So you know how TBG is known for creating cool stuff for the internet? Well did you know that sometimes we also make cool stuff not for the internet but FROM the internet?

Enter a fun little project we just completed, stationed at the Hudson Hotel in NYC…

For New York’s Spring 2012 Fashion Week, Morgans Hotel Group wanted to change up what they normally do in Hudson Hall, their dining hall that looks over 57th Street on one side and into their ivy covered Private Park on another. Instead of the showing the usual music videos and sporting events, they wanted to fill the space with something that was relevant to the fashionistas and fashion bloggers that would be hanging in the hall during their stay for the event. As soon as we saw the space, with walls are composed of a continuous Mondrian-esque mosaic of frames, we knew what we wanted to do. It served as a perfect canvas for displaying real-time images and quotes from popular fashion week blogs, and a perfect way to showcase Morgans’ partnership with Tumblr.

Using Tumblr’s API to pull text and images, and Flash to display it all, we created a series of files that can be matched up with the existing projection system. The content prior to the installation took up large areas on the walls of the hall, but our designs aimed to use the beauty of the frame compositions to fit the content perfectly inside each and every frame. The design is displayed in blocks of text, images and patterns that mimic Morgans’ branding to keep it looking fresh and modern, and to keep the walls ever-changing, the content is refreshed through transitions while the installation updates with new text and images as they are entered into Tumblr.

Morgans liked the idea so much that they asked us to find a way to have it live beyond Fashion Week, so we made the design diverse enough to work with other special events or everyday happenings that they might want to showcase.

The installation is now live and can be seen during dining hours. So next time you’re in the Hudson Hotel, head down to Hudson Hall, grab some food and enjoy the installation.

The Hudson Hotel is located at 356 West 58th Street (at 9th Ave) in NYC.

Amazing.

I had zero time to edit together hours of video, or to build any complicated green-screeny installation stuff in Max/MSP. I figured since I was a Barbarian now, I’d see if Cinder was up to the task. It totally was.

From the always excellent Chris O’Shea

Hand From Above encourages us to question our normal routine when we often find ourselves rushing from one destination to another. Inspired by Land of the Giants and Goliath, we are reminded of mythical stories by mischievously unleashing a giant hand from the BBC Big Screen. Passers by will be playfully transformed. What if humans weren’t on top of the food chain?

We officially open-sourced Cinder, our framework for creative coding in C++, to the world three weeks ago. And, as we’ve decided to go with a release early and often style development cycle, today we’re releasing version 0.8.1.

To read more about the new features and download version 0.8.1, check out the libcinder.org blog.

We are incredibly excited to announce that Cinder (formerly known as Flint) has now officially been released into the wild as an open source project. As described on the main page at libcinder.org, “Cinder is a community-developed, free and open source library for professional-quality creative coding in C++.”

So why did we do this, you might ask? Well, it originated as a solution to a fairly kludge-y work-flow we were using to create music visualizers. We were basically designing in Processing, porting to C++ and testing; repeat. At one point we even considered developing a magic-box type macro that would convert a Processing sketch into C++ and then to an iTunes visualizer. I had also coded a basically blank iTunes visualizer that piped FFT data to processing. Good times, but not ideal. At all.

Instead, we started an internal project codenamed ‘Flint ’ (not only because we liked the name, but because the namespace sounded cool: fli::Surface, etc). The project had two main goals:

First, when we needed to be in C++ (for iTunes plug-ins etc.) we wanted to have our creative coders be able to make things directly in C++. It needed to be approachable. For a while, we called this “The Robert Case” after Robert Hodgin, who was a driving force in making a ton of amazing stuff here at TBG.

Second, we wanted to make sure that any approachability enhancements did not prevent the more hardcore developers from doing the “bare-metal” programming. That was the “AFB Case” after Andrew Bell, who wrote the majority of Cinder here, and has been writing C++ code for ever.

We’ve used various incarnations of Cinder on projects like the augmented reality issue of Esquire Magazine, a music visualizer for Relentless, and Magnetosphere, as well as several internal experiments.

I would also like to reiterate some things that we’ve said in the FAQ of libcinder.org. One, we cannot say enough great things about Processing. It’s not only a great way to dip your toe into the waters of creative coding, but also a powerful platform for doing advanced and amazing things. Another incredible project out there is openFrameworks, which is led by some amazingly talented people and has a great community surrounding it.

I am so glad that we were able to make Cinder open source. Andrew and I both expected a certain amount of internal resistance attempting to do so (a lot of hours went into this!), but that resistance never materialized. We have been the beneficiaries of too many open source projects to list, and we all felt that giving back was the only move we could feel good about.

Check out the cinder website here: http://libcinder.org
Grab the source here: http://github.com/cinder/Cinder