together with time's up gregsn, joreg and micha and are reviving spin - the spherical projection interface. spin has been hidden in the basement for too long. finally a new financially backed project enabled further development on spin. as part of the crashtestdummy project spin is being dressed with a new series of virtual worlds. read on below about our progress... ...and if you are in europe in summer 2006 mark the following dates: budapest 05 - 13 may ljubljana 21 - 28 june (canceled) munich 21 - 29 july

march 20: setting up spin

watch a stopmotion movie of setting up spin.

march 22: we have it running

vvvv touching spins skin

• joreg

march 24: egosoccer

a short intermezzo. before concentrating on the developement for our actual mission we implemented a prototype of the egosoccer idea. read more about egosoccer and watch a short video of the prototype in action on the dedicated egosoccer page joreg

april 5: and now for our mission

we are trying to feed the four projectors from one pc with two nvidia 7800 graphiccards. we go fullscreen twice with a resolution of 2048x768 each. below is what on graphiccard computes. two views on the sphere. predistorted, so that on the spheres surface the pixels align straight.

running through a wood of cylinders that bounce off the sphere is..quite sportlich.

• joreg

april 10: todo

spin is still missing a lightning rod.

and another screenshot of todays developments. the meta world is taking shape. spins proves to be a forgiving projection surface. everything looks a little bit blurry which autoimproves certain effects like our smooth flaming doors (upper left renderer).

• joreg

april 12 1961: yuri gagarin became the first human to go into space

the ideas of what we could and should be doing with SPIN and VVVV and the whole CrashTestDummy thematic are coming together. Experiments with curved spaces, running around on the inside or the outside of objects, visibility and view blocking, transparency, physics and models. That the current worlds come together today, 45 years after Jurij Gagarin left the atmosphere and the standards of gravity, is a slightly wonderful trick of the light. Racing through what feels, to me, like the abandoned innards of some industrial scale space station, a labyrinth built with strange and intricate intentions, I felt like I had escaped into orbit around some strange and only partially explored planet. Time to explore some more. tim

april 13: hardware update

today we spent our render computer a 3rd graphiccard. now it goes fullscreen twice in spanmode with a resolution of 2048x768 each and we have one additional monitor for patching at 1280x1024. on the patching monitor we have an additional overview renderer. as if we didn't expect it to work we where quite pleased to see it does.

and just for the record. the system now is:

• 19'' Rackmount PC 4U Chassis
• Asus A8N32-Sli Deluxe Motherboard
• AMD Athlon X2 4200+ 2200MHz DualCore CPU
• Nvidia nForce4 SLI x16 Chipset
• 2x 512MB DDR400 RAM
• 1x SATA Raptor 10000rpm HDD
• 2x PCI 500W Power Supply
• 1x Nvidia GeForce FX 5500 PCI
• 2x Nvidia GeForce 7800 PCIe

we note that one core of the cpu is still only producing warm air, since vvvv only uses the other one. we'll see if we find something for it to do.

• joreg

april 20: public experiment

we are getting somewhere. those are screenshots of 2 of the new worlds that are already quite playfull.

tonight is the first night of public experiments. come as you are to a casual party at time's ups place and take a testdrive in spin.

may 5: you are now on your own

uh..another 2 weeks have gone by quite rapidly. many things happend. many changed. and still we are not really lucky with the results..as always? maybe thats just it. anyway a strange experience is waiting for everybody in budapest at "deak ference ter" from tonight. i think we're supposed to open at 18h. come plenty and be among the first to ride the new spin worlds (do not eat too much, it turned out to be quite..physical some times)

Test World

PaperWorld

Tumbling World

Tube World