Jeff Crouse » In Progress

The Ecosystem Engine

Jeff — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 22:28:53 +0000

The Ecosystem Engine is a JavaScript and XML driven viewer and editor
for animated, sprite driven simulations. It is akin to a web browser,
except instead of web pages, it runs animations in which the “actors”interact and react to each other and the environment in such a way that the animation is never the same twice. The engine will have support for several input sources, including webcam data, online data, and direct user input via a keyboard and mouse.

For the past year, we have been developing the Ecosystem Engine in openFrameworks, although I am once again looking at Ogre3D and a few other engines as a good foundation for Ecosystem.

Ecosystem will be put into the dev.eyebeam.org system and we will invite coders from the openFrameworks community, the ITP program, oncall.eyebeam community, and other c++ game dev communities who are interested in animation to take part in its development. We will arrange a weekly or bi-weekly meeting to go over developments, using Steve Lambert’s add-art development strategy as a guide. Jeff Crouse will act as the project manager, monitoring code commits and ensuring the overall quality of the software.

Another team of volunteers (again, recruited from the communities mentioned above) would write documentation about the process of creating animations for the Ecosystem Engine and creating a website where it will be available for download for all major platforms. Our hope is that we can eventually attract animators to use Ecosystem and showcase other artists’ projects on the site.

FeedBlast

Jeff — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 22:02:35 +0000

FeedBlast is an experiment in directed generative video. It takes the form of a web-based application that creates an audiovisual mashup of web content using items from a collection of RSS feeds, also known as an OPML file. The goal of the mashup is to present a densely-packed summary of a users unread feed items in the smallest amount of time possible. The resulting Quicktime movie can be downloaded, viewed, and shared. Watching a FeedBlast is not about comprehension, but about gaining a general understanding of the information landscape that informs and directs later review of the feed information.

In 2007, I was a finalist for a Rhizome grant for the project. Check out the proposal here.

BoozBot Alpha

Jeff — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 03:03:04 +0000

After the success of BoozBot Beta, Dave and I decided to make a more polished version.

DeleteCity

Jeff — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 00:04:20 +0000

Delete City is a WordPress plug-in that operates in the background of your personal blog. Every day, the plug-in conducts searches on sites like YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, etc. and automatically downloads large amounts of content. With companies like Dreamhost and Bluehost offering ridiculuous amounts of storage space to lure in new users, a growing percentage of people with blogs have more storage than they could ever use, which is perfect for DeleteCity. These searches can be customized to download the kind of content that you want. For instance, if you are interested in puppies, then DeleteCity will only download movies and photos about puppies. Right now, we are focusing on movies and photos, but in the future we might extend the plug-ins to include PDFs, MP3s, and more.

This video used to live on YouTube. But not any more!

After the content has been downloaded, the plug-in returns to the site where the content was found at a set interval to see if the content was removed or taken down by the administrators. This is a very frequent occurrence on sites like YouTube. There are many reasons why content could be taken down, from large-scale government censorship, to companies like NBC trying to protect their property, to the author simply deciding that they don’t want the content online any more. For instance, try to watch this video of the Alexyss K. Tylor show, Penis Power. I’m not sure why this particular clip was taken down, but it very well could have been because Alexyss herself complained, or simply because it was flagged as inappropriate by enough users.

When the plug-in finds that a piece of content has been removed, it automatically retrieves it from the cache that was previously downloaded and posts it to your WordPress blog. It then emails the author and invites them to come to your blog and comment on why the content was taken down.

This site was inspired by sites like YouTomb and DelTube (which seems to have been taken down). In fact, you could say that DeleteCity is simply a way for anyone to have their own customized YouTomb or DelTube. The fact that DelTube is down perfectly illustrates why DeleteCity is needed. Large companies can take down single sites relatively easily. But once something is decentralized and hundreds or thousands of people all over the world are running a caching program, it is much harder to take something down from the web.