Rick Reifenstein

I hate when the weather report says a chance of thunderstorms, causing me to take an umbrella and a raincoat, only to sit all day and watch nothing but blue sky occur. UGH! While we were trying to systematically figure out some network drive and server hardware failure at work today; I thought it would be a good time to revisit "Processing"  If you are unfamiliar with Processing, it's like a sketch book for programmers. It leans a little more to the "programming as art" side of the programming world. Here's the official description: " Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to create images, animations, and interactions....initially developed as a developer sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context.' I had caught a lecture and demonstration by Ben Fry one of the founders of Processing, and was impressed with what it can do with large data sets. the out put can...

I’ve been hobbling around on a sore ankle for the last 10 days for no reason. I say no reason cause I don’t know how it got injured. I did walk around a technology showcase in Richmond the day before , but it was fine. It’s feeling a bit better today. I think the weekend in Pittsburgh visiting family and doing nothing really helped. I submitted Lux Atrum for consideration for a job through Music Dealers last week. They were looking for a Rocktronica type piece. I felt Lux Atrum was what they were looking for. Not sure when I'll hear about whether it was selected. Posted on the site a new track called "Moonlit Bits". It was inspired by the soundtrack Daft Punk did for "Tron". The drums were done using Reactor. I want to do more work in Reactor this year. I have always liked the depth of the sounds coming from Reactor. I plan on using it a lot in the latest project in the studio right now; music for mediation. My therapist friend from California is working on he...

I apologize for the long delay between posts. I will hope to not fall behind as much in the future. As the title of this post indicates I have accepted a new position at the University of Virginia. I will start as the new Director of Technology and Audio/Visual Services in the Office of the Dean of Students on Feb 14. While I'll be continuing to draw on my passion for new interactive technology and bringing those technologies to light, I will also be heavily relying on my experience as a Production Manager, and media producer. There are several live event spaces that the Office of the Dean of Students has, and new venues being created. I refer to these spaces as venues because in my mind that's what they are. While these venues may not always have some entertainment associated with the activities taking place in the venues; there is still an element of showmanship that takes place by the presenters, speakers and sometimes performance oriented student activities. Like a theatric...

I played with the Kinect for a little over an hour last night. Wow! It does everything Microsoft said it would. There was nothing I needed to excuse away as what you get with cutting edge tech. No! Kinect is awesome! Even though I ordered a few of the other games for Kinect, I only played all the games on “Adventures” to start with.  After the first round of “Rally Ball” I was ready for a short break and a glass of water. This thing gives you a whole body work out. I suspect that the fitness games for the Kinect will make the Wii Fit games look like retirement home exercises. Of course Kinect also allows you to use gestures and voice to control movies and navigate through the dashboard. All was easy to do and learn. Instructions pop up on the screen. I found the voice recognition to be very good. Despite being a little sore from yesterdays Kinect session; I plan on trying out the Kinect Sports tonight.

Fall has come to Virginia painting wonderful colors in the sky and on the mountains. While I have taken the time to enjoy them this year, I have also been very busy looking at upcoming New User Interface advancement both in the areas of computers and gaming technology. I am waiting for my Kinect to arrive. The downside it’s a Christmas present for the family so I’ll have to play with it in secret. I think that the impact Kinect will have with the computing world will be felt much broadly then just gaming. Motion capture will surely be integrated into the next Windows OS Win8, which will enable it’s use for small gestures and facial recognition as well as large scale manipulation of objects and data like we saw in the movie “Minority Report”. Microsoft Research is already working with this technology in the lab in the form of prototypes. It’s important to keep in mind though that these advancements take time. I’ve followed two Microsoft Research projects from just research to full prod...

I love NUI's! I know Steve Jobs said that it's unnatural to have a touchscreen on a laptop because of arm fatigue. To a certain degree he's correct. But you don't constantly have your arms up at the screen. You do bring your arms to a resting positon. Teachers do it everyday when using black and smart boards in todays schools. After several weeks of using my new 20 inch HP multitouch screen at work, being forced to use a trackpad or a mouse is like going back to the stone age. I find that when I'm working at home on the laptop or at somone else's computer my natural instinct now is to use my fingers to move windows, close programs, touch and hold for the right menu choices. At first it doesn't seem natural because are used to using a mouse or a trackpad. It seems almost primative to think about using your fingers. But using your fingers to move things around and to select choices are the most natural. It's what we want to do in most situations if you wer...

I spent much of today creating media to be played in a Silverlight player for the latest interactive kiosk in the Harrison Institute main gallery. This is v.2 of the kiosk. The aim of this version was to create a full screen player with a playlist that a user could navigate easily by touch. While Windows Media Player has big buttons for touch screens; the playlist is a little too tight for navigation by finger. Silverlight has some great tools built in that allow for large easy to navigate playlists. I also decided that I wanted some movment on the screen, but something that wouldn't seem out of place or distract the listener. I decided to create little movies based on slideshows using the cover art of the CD that the music was pulled from. Using the latest Windows Movie Maker software I created a neat little slidshow with fades and title FX. The slideshow was then imported into Expression Encoder 4 as many times as there were tracks. Then using the overlay feat...