March 23, 2007

not slacking!

way too much going on, this past year has been sleepless. I've managed to take on a good bunch of monumental projects that have kept me quiet to the outside world. Now that I see the light at the end of the tunnel, I'm definitively committed to flip that up. expect updates, soon, very very soon...

May 06, 2006

Interactive Interior exhibition

Old news, but I thought it was worth mentioning. During the first 2 weeks of the opening of the first physical Beyes shop at the recently finished Omotesando Hills in Tokyo, we held a small exhibition together with nanika, wowlab+wildcard,Takashi Kamada and semitransparent design. Produced and curated by Koichiro Tanaka. I had a great time creating one of the pieces that was cycled among the others every day. Although the exhibition is officially over now, the installations are still being rotated every day in the store, so if you happen to be in the area, be sure to check it out.

October 11, 2005

the death of Interaction Design Institute Ivrea

IDII no more. Last february, on an unprecedented and incomprehensible move, Telecom Italia, the biggest sponsor to Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, quit his sponsorship to the school. In the midst of the cloud of the debacle that generated, all teachers quit, and the school, as we know it, closed it's doors. Most of my classmates decided to embark themselves on a new project, a project that merged the remainings of IDII and Domus Academy. Hence, IDI was born. I decided to come back to Tokyo, and continue here working with my old workmates, Basement Factory Productions. Together, we are in the process of bringing alive a new company that will focus on producing the most outstanding work on communication design, interaction design and information visualization as well as seriously creative technological research and development. wooha! tough times ahead, but I'm definitively super excited.

March 02, 2005

SHIFT cover

Made the cover art for Shift, which was published a couple of days ago.

update

The cover seems to be gone, but the interview is still up

February 08, 2005

a new marumushi.com

it was time for an update. things are not yet really finished, and not thoroughly tested, so if you find anything weird, please let me know. there's a bunch of new experiments of my first steps with processing, and flickrgraph, an app I've had in the works for a while, but never really had time to finish. I'm splitting also the news feeds, keeping www.marcosweskamp.com/blog a little bit more loose and, this feed mainly focused around work. aight, I hope you enjoy:)

September 26, 2004

Researching into Music and Memory

Dider Hilhorst and I are currently working on a project that links music and memory. At this point we are collecting data to populate the database that will be used for the visualization. In a form we have put online we ask you to mention a specific song that you relate to a memory. Do you have a specific song that reminds you of your first girlfriend; that cool wedding of your best friend; a summer vacation? We are sure that you can find plenty examples! You can even sketch out your memory, among other things! It's great fun, really! http://www.nundroo.com/memory/form.php Your help is greatly appreciated, thank you! Feel free to send this form to other people too! Oh, yeah, and we would like to collect the data pretty soon, actually within the next 2 or 3 days. note: Your privacy will be protected, obviously, all the data used is collected anonymously and strictly used for internal academic purposes (not sold to others etc.) As you can see we do not ask for a username or email or any personal information. We are interested in the stories, and how music relates to memory.

September 16, 2004

newsmap goes squarified

I just updated newsmap to a new version fancying a squarified treemap layout algorithm, which tries to keep the aspect ratio of each cell as close to 1:1 as possible. That should make headlines easier to read. It's interesting to see how this new layout gives a different perception of what is big news today. Confused? The biggest news will always be on the top left corner inside each category, the smallest one on the bottom right. The placement of all categories and countries follow the same principle, when the sum of related articles for one story inside each country/category is the greatest, it will be shifted to the top left corner, the smallest ones shift to the bottom right. Of course you can always switch to the standard layout by selecting so in the bottom right of the screen. Use "permalink" to create your custom link for the view you selected.

August 16, 2004

Newsmap Goes Squarified

I just updated newsmap to a new version fancying a squarified treemap layout algorithm, which tries to keep the aspect ratio of each cell as close to 1:1 as possible. That should make headlines easier to read. It's interesting to see how this new layout gives a different perception of what is big news today. Confused? The biggest news will always be on the top left corner inside each category, the smallest one on the bottom right. The placement of all categories and countries follow the same principle, when the sum of related articles for one story inside each country/category is the greatest, it will be shifted to the top left corner, the smallest ones shift to the bottom right. Of course you can always switch to the standard layout by selecting so in the bottom right of the screen. Use "permalink" to create your custom link for the view you selected.

July 25, 2004

Sayonara Nippon!

I'm sitting now in my couch, half my appartment is already packed but it still feels like I'm just beggining. After 6 amazing years in Tokyo, I'll be finaly making the big move next week. Starting this september I'll be pursuing a masters degree in interaction design at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy. Yup, that's why the silence for the past month. It's been a little bit crazy, trying to finish with all my projects at work and catching up with local friends who, who knows when I'm going to see next. Giving up your work life to go back to school is not an easy task, and specially when you have an overseas moving ahead it might be a little bit stressing. There's so much stuff that I have to get rid of! But I'm really excited about this. Suddenly having so much time to be able to work on my own projects sounds so nice. Plus, Italy! my grand grand parents where italians but I've never been there before. Will have to learn italian, though probably jumping from spanish it shouldn't be that hard. So I'm leaving japan on September 2nd, headed first for Ars Electronica in Linz, where I'll be speaking a little bit right next to Lawrence Lessig in the Prix Ars Electronica Forum on September 6th. Hang out there for a couple of days, and later catch a train to my new home in Ivrea. This friday, I'll be having a small sayonara party in a bar in Omotesando. If you are reading this, YOU ARE INVITED. We start at 9pm with an excellent deal of all you can drink belgium beer for 1500 yen! drop me a line for directions mail[AT]marcosweskamp[DOT]com And for the rest who can't make it, well, expect a ton of stuff to come. I'll be renewing the site soon, still have the phidgets projects on the work, newsmap screensaver is almost out there, and a slick graph visualization engine are on the way. So, keep an eye on this feed! * update! due to the overwhelming ammount of people comming tonight I had to move the location to a bar in Ebisu. Still happening at 9pm. map over here. see you there!

June 09, 2004

Japanese Flash OOP Book announced

If you can't read Japanese, please ignore this post. If you can, well luckily you've already heard about it, but who knows how different the reach from this blog is compared to others in Japanese. A couple of days ago was announced the forthcoming Flash OOP book, the result of a ton of work by 14 members of the Flash OOP Japan Study Group. Published in Japanese and focusing on Object Oriented programming with ActionScript 2.0 and FlashMX 2004 Professional, the book is aimed at developers with previous understanding of ActionScript or developers from other programming languages willing to make their first incursions in ActionScript 2.0 The book is expected to hit the stands on June 16th. you may still preorder it here: Flash OOP　- ActionScriptによるオブジェクト指向プログラミング Supervised by Tatsuo Kato, and written by Fumio Nonaka, Kampei Baba, Jun Kitazawa, Hoshi Tetsuya, Tatsuo Kato, Yasunori Fujimoto, Shinya Tomikawa, Naohiko Ueno, Marcos Weskamp, Taro Sugita, Ken Azuma, Shin Matsumura, Hisato Ogata and Atsushi Honda. With the help of Baba-san and Kitazawa-san I chipped the 8th chapter: "Data Structures and Algorithms", which was not an easy task, but definitively a ton of fun writing. Biggest thanks goes to Kato-san who almost left his soul in the supervision of this book, and of course everyone at Bascule for their never ending dedication to this project. Special thanks go to Kan-chan who was able to put up with all my missed deadlines and helped me all the way until the end. Oh, next week, June 18th (fri) from 18:30 - 21:00 we will be holding a meeting with the Flash OOP Study Group at the Macromedia office in Akasaka, anyone in the area is mostly welcome to participate - entrance is free of charge, and we will be giving away a copy of the book to the person who talks the loudest in the discussions there:) 皆様本当にお疲れ様でした！

May 17, 2004

DIY Social Circles

So you're probably tired of looking over and over the same lists in Social Circles. Since day 1 of this project Dan always wanted to let users look into their own mailbox too. So he grabbed the original source code and rewrote it so that you can now visualize the mailing lists YOU are subscribed to. So what are you waiting for, go try DIY Social Circles! We haven't tested this one thoroughly so if it doesn't work for you, please, please drop me a line: [mail ATT marcosweskamp DOTT com]

March 30, 2004

a map of the news media

just finished killing the last bug I had in my list before releasing this new project. newsmap is an application that visualizes the totality of the GoogleNews aggregator. The GoogleNews aggregator is an amazing piece of software, not only aggregates almost every single online newspaper, but it also combines news stories into clusters so that when the same story is repeated among several news sites, it files and displays only one to you - no mater how different the actual text that makes the article is. Even the same story, told from completely different points of view, get's filed as one single entry. Google news aggreagates stories in several languages and customizes it's content for 10 particular countries. I've loved googlenews for this particular reason since the first day, and it was then when I started thinking about visualizing the totality of it, since it could be a very close approach to getting a picture on how news media attention differs from country to country. Newsmap utilizes a treemap algorithm to dynamically create each view, and the size of each cell is determined by the amount of related articles that exist inside each news cluster. this could have never been finished without the invaluable help of Dan and Gus - thanks a lot guys! launch the project over here

March 13, 2004

Remote Driver 2

Ready for some hot rod action? remote driver 2 (Only experienced drivers shall apply) I guess this will be online for around 1 hour. Not sure how many users this can support, so don't get surprised if the whole thing suddenly shuts down. Everyone please line up behind the yellow line, and patiently wait for your turn! No banging against the walls, this is expensive equipment! [update one hour later] oookay, that's it for today. thanks everyone for coming in. we'll be back online again next friday:) Same day, Same channel, same time. - check on the application for your local time.

March 05, 2004

Habitat Perspectives goes to Siggraph 2004

I just got notified that Habitat Perspectives was accepted for the SIGGRAPH 2004 Art Gallery. I guess I'll try to make it there this year again. Last year was my first one and it was an amazing experience - this is the kind of event you don't want to miss. If anyone out there is planning to go, please drop me a line! Of course, biggest thanks goes to Paul, Tetsuya, Harayoki, Nori, and Mayumi, who took their time to participate there :)

January 04, 2004

Visualizing Mailing Lists Communities

I was always intrigued by how are the dynamics of mailing lists, who are the moderators, which are the persons that everyone listens to, which are the main central themes of them, how do they organize themselves. I've had this idea floating around for a while, and it wasn't until these holidays that I could give it a shot. social circles Data to visualize flows in in near realtime, that is to say these are almost *live* snapshots of the current status of these mailing lists. Currently I'm visualizing the mailing lists I'm subscribed to. If anyone has other ideas on lists that you'd like to see, drop me a line. Also, we are working with Dan in a version that will allow you to directly visualize your own inbox, which hopefully we'll have up pretty soon. Credits: Idea, Design, Frontend & Backend coding: me. Backend coding: Dan.

November 25, 2003

Synapsis: a carnivore client

The latest piece I did in collaboration with ugn. I always wanted to build a client for carnivore, developed by rsg. Well, here it is! source and desktop client all included. The live example is looking at all network traffic into and behind ugn.jp and retransmits the packet movement data to the web through flashcom. The recorded session is a 1 hour recording of wireless network traffic I did back in San Diego this year. you can view it over here: http://www.marumushi.com/apps/synapsis/ or mirrored over here http://ugn.jp/synapsis/ enjoy:)

July 22, 2003

Introducing Remote Driver

It is probably because of this project that I am freaking out with deadlines now. A friend at the office showed up a couple of days ago with one of those rc cars you can drive with your keitai. Minutes later we where using flash to move it, and as time went by, the source code jumped from person to person, everyone adding a little bit to it. Some time after that we where suddenly controlling the rc car with flash through flashcomm server, added webcams, chat and a waiting queue and voila, we got remote driver How cool is it to be interacting with the real world through the virtual world? Oh man, I really, really want to see more of this around... Enjoy! ::update: None of this would have been possible without the master mind of Kampei Baba and the help of Shin Matsumura & ugn

May 16, 2003

Desktop Activity Monitor

Couple of weeks ago I was sent a copy of Screenweaver by the guys at Rubberduck (thank you so much!), read some docs, saw a couple of samples, and today after work, I was able to put together this little gadget that you can see now on the left side of the top page of my blog. On Chapter 6 of Collaborative Virtual Environments, under the title of "All that is solid melts into software" , Andrew McGrath and Wolfgang Prinz, point out the importance of mutual awareness of the activities individuals are engaged into when sharing the same physical environment. Say for example I'm at the office, and doing some research on Informational Diagrams, I decide to see what we have in the bookshelf here so I move towards that area. If there's someone already standing infront of the Data Visualization section, I will inevitably ask them for a recommendation. Later I need to do some scans so I move to the scanning station. Say someone comes over, since scanning is probably just a click and wait thing, we will probably get engaged in a random conversation. But as soon as I go sit back at my desk and everyone noticing that I'm working, chances of someone showing up talking about the weather are really low. Most probably my neighbour will tap me in the shoulder with sporadically questions about work, and I will probably forward the question to the guy on the other side who will stand up, and come over to have a quick meeting infront of my neighbour's monitor where we will share ideas, point to the images in the screen, etc. until we reach consensus. Well in this chapter, they talk about an application, "Forum", which basically logs you into an online multi user environment which will keep track of your activities and through analysis of what is currently your focus of attention, will move your Avatar towards the areas of interest. For example If I open a text file and write a bunch of lines of ActionScript over there, the system will automatically move my avatar towards the ActionScript area, where I will join all the other users working on ActionScript at that time. Later I move onto a XML document, and my Avatar will automatically be moved into the XML area. I suddenly need some advice on that, so I can try text Chatting with one of the persons over there, maybe upgrading into a video chat later if it is needed. So I decided to give it a shot, and that's what you can see now here. Well yeah, this little app is only one-way at the moment (only YOU can see what I'm up to) and there's not a lot of visualization, except the lill stats, but if people out there are interested, maybe I could extend this so that I can support several users and pump it up a little bit more to a real app. The way it works is very simple: basically I have a desktop app which registers what am I currently working on, and before posting that to FlashComm, it filters the results through a white list of applications I gave clearance to. Well, yeah, sometimes I maybe working on some super-secret documents which I may not want everyone know about right? Maybe the guys working at the Together project maybe interested in such a tool? Well yeah, worry now about big brother... Update: wow, got heavilly linked during the weekend! mesh voisen.org coldstorageonline PeterJoel Moik78 Better behave myself, feels weird beeing watched like that;P Thanks everyone for the hookup!

January 22, 2003

geoTracker 1.0 goes live!

So this is what I've been up to for the last month. Escaping the office at 5 and working on this project until morning has never been more fun. Ok, so what is geoTracker? geoTracker is an application that provides a visitor-based snapshot of the global weather in near-real time. Each user will contribute to generate this partial view by accessing the available weather stations worldwide. Most importantly, each user will be able to view in real time where are the other users accessing this application coming from geographically, and which station's weather information are they accessing. geoTracker combines a light local database with several web-services and APIs from which it pulls data to resolve the user's geographical location and bring in the weather reports for each location. All data requests will get distributed to all connected clients through a persistent connection made to the server. launch geoTracker learn more about it It is my first try with hands on ColdFusion, Remoting and MySQL, and let me tell you something; it was super simple!. Everything integrated so nicelly I had all the backend code up and running in a couple of days, and I was able to fully concentrate in the frontend code the rest of the time. FlashCom was also very sweet - although I did have some trouble in the beggining - when I started working on it, I realized the hard way that buidling something for a single user, is completely different than building it for several users at a time. The application logic turns to be completelly different, and it gets way much more complicated than expected sometimes. Anyways, hope you enjoy it. Any questions or feedback are mostly welcome.

December 05, 2002

Advertising Museum Tokyo launched

www.admt.jp One of the most fun projects (if not the most) I had the chance to work at my previous employer has been finally launched last weekend. It basically is a flash interface to surf the huge advertisements and industry statistics database the client originally had - which later as the project rolled on, grew and shrunk hundred times in size. Because of copyright issues, it was decided that most of the content can only be viewed at the museum's kiosk computers. If you happen to be in town, don't forget to give it a visit:) Although we where only two flash developers involved during the whole project (Matty Sallin is the man) the biggest kudos goes to all the people who made the project realize (sorry If I forget anyone): Tad Hara, Dan Albritton, Krishna Manda, Tsuyoshi Goto, Ayako Hasegawa, Masaru Fujii, Takaharu Higashibata, Tori Orr, Haruna Hirose, Sarah Okawa. You can visit the museum's website over here

November 18, 2002

ZoomPane component

Almost there, just a couple of minor bug fixes and documentation, and I'll be ready to release this component I'm feeling very confident about. quick demo over here

August 15, 2002

Flash Communications Server Rocks!

Today I downloaded and installed the trial version of Flash Communications Server, and in a couple of minutes I had put together a chat. spend some more time, and suddenly I got a video chat, text chat, multi cursor display, multi user whiteboard, and a little thinggy that all users could just move around and fight for. FlashCom is definitively a big hit. I can't wait to spend more time with it.

August 04, 2002

New winds blowing

Wooha, that was a long time between updates! Well, there's been a lot going around. I was super busy with my job but luckilly I could overcome my workaholism and take a break in Mexico for two weeks. New winds are blowing in Tokyo again; before leaving on my trip I decided to move forward with my career and take the tough decision of leaving DentsuFUSE, where I got to meet the most amazing people ever. For the following month I'll be freelancing here, and really looking forward to get a full-time possition anytime soon. So, here we go again, there's a lot of new plans, I'll soon be adding here an even more updatable blog section, probably focusing on MX technology. (you've GOT to have a blog these days huh?) Also Planning to give away a set of Flash components, and a lot of source code. Got to pick up painting again too. I have a couple of comissioned works that are almost half a year late already:P Whish me luck! Love to all.