For this XM radio device, I developed a software prototype simultaneously with the design documentation. The prototype turned out to be useful in several ways — during design, we could try things out and make empirical decisions; it was a great artifact for client meetings; and it served as interactive documentation for the firmware developer.

The device has a two-line LCD display. A 5-way pad with a few extra buttons navigates the menu tree. This prototype separates the UI and app logic with a simple but sophisticated message-passing layer that makes it completely scriptable, allowing features such as saved states and modes that are not accessible directly through the device UI (for example, battery disconnected). It is written in java and embeds the processing graphics library for rendering.

Launch the simulator
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“Vernacular is an interactive software droid. It is an associate data processor whose function is to augment our use and understanding of the information culture in which we are immersed. We’re artists of the Star Wars generation. We grew up with cybernetic visions of a twenty-first century. Buck Rogers looked old school, our future was intelligent robots like R2D2 that did not merely respond, but transformed the data flow around us. Vernacular addresses the meta-language of ‘infomatix’. It is a software in which the associative patterns of one’s data is rendered in molecular form.”

Vernacular premiered at EAI in New York in April 2003. Vernacular was created in collaboration with Howard Goldkrand and Beth Coleman. The application and source are freely available for download. Vernacular is based on Craig Reynolds’ flocking algorithm and simple particle physics. It generates spatialized audio and OpenGL graphics. Vernacular requires Mac OS X 10.2.3 or above.

Vernacular at EAI
In collaboration with Soundlab | Cultural Alchemy

Download Vernacular (Mac OS X 10.2.3+) | Source