KEY POINTS:
You may have seen some purple bouncy balls around Aucland, placed in containers in parks. If you did, the source was a Mac/PC fusion based out in Huia. Orcon internet wisely decided to support Maya McNicoll's idea to gather together some top artisans of technology for a week to see what emerged - and it's quite something.
Choosing the gorgeous location of Huia west of Auckland, the various artists, all from different backgrounds, arrived, set up their PCs and Macs and other equipment and set about creating projects bringing together light, movement, sound and other inputs to create new media. The aim is to let any source code that results out into the wild to be further developed by the Open Source community.
Invited dinner guests every night help to keep things moving along and provide industry feedback to the participants.
Integration of Macs with PCs is a hot topic right now, as Apple continues to increase its market share - you might wonder why they can't just get along, but the fact is, out there in the real world, they are, and have been for some time.
Integration of Macs into predominantly Windows-based enterprises is a growing priority for many organisations. The results of a study just announced by Group Logic, a leading provider of Mac/Windows connectivity solutions, has found the most pressing challenges facing IT administrators are related to maintaining Active Directory policies, providing help desk support for Mac users and ensuring compatibility.
But it's not just enterprise that needs connectivity - it's the creative industries too - and it's happening. Take Purple Spheres - just a few hours after start, the impressive results were online for all to see - interactive Flash-based applications that respond to sound, light, your mouse ... the Purple Spheres group has used motion capture to tap the capabilities of Adobe Flash to render projects that also manage to be aesthetically pleasing.
What's amazing about the various interconnected projects is the obvious scalability of it all - and within seconds you start thinking up exciting future applications of some of the developments.
The Huia group has already been using ping-pong balls to control Google Earth - it's mesmerising to see.
When I visited the project, work was continuing on a piece that converts sound and movement into graphics to be used as a visual 'dance partner' for dancer Georgie Goater to interact with.
Maya McNicoll has been writing code since she got her first computer back in 1981, when she studied digital art at UC Berkeley. She showed me a home-made touchscreen put together for very little money using her own ingenuity and ideas from the Open Source community. The device uses infra-red LEDs firing through acrylic to sense contact, with a low-cost camera underneath providing visual feedback to a PC.
Other contributors have been drawn from around Australia and New Zealand - Trent Brooks is a Sydney-based Flash developer and digital designer who studied at the Sydney Institute of Technology. Trent has been working on human/computer collaborative art projects at Purple Spheres.
Felicity Moore is from London where she lectured on editing and story-telling at the National Film School; she's another key aesthetic player in the project as well as contributing multimedia expertise.
Steven Santer started in Fine Art in the mid '90s, majoring in photography. After a multimedia course at the School of Audio Engineering, he working as an interactive designer/Flash animator. He has spent many years working with After Effects.
Vyrne Gullery has a bachelor in computer graphic design, working as a brand designer for print, web and interactive. Now he's designer/interactive/art director at G2 and is partly responsible for the great visual aesthetic bringing together the various projects.
Meanwhile, Aaron Nolan has been blogging about it all. Duncan Blair from Orcon would like the event to grow and become annual. There is loads more happening - details at Purple Spheres.
