spells PEACE (yes, I went to the Wu-Tang concert last night)!!

As you can see in the interview we reBlogged from We Make Money Not Art, today is my last day at Eyebeam. I think Regine did a good job of capturing anything interesting I might have wanted to say on my way out, but I'll just take a second here to wax a tiny bit sentimental.

Thanks to John Johnson for making Eyebeam a reality. Thanks to Jonah Peretti for sucking me in and guiding and inspiring me throughout. Thanks to the OpenLab fellows for taking our vision and running with it. Thanks to the other staff, fellows, residents, and the extended Eyebeam family who have helped make it such a great place to be. Last but not least, thanks to everyone out there who has interacted with our work and made it all worthwhile.

peace,
mike

After the mind-blowing experience that was 22nd Chaos Communication Congress, in Berlin, last December (they are calling for submissions of lectures for this year's edition btw), i've been looking at how the world of artists and hackers could mingle. A combination of such different approaches might not always be easy to achieve but the work of Michael Frumin at Eyebeam demonstrates that when it does, it can take some fun, thought-provoking and unforeseen forms.

Today is Michael's last day as Eyebeam's R&D Technical Director as he's moving on to new experiences.

In the past, you have been a founding member of a team of hackers doing experimental financial research. How much of the hackers way of thinking/working have you brought to eyebeam?

All of it. Our financial research did not include hacking (cracking, rather) into closed systems, though some of my coworkers might have done that kind of thing in a previous life. What I absorbed from them, and brought with me to Eyebeam, was a certain approach to idea generation and problem solving. Curiosity, independent thinking, constant learning, determined confidence in your own ability to get things done, and rapid testing of ideas through functioning code were the tools of our trade. I'm sure that without them my contribution to the bootstrapping of Eyebeam R&D would not be what it was, and I wouldn't be here doing this interview for your awesome web site.

OGLE: 3D-printing SecondLife character, and mashup into Google Earth

How did you get involved in an art organisation? After a few years collaborating with artists do you feel like you're one of them?

One of the partners at the hedge fund I worked for is an active contemporary art collector in New York and a supporter of Eyebeam. We were on good terms after I left, and when he heard that Eyebeam was looking to start a research program, he put me in touch with Jonah Peretti. Initially, I joined one of Jonah's weekly Contagious Media Research Groups, where we developed the FundRace project. It was such a smashing hit that he asked me to come to Eyebeam as the prototype R&D Fellow. The rest, as they say, is history.

In truth, most of my work at Eyebeam has not been directly with artists. I much prefer working with other hackers, whose contributions to projects tend to be more on the material side of things, rather than solely conceptual or ephemeral. If the hacker happens to also be an artist, power to them. For example, Cory Arcangel and Alex Galloway (RSG) have both been fixtures at Eyebeam during my tenure. They are accomplished new media artists who in-source most of their technical execution, but have been eager to learn and take suggestions from the hackers at Eyebeam, and offer what help they can to our projects. You know the saying about teaching a man to fish...

How much do you think hackers have in common with artists? And in what ways do one group differ from the other?

It seems to me that artists and hackers share the currency of ideas. However, I'd rather be a hacker than an artist because the former is capable of testing and implementing his ideas in his computer or workshop while the latter is dependent on his critics, gallerist, curators, and collectors for validation.

VGMap (Vectorized Google Maps)

How is the R&D at Eyebeam working? Are you part of a big team? Does Eyebeam leave you carte blanche or is there a set of rules you have to respect? Particular concepts you're expected to work on?

Very well in fact! The OpenLab, with its first round of R&D Fellows, has been up and running for 10 months now and all indicators are positive so far. Smart people turning out tons of insightful, contagious, well executed, open licensed projects.

Eyebeam does not really have any rigid team structures, in part because of the extremely broad range of expert skills in its staff, fellows, and residents. Most work, particularly in the OpenLab, is the result of inspired individual effort and informal collaborations.

We have a lot of flexibility, but I wouldn't call it a carte blanche. You can't come to the OpenLab and write proprietary software, develop commercial web services, patent your hardware designs, or publish media with restrictive copyrights. Those are a serious set of constraints -- how many artists would work really hard for a year being unable to retain monopoly over their results? But our focus on open licenses and open information has done a great job of helping us select projects which are compelling, useful, and generally quite progressive in nature.

ForwardTrack

Is Eyebeam one in a many similar organisations in NYc or does it play a particular role that no else so far has fulfilled?

There are more arts institutions in New York City than you can shake a cellphone at, but I don't think that any of them provide the same concentration of funding, technology, expertise, and raw physical space to allow individuals to realize their creative visions. Galleries have tons of room, but expect work ready to be purchased by collectors; Eyebeam is all about developing new ideas, many of which will suck. Graduate schools with creative technology programs will help you out if you've got $100K to spare; Eyebeam pays a (barely) livable stipend to the unfortunate few who are selected for its fellowships. The private sector in New York thrives, but your work better add value or you're out.

When it comes specifically to the OpenLab, I don't know of anywhere else in the world with such a high caliber of staff whose projects are valued primarily by their contribution to the body of open licensed and public domain work.

What did you try to achieve with reBlog? Was the application understood by bloggers? Do they all accept to have their content reBlogged?

When I came to Eyebeam in 2003, its web site was (and mostly still is) totally old school -- no frequent updates, nothing from the wide range of potential contributors, no platform from which the organization could help promote the work it supports. There were, however, a host of blogs and other RSS feeds with lots of great content about Eyebeam and all things art/media/tech-related. The first reBlog installation was an attempt to take advantage of the fact that a non-profit could selectively syndicate relevant content, with minimal effort, to build a consistent online audience. Thanks primarily to this tool, and to the curative touches of the many guest rebloggers who have taken turns at the wheel, we now announce all of our work to an audience of at least 10,000 interested and influential readers.

One fundamental aspect that separates reBlog from other software that is used to simply steal peoples' content is that it always automatically attributes the original publisher with language and with hyperlinks. Another is that reBlogs do not include all posts from each source feed, only those selected by human editors. I think these distinctions are what makes the concept easily digestible by readers and bloggers alike. They are also the magic touches that create a virtuous cycle which makes everyone happy. We have never been asked to remove a feed from the Eyebeam reBlog, but at least one blogger per week asks to be added.

The fact that it worked so well for Eyebeam, that bloggers appreciate it, and that our reBloggers love doing the actual work is what has inspired use to continue reBlog as an open source project (which, by the way, would be total abandonware if not for the awesome contributions of Stamen Design.)

I have the feeling that works like OGLE or reBlog allow web users to reclaim contents on the internet. Am i wrong? Is there an agenda behind those projects?

You're not wrong, but I would draw the relationship between them a bit differently. First, take a brief look at my core project work at Eyebeam: FundRace, reBlog, ForwardTrack, OGLE -- contagious media out of public record campaign finance data, curated RSS syndication, social network tracking layered on tell-a-friend-driven online activism, and 3D geometry capture from virtual worlds. A post-mortem of these suggests something to the effect of 'breathing new life into old information' as a unifying theme, which I think I can live with.

One might not think there would be a lot of continuity between a financial research group and Eyebeam R&D, but drawing out this theme reveals a stark similarity to my previous job. In our financial 'skunkworks' I spent most of my time writing software to gather, analyze, and visualize data from the internet to augment the firm's investment strategies. For example, we had a bot crawling eBay auctions to calculate the company's revenue trends, and a system which used statistical analysis of SEC filings to help find related businesses among the thousands of publicly traded companies. As with the projects at Eyebeam, I was capturing information already in use to one end, making it usable and interesting for other reasons entirely. There's so much data out there, and so little time!

FundRace: detail of Money Map

What are you working on now?

OGLE and the Graffiti Research Lab were featured in the Guerilla Studio at SIGGRAPH, so we took over Boston for a week. Aside from that I've been preoccupied with leaving Eyebeam as gracefully and purposefully as possible. This is no easy feat for such an ungraceful guy who's more accustomed to hacking on fun projects than working consistently towards any grand purpose. I've been lending what little wisdom I have to the process of promoting some of the current OpenLab fellows to 'Senior Fellows' and helping them manage the call for new researchers. Leaving Eyebeam, I hope to keep updating and supporting the open source projects I have started here. That probably continues until the internet goes dark or I can convince someone to take them off my hands.

While I don't have specific plans for what's next, I'm hoping to find a way to apply my skills and experience to the general enterprise of Public Transportation. I didn't think it was a field typically filled with software hacking data wranglers, but MIT has a program in Transportation Science which indicates otherwise. There is a lot of research going on around using data from electronic fare collection systems to plan and improve mass transit services. With cellphones, GPS, RFID, etc. coming to the fore, I think it only gets more exciting. Despite peoples' legitimate concerns, there are real civic benefits to the collection of so much information about who we are, where we go, and what we do. This all fits nicely with my theme from the previous question, so maybe it's best to just think of Public Transportation as a much bigger system to hack.

Thanks Michael!

Flurd (who is the man!!!!) writes:

I created a WoW movie promoting my guild, which combines rendered models (extracted with OGLE) and in-game footage. There are 10 models in all scattered throughout the video. The model geometry and textures were taken, and then using Blender's 'Soft Body' cloth simulation, the dangling clothing and hair was given movement. Also added in the appropriate spell effects, reflective and otherwise enhanced materials, and included a post-production glow. After being thrown together with background video captured from WoW, it created a pretty awesome effect.

You can view or download the video at http://www.lunaticrage.com/wow/doa/

Here's a sample:

I also put together a version of the video with only the OGLE'd characters (but no music), watch it here.

With the help of some friends at CADD Edge we were able to get a color 3D print of our favorite World of Warcraft gnome. All we had to do was export our cleaned up and textured models as VRML files, which they fed right into their ZCorp printer.

+

=

If you are interested in doing the same with your video game avatars, I suggest contacting Anvil Prototypes. They are interested in helping people who want to pay to have their characters printed (see their sweet flyer), and took this funny photo of a color-printed gnome in the woods:

(is it just me, or are the monochrome prints from Eyebeam's Dimension so much less fulfilling now?)

[I am testing a software upgrade on the reBlog, I hope this works -- MF]

On day 3 I played some more with surfaces in SolidWorks. The Dimonte Group “curvy stuff” tutorials are great. SolidWorks “solids” are actually macros that create surfaces! I still haven’t gotten my head around SolidWorks enough to create a snap-together part out of a lofted surface.

On day 4 I wrote some code in Processing to create scaled cubes according to a simple algorithm, captured it using OGLE and printed it out. The goal is to take away the barrier from thought (as expressed as code) and physical objects. Working with SolidWorks feels something like sculpting. It feels good, but the work is definitely being done with your hands. Writing an algorithm and having it create physical objects feels completely different. Like the objects come directly from ideas.

Pictures from Eyebeam day 3/4

Yay I’m done with another small kit. This one is a nice battery-powered USB charger. You can plug in anything that charges over USB like iPods, cameras, cell phones, etc. to get a lot more run-time. It runs off of 2 AA batteries, alkaline or rechargeables and has 2.5x more juice than a 9V-powered design.

Some numbers…
iPod video (tested, using alkaline batteries): 3hrs more video (1 full recharge)
iPod shuffle (unverified): 60 hours more (5 full recharges)
iPod mini (unverified): 26 hours more (1.5 full recharges)

This project is suitable for beginners, some soldering tools are necessary but even if you’ve never soldered before it should be pretty easy. You can etch a circuitboard and/or breadboard this up, or simply buy a kit.

I also spent a bunch of time documenting the process by which kits are born, so that people can learn about how to design stuff like this.

You can read all about it on the MintyBoost page or at Instructables and buy kits from the adafruit webshop.

Thanks to EYEBEAM Openlab for supporting this project as part of my fellowship!

I finally got off my butt and finished documentation for MIDIsense, a simple and inexpensive MIDI/sensor system for artists, musicians and experimenters. I did a workshop with these in March and they worked great so I’m happy that they’re finally available.
The only board I’ve released so far is for log resistive sensors. These are pretty common: photocells, bend/flex sensor, force sensors. My example right now is a laser harp using $3 laser pointers and $0.50 photocells. I’ll probably do an example with a bend-sensor glove or tapping a force sensor next. I’m also, of course, hoping people decide to buy the kits and come up with neat new interfaces.

I’ll release the Analog/Digital I/O board next, which will be much simpler, in a sense…but will allow 5 buttons/switches and 6 analog inputs, such as distance sensors and linear potentiometers.

More importantly, I need to hack on the windows python code because the windows MIDI subsystem seems quite slow in comparison to even a 3 year old iMac!

Thanks to EYEBEAM Openlab for supporting this project as part of my fellowship!

The 3D buildings OGLE'd from Google Earth are not ready to be 3D printed off the bat. Each building is a composition of multiple vertical volumes that have walls and a ceiling but no floor. By computationally (i.e. hacked up OBJ-file-processing perl script!) copying all of the roof polygons to floor polygons, we got the job done:

Ground Zero (in Google Earth):

Columbus Circle (in Google Earth):

At 'sunset' (two prints not on same scale):

Starting today we have our first non-Eyebeamer in a while, Sonia Zjawinkski. Sonia is a contributing editor for Wired magazine. She also writes about cultural trends for New York magazine, I.D., and ReadyMade magazine. She first came at us through interest in the Graffiti Research Lab, but we are glad to have roped her into being our reBlogger for the next couple weeks.

Thanks Andrew for the last 2, take it away Sonia.

From a past Eyebeam Artist In Residence to a current one. Thanks Yury, here comes Andrew Milmoe, B.F.A. Carnegie Mellon; M.P.S. New York University. Andrew Milmoe currently divides his time between large information architecture projects and creating his own interactive art works in his Brooklyn art studio. Mr. Milmoe is still associated with EAR Studio where he managed the studio and assisted with public art projects for two years. He is on the board of the non-profit division of Gen Art, a national arts organization. He is currently working with Noreen Leddy on her Aphrodite Project.

Go Andrew!

Typically, the pong ports are really lame but I love this pong clock, I wish I could buy one, though it would be pretty trivial to write so maybe I’ll write it as a screen saver.

What’s the score? The time. As Pong randomly plays, the score shown is the time of day on this “amusing, unusual timepiece” by Buro Vormkrijgers. Watch the movie (be patient, takes a while to load). Also by the Buro; MIC, the flexible, telescopic LED-powered portable lamp.

MoCo Loco: Pong Clock

Tags: pong, atari, bushnell, nolan

Reuters - Tired of playing second fiddle to men in conservative Saudi Arabia, five women decided if you can't beat them, join them.

Kyle Reed makes me want to make my own collage illustrations by attacking a stack of magazines with an x-acto knife. Something tells me, though, that I wouldn’t create anything as cool as his work.

(Thanks, Jen!)

As of OGLE 0.3b, it is possible to capture texture coordinates (UV) for vertices that have them. This is enabled by the CaptureTextureCoords flag. Coupled with the fact that GLIntercept writes out to disk images for all the texture maps, this allows you to re-texture your capture in Maya with a little menial labor, eg:

This has tested to work accurately on some applications (World Of Warcraft) but on others it seems to misbehave, so it is disabled by default. I am working with Damian Trebilco, author of GLIntercept, to give OGLE the power to do this image-texture-assigning work automatically. Give it time...

AnalyGIS and SRC, both of whom work on various tools for studying markets and communities, have teamed up to build a demographic study tool combining Google Maps (surprise) and 2000 US Census data. Click on a spot in the US, then select either basic census information (ethnic distribution, sex parity, and income averages) or housing information (owners vs. renters, housing value, age of units) within one, three and five miles of your target click. You can also enter an address directly.

They describe this as primarily a proof-of-concept exercise, so there's no telling when it will disappear. Still, for those of us who want a better way to access demographic information quickly and visually, this works pretty well. Since it's based on Google Map's public APIs and open access census data, it should also be relatively simple to rebuild should this one go away.

(Thanks, Joe Willemssen!)

(Posted by Jamais Cascio in QuickChanges at 02:24 PM)

The Eyebeam OpenLab is now accepting interns for a number of project areas. Positions are unpaid but receive full named credit for all work completed. All interns will work closely with one or more of the OpenLab's staff or fellows on new or ongoing projects. Interns must be skilled in their project area but more importantly they are eager to learn and take direction from their coworkers in the lab.

We are seeking interns in the following areas:

• Web Development
• 3D Graphics
• 3D Printing/Digital Fabrication
• Graffiti Research Lab
  • Web Development
  • Engineering Technician
• Senior Fellow Cory Arcangel Intern

For more information about the positions and how to apply, please go to http://research.eyebeam.org/internships

Thanks to Angus.

Starting today is an old Eyebeam head Yury Gitman. Yury is an American Artist turned Toy Designer. His current creation is My Beating Heart, a soft huggable pillow with a soothing and tactile heartbeat inside. He has also exhibited at the Biennale of Electronic Arts in Perth, Australia; at the Isle de France in Paris; at Ars Electronics in Austria; and at Eyebeam, among others, in New York. He remains one of the first people to use the Internet from inside the New York subway. He did this by employing a network of his Magicbikes ("wireless bicycle hotspots"). In 2005 Yury opened Banana Design Lab, a product design company focusing on lifestyle designs to entertain the soul.

Git to it, Yury!

Now that Perry has had the visceral experience of being the reBlogger, he can help with picking and scheduling furture folks.

This week we have Eyebeam's very own Sound Design Intern Angus Galloway. He says about himself:

I was born in Bath England in March of 1977. My family lived in Cardiff Wales and Edinburgh Scotland before moving to Durham North Carolina in 1984. I attended college at Emory University where I studied Philosophy and Art History. After graduating in 2000, I taught at the Walden Autism Research Center in the Pre-Kindergarten classroom. I began the Graduate Program at Georgia State University in Drawing and Painting in the summer of 2002. During this time I taught a range of classes including Drawing, 2D Design, and Sound Design. I invite you to visit my website online at www.angusgalloway.com.com for further information

go for it Angus.

Lets you connect multiple devices, even with big power converters, to a single outlet.

-- Zimran Ahmed

PowerSquid
$10
Available from Amazon

Manufactured by PowerSquid

Tool for Integrating Sensors, Sounds, Devices as Interactive Objects and Environments

NADA affords both the technical novice and expert an unified platform for prototyping physical interfaces and digital content - from handheld product concepts to reactive environments that can be connected across the Internet.

Working models that require less work... NADA is designed for maximum versatility and efficiency. It is a true cross-platform application, and it connects to a variety of commercially available hardware for bringing digital information into and out of standard PC’s and Macs. Supported hardware is automatically detected and auto-configured, minimizing complexity for the user. Project authoring with NADA can be done in either Macromedia Flash MX2004 (or later) or Java™. Even beginners without programming experience can design and prototype with sensors, actuators, lights, switches and animation using an intuitive graphical environment. Graduate to finer levels of control by developing projects using the NADA API for ActionScript and Java™. Below is the look of the NADA interface. [via MAKE]

Not as popular here in the UK as it is in the US, we still know all about Hershey’s chocolate - we’ve even had S’mores! Damn they were good… I see you don’t even have to bother making them yourself anymore though.

However, we didn’t know that Hershey’s had a chocolate-themed amusment park! Actually, Hersheypark has some pretty cool-looking wooden coasters as well as around 60 other rides and attractions.

More about Hershey’s, Hersheypark and other chocolate-related stuff over at Wikipedia.

Thanks to GoatJuggler.

Thanks Huong!

Starting today is Perry Lowe, who is finishing his fifth year at Eyebeam where he coordinates
communications. In his spare time he makes subversive needlepoint and has
work appearing this spring in the KnitPro Needlecraft Art Show, Workmanship
of Risk at the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery in Canton, NY. Go P!

Over the last 2 weeks or so, I worked with Jerry Paffendorf of Electric Sheep and SecondLife future salons to capture and 3D print his SecondLife avatar, with his SecondLife 'Slegway.'

We had some success after a couple iterations, learning a good lesson about what you just can't do on a standard 3D printer. The one-piece print would have been just impossible to separate from the support material without destroying the model material, eh?

The OGLE capture in Maya
3D printed as one piece	(side view)
Avatar and Slegway printed separately	Standing on the vehicle
The free and Han-solo versions next to each other

DanielP loves reblogging, doesn't he?

Keeping it in the family, the next reBlogger is Huong Ngo, intern in the Eyebeam Production Studio. She was born in hong kong and raised in north carolina. She create installations, performances, sculpture, video, and clothing, mostly
based on questions about social dynamics, personality development, and self-realization. She currently runs a dream exchange/repository called the "dream machine." toll-free: 1-877-877-5602.

Go Huong!

Evan, rock the house and; Daniel Perlin, rock the house and... Up next is Daniel Perlin who has worked on a number of different programs in Eyebeam's Education Studio.

Daniel Perlin is interaction designer and artist based in New York. His work ranges from installation, to screen-based media, to objects. Installations include Mutations with Koolhaas, Kwinter, Fabricius and Virafon, an audio installation with Vito Acconci for a bus stop in Madrid Spain. His screen based work includes film sound for Junebug, Palindromes, Fog of War, and others. His interactive design work ranges from web based media (root.net) to physical computing, and includes projects such as modified every day objects and interactive, high maintenance plush dolls (needies.com). His work has been shown at the Chelsea Art Museum, NY, LMCC, Temporary Contemporary Gallery London, TN Probe, Tokyo, Guggenheim Film, Cannes, Toronto, Sundance and other film festivals. Daniel holds Undergraduate and Masters degrees from Brown University, as well as a Masters from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, and currently is a resident studio artist at the Whitney Independent Study Progam.

Take'er away Dan!

My sabbatical from programming web applications is nearly over, and fortunately I do have something to show for it: OGLE, The OpenGLExtractor (pronounced Oh-Gull, as in the word, 'ogle'). This is the Eyebeam OpenLab's first new project of the year, with more to come soon.

OGLE is a software package that allows for the capture and re-use of 3D geometry data from 3D graphics applications running on Microsoft Windows. It works by observing the data flowing between 3D applications and the system's OpenGL library, and recording that data in a standard 3D file format. In other words, a 'screen grab' or 'view source' operation for 3D data.

The primary motivation for developing OGLE is to make available for re-use the 3D forms we see and interact with in our favorite 3D applications. Video gamers have a certain love affair with characters from their favorite games; animators may wish to reuse environments or objects from other applications or animations which don't provide data-level access; architects could use this to bring 3D forms into their proposals and renderings; and digital fabrication technologies make it possible to automatically instantiate 3D objects in the real world.

First Example: 3D-printing your World of Warcraft character
Some people in the lab are rather obsessive about their World of Warcraft characters. After capturing the character with OGLE and cleaning the geometry with Maya a little bit, we were able to render it into the real world with our Dimension BST 3D printer, as seen below.

Read more about what we have done with OGLE so far (think SecondLife and Google Earth), check out how it works, or just go ahead and download it and get to OGLE'ing.

In the meantime, don't be afraid to share it with friends or colleagues who are into 3D stuff, and stay tuned for some more exciting relases by the new-ish R&D Fellows.

Dave Jacobs, wow. Some of the best reblogging I've ever seen!

Starting today is Evan Roth, a recent MFA graduate from the Design Technology department and current fellow at the Eyebeam Openlab. He is the creator of Graffiti Analysis, a project that uses motion tracking, computer vision technology, and a custom C++ application to record and analyze a graffiti writer's pen movement over time. Evan's media experiments also include Explicit Content Only, Postal Labels Against Bush, and Graffiti Taxonomy. He's also working on some swank stuff here in the lab that you'll be seeing shortly.

I've been trying to work full time while also partake in the holiday vacation social atmosphere that's going on this week. I've been getting stuff done, but totally slacked on getting a reBlogger in place or doing it myself. however, I had a great reBlog-related breakfast meeting today with blogger/hacker extraordinaire David Jacobs, and he's volunteered to cover my ass for a couple weeks.

Thanks Dave, take it away.

Favorite Event of 2005:

doodle4google

Favorite Artist of 2005:

Blu

Favorite New Artist of 2005 (an artist who you did not know of last year):

Turf one

Favorite Piece of Art of 2005

This awesome view of williamsburg

Favorite New Product or Trend of 2005:

Fruttolo3D sunglasses hand made by my friend oboe (in the pic)

Favorite Toy of 2005:

Maybe it's a bit older but keeps on rockin'

Favorite CD or Song of 2005:

"Yours to keep" Teddybears Stockholm

Favorite Website of 2005:

http://www.twothings.net/

What do you most want for Christmas?

An US visa to work in NY for a couple of years : )

How will you be spending the Holiday's this year?

With my brother in new york city.... /

What will you be doing for New Years Eve?

Dunno i hate the New Years Eve but i think i'm gonna get drunk somewere in LES...

What are you most looking forward to in 2006?

Travelling, Painting,Snowboarding,meetin' peolpe, enjoy life...

You can see Stefano's work here.

plus they have such sucky bass!! --MF

Brent Curry had been planning on taking a trip and with previous adventures testing both his endurance and comfort, he decided to construct a new vehicle to for his travels. The couch bike has two independent gear trains and uses a tiller handle to control the front wheels. Brent and his Norwegian cohort Eivind used the bike to explore Maritime Canada. They only drew attention from the cops 3 times during their journey. They did have a little trouble with the couch being 7 inches wider than a Lincoln Navigator; when riding on paved bike trails they had to disassemble the bike to get around gates designed to prevent motor vehicles. The travelogue also mentions being forcibly dismounted only once, when Brent failed to grab both brakes at the same time.

[via Treehugger]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
© 2006 Weblogs, Inc.