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Besides being more than busy on paid projects, lately I’ve been involved in an interactive installation by Keez from Pips:lab.
Keez created a concept called RadarFunk and developed it for public shows.
RadarFunk reads patterns generated from sound sequences and reproduces them.
Consider it a musical barcode.

Well… Keez asked me if we could reproduce it with mobile phones and we did.

radarFunk MINI is what came out of my head, with about 3 weeks of J2ME programming using MMAPI and BlueTooth.

The mobile application is developed on Nokia’s 6681, an excellent platform for both Java and Symbian.
The choice was J2ME for the ease of development, but of course I never did any Java, so I had to learn how to do it.

I used Xcode and J2MEpolish (which I spoke about already) together with mPowerPlayer to create the .jar file. The testing was done on real hardware (Nokia 6680), as the Mac platform lacks a real emulator, and I never liked emulators anyway.
I’ve tried using Processing Mobile, but it’s too basic and still too young to be used for an application that supposedly will run 24/7 for a month with as less maintainance as possible.

The core application, by the way, is BlueSocket, a technology developed by TwoDotOne.
Remember that TwoDotOne is not just me anymore, but I was joined by Saver (salvatore iodice) in december. He’s an excellent C++ developer (especially when directed by me :) .

BlueSocket is a BlueTooth socket server for Microsoft Windows (soon to be ported to Linux and Mac Os X) that enables multiuser communication over BlueTooth.
The platform targets retail experience, art projects, home applications.
The difference between this and other similar projects is that this server allows simultaneous multiple connections, allowing for almost realtime interaction.

Director was used as a simple sound player prototype to play the instruments, and Flash played a fundamental role in connecting Director to BlueSocket.

All of these components together made this installation possible, and enabled Keez to express his evil genius through a mobile phone.

UPDATE:
here’s the video teaser to get some live action.
full length video coming soon.

My thanks go to:
Natalie Faber for being the curator of PlayMobiel.
Keez for dragging me in and being supportive and challenging.
Saver for programming BlueSocket and fixing last second bugs.
ShotCode for sponsoring the event.
Last but not least Regine from we-make-money-not-art for posting this fabulous article about RadarFunk.
(after my girlfriend’s complaints for not mentioning her) I thank angela for being supportive in “several” ways.

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