Brent Bushnell » projects

OK Go Rube Goldberg Music Video

brent — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:45:14 +0000

The minds (and bodies) of Syyn Labs spent the past three months building a huge, two-story Rube Goldberg machine during which a piano gets dropped and a TV is smashed with a sledge hammer. Why? It’s the centerpiece for the latest music video from the band OK Go (remember… the guys who did the treadmill video). It features the song “This Too Shall Pass” and even after listening to it hundreds of times, it still sounds good!

Huge thanks to the band for this opportunity and to all the Syyn Labs and Mindshare folks that helped pull this together. Special recognition to Adam Sadowsky for orchestrating the whole thing like a pro conductor. Thanks to all the people that helped make my vision for the Legos a reality! Namely: Dylan Bushnell, Heather Knight, Liya Brook, Paul Grasshoff, Peter Svidler, Izumi Hamagaki, Wyatt Bushnell, Sam Leventer, and Mahdroo McCaleb. Hats off to the steady camera man, a major hero for his ability to capture this on film! Thanks to the magical eye of Josh Reiss for capturing photos of the whole thing too!

Updates:

The video was covered on NY Times, CNN, Examiner, Wired, Makezine, NPR, NBC Los Angeles, BoingBoing 1st, BoingBoing 2nd, DVICE, Gizmodo 1st, Gizmodo 2nd & PerezHilton!
An interesting article showing the statistics on the “viral effect” of the video is available at the Viral Blog
A few previews from before the launch available at Rolling Stone, LA Times and AltPress
LACMA is featuring a few components from the machine, including the Legos! There will be a concert fundraiser on March 5th, 2010. For tickets call 323 857-6010 or visit the LACMA site
More info on the project and the release is available here
There’s now a Wikipedia article about it.
OK Go won a webby! More info here.
A panorama of the top floor, courtesy of Pehr Hovey, is available here (1.5MB JPG)

ArtWalk Fall ‘09

brent — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:11:48 +0000

Wow! What a weekend. The Virsix showroom was alive and packed during the biannual Brewery ArtWalk. We had five of our games available and people ages 5 to 70 competing away! Players tested their cat burgling skills in the Laser Maze, avoided traffic in our foot tracking Frogger-style game, contorted their body for human Tetris, and even flew around the galaxy in a space battle. Thanks to all involved for their help putting this on, especially the guys at H2P for a marvelous job filming.

uWink spins off tech into Tapcode

brent — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 01:37:51 +0000

We recently completed the process of spinning off the uWink technology into its own company named Tapcode. It’s an exciting time as this separation allows us to focus exclusively on the licensing of our self-service and entertainment product suite to third parties. It turns out a “tap code” is a cipher for communicating, similar to morse code. As a word nerd, I can’t help but like the double entendre in the new name! Visit the new Tapcode website here.

TimeGraff

brent — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 03:55:02 +0000

For the past few months I’ve been taking photos of graffiti in and around Los Angeles. There’s *a ton* of it in this city and a good portion is really excellent art and unique typography. I don’t yet have a camera with a GPS chip so I’ve been marking waypoints on my Garmin as I’ve taken the shots. A given graffiti location changes over time, so my plan is a Google map mashup of these photos with their location and an interface that allows navigating the spot over time. The alpha is available here.

Laser Maze

brent — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 06:50:16 +0000

Tyler, Dan, dad and I exhibited our laser maze (for the first time to the public!) last night at the February Mindshare. The object was to traverse the room without breaking any of the beams, ring a bell, and then navigate back to the start. Attendees pretended to be [take your pick of cinema's security-breaching thieves] employing everything from commando crawls to acrobatics to get across. Thanks to Seth Margolin for an excellent filming and editing job on the video!

Laser Maze at the Firehouse from Brent Bushnell on Vimeo.

80/20 and Touchkit

brent — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 03:44:52 +0000

Eric and I put together a frame for the TouchKit FTIR multitouch screen last night. We used 80/20 and a few custom cut angle brackets. The favored vision system for use with it so far has been reacTIVision. Note, though, that it assumes the screen fills the whole camera view.

ArtFall

brent — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 19:06:32 +0000

I had a blast collaborating with Eric Gradman last month on an interactive art installation named ArtFall. There’s a complete description here, and a downloadable iPhone encoded video here.
Update: Artfall was covered in Makezine, Hackaday, Matt Cutts blog and a French blog.

ArtFall from Eric Gradman and Brent Bushnell on Vimeo.