Each of the four ropes you see controls a different looped sample: drums on my left hand, keys on my right, with electronic bass and some kind of FX thing rounding it out. As you see, when I rock it solo—my giddy look notwithstanding—it just sounds damn good, but when the inventor himself joins in, it's better still. Pedals on the floor restart each loop, so that you can tap it into place.

This is just one component of Michael's Lost/Found project—in the video you can see another pulley contraption he uses to draw circles, creating literal "feedback loops" of sound. Chladil's goal is not to make the next Soloflex, but to help non musicians access music making in a more natural, gestural way. For better or worse, that's also the goal of the inventors of the Beamz laser lute. Fortunately for Chladil, not all appendages can be used to tug ropes (last we checked). [Ropeandpulley.com]

The Teste Touch's built-in temperature sensor lets it respond to heat like real testicles; when it's cold, the balls shrivel up like George Costanza's, and when it's warm, they look like something you'd find in a JCC steam room. When tickled or touched, the sac moves and giggles, and while this may not be totally accurate, it is entertaining.

Jason Krugman, Stella Kim, and Ben Chao, the three students who masterminded the whimsical Teste Touch, kept it pube-free on purpose; they wanted the balls to be friendly and huggable, and not, you know, gross or anything.
[TesteTouch]

The experience is so immersive you forget that it's not real—no wonder real pinball is on the endangered-species list. The virtual kind gives you different types of play, four in fact:
• Cooperative, where you have two paddles on your side and one on your partner's side, and you both share a score
• Synchronized, where both sides tap the buttons simultaneously to make the paddles swing fully, so you lose if your partner doesn't help
• Competitive, straight-up pinballin'
• Multiball! You'll see this one at the end of the video, a total clusterfuck with balls flying everywhere

I give Daniel bonus points for cool virtual realism: The actual wooden playing board peaks in the middle, sloping downward. The virtual balls react to this, slowing as they roll uphill to the middle, then speeding up as they roll towards either end.

It was so much fun I almost forgot to ask what the point was. Daniel says that in the age of Wii, it's important to study interaction of players who are not necessarily competitors. Also, he likes to observe how mechanics affect gameplay. We couldn't get Daniel to admit he was merely trying to come up with a great game to sell to bars, but hell if he didn't invent that too. [Moving Parts; ITP]

Basically, you can recommend a show to any (or all) of your friends on your list, and it'll simply pop up in their friends channel. It also works to some extent like a Flickr pool, so you check out what your friends have been watching.

The other Flickr/YouTube-like feature is the ability to tag shows, which is potentially extremely cool and incredibly useful, more so than automated recommendations. I just wonder how long it would take for every show to be tagged "09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0." Video demo after the jump.

Ambient TV [Project Page]

In English, that means if Ethiopia is mentioned 30 times, Kenya 20 and Colombia 50, your brew would be 30 percent Ethiopian, and so on. (You could, of course, fill the respective canisters with all the same bean to make a standard cup, but where's the fun in that?)

On top of flaunting the ever-popular steampunk look, it grinds the coffee fresh before it brews, so you don't need a separate grinder. The only downside is that it's drip—he told me he thought about French press, but the mechanics didn't work out. It still made a pretty damn good cup at the show, though. – Matt Buchanan

News Brews [Project Page]
NYU ITP 2007 [Gizmodo]

ITP Spring Show 2007

Solar Bikini [via Make]

Click To Play

Watch it. It's pretty bad. I bet MJ could do some crazy shit with these.–Brian Lam

Moonwalker Shoes [Make]

Our second favorite class from when we were in grad school at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program was taught by game designer Frank Lantz of area/code. The best project—certainly the most copyright infringing one—to come out of his Big Games class this past semester might just be the Nintendo Amusement Park, "a real life obstacle course which a player jumps through using a power assist harness."

The current set-up is as basic as basic can be: it uses bungee cords, with the player attached to a fixed point on the ceiling. If they manage to get funding, the group behind the project will build a 2-axis ceiling track with a haptic winch, which "would be responsible for determining where the player wanted to go in 3D space and delivering them there safely." Watch the lovingly-crafted commercial (in Japanese, with English subtitles!) on the site to get an idea of what they're trying to do, and how much fun it could be; we're looking forward to trying it out ourselves sometime soon. Hopefully they get their wish and a big company pays them to develop the idea further to make a fun booth for E3 2007.

(Extra bonus item, which some of you may have seen before: our favorite project from 2004's Big Games class (a.k.a. the one we couldn't get into because NYU's registration software screwed us over), was PacManhattan, an urban game that used the streets of Manhattan to recreate the PacMan grid. )

Nintendo Amusement Park [via teendrama]