush it as you’re putting it together. The examples below are made from (2 sheets each of) 6″ foil paper and 8.5″ photocopy paper.

Which brings up the question: Origami purists like to only work for a single square sheet. Which is more of a “cheat”: to use two squares or one rectangle?

Coming Soon: crease patterns for the 3 methods for Stellated Dodecahedra.