Animata is a real-time animation software for live performance, with the aid of which we can easily create scenes with virtual puppets. Creating and moving characters is as simple as loading an image and attaching a skeleton to it. Images can be placed in different depths of field so that they have a three-dimensional effect. We can move among the layers of various depth, creating a spatial effect, with the help of the camera, covering various segments of the scenes. The characters’ movements are controlled by external devices.

AniMobil is animation software which utilizes mobile phone cameras to make stop-motion animation. The result can be saved as an animated gif and uploaded, as an avatar or, as a simple video to be used for example on YouTube.

Light Arbour is an intelligent lighting system which reproduces phenomena of nature to light. While it is a design object in our living space, it provides an alternative communication facility (instead of hypertext) between places and people, reminds for phenomena and presence as well. It consists of two parts. The one is an optional phenomenon recorded as a video, the other is a display from lighting modules. It could be used in real time or like representation of videos which have already existed.

AutoCut is a sound-based "self-editing" video application. There are many short videos shot by mobile devices. They usually stay on the hard disk or be uploaded to a video-sharing portal without any editing.

Autoremixer is an automatic mixing software, which makes from 3-4 song a new one.

Within the thick visible breath that we exhale in cold air, tiny fairies come alive. Tough we can’t see them, if we are drunk they get drunk too; our breath is their flora and fauna. The Breath Fairies machine exposes these little creates, and lets people keep them on their mobile phones.

Bycall is a bicycle alarm, which transmits warning sign from the bicyclist to the radiostations in the cars, within a radius of 15 meters.

Mobile software
10 May - 31 August

CityScout is a mobile application which provides information on nearby places. There are many similar applications. CityScout stands out from these by not requiring a GPS device for its positioning but using mobile cells instead.

“Cross-connections” is a term that was commonly used when one call between two people from a landline phone was superimposed by another call making both the conversations heard by all four people involved. Often leading to the four speaking with each other. This is interesting because privacy, suddenly becomes a relative term. It has little to do with isolation but with the hope of not being discovered in a crowd.

Flights are personal lanterns, extraordinary lightning objects, party-accessories based on communication and simple interaction between people and their surroundings.

A comparing account of a journey performed in two different ways, as for our load on the environment: fuel consumption, air pollution and waste production. The unit of this account is the "ecological footprint". Some researchers of Kitchen Budapest traveled the distance between Budapest and Helsinki in mid-March. Some arrived in the festival Pixelache Helsinki 2008 by plane, others
by minibus. On the way they were documenting their environmental expenses, by taking pictures and making notes. For the birthday exhibition of Kitchen Budapest the project is summarized in a presentation.

Hímes is a special USB flash drive which was designed by the researchers of KiBu to 100% Design Tokyo design festival and market. It is small, girly, tricky and wicked.

We are in the process of rethinking street furniture designs in Budapest Hungary - so we could redefine function, form and informational architecture. Our desire is to create prototypes that could become crystallization points for an interconnected, inclusive and more usable metropolis.

street furniture design should:
1. utilize solar panels and power over ethernet
2. have input and output capacities
3. be interconnected, low-maintenance and super durable
4. have multiple functions: decreasing urban clutter and creating landmarks

Local Wifi/Telestreet/WebTV/activism project
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Social access, local content, community action!
Escape from the Internet ghetto!
Bridge the digital divide!

Independent media always have to operate in a media environment
characterised by an assymetry of resources where the mainstream media
commands more access and more content than independent media could
ever seize or produce. The subordinated position is always a source of
inspirationo for innovative tactiques that emerge from the reality and
the experience of repression.

The aim of the Landprint project is to reproduce subtle patterns and photos by combining various species of plants with programmed robotics.

Plants and flowers that spawn seem to make continuous patterns with their various colours and shades seen from a distance. With the use of programmed robotics for the planting and cutting of plants, we can manipulate the evolving patterns, to render photo-like, delicate images.

Mllamp project is an experiment for simulating emotions with putting minimal intelligence into everyday things.

If it has some anropomorph character, the viewer can easily go into with recognizing human gestures.

The interaction between the pair of Mllamps associated with human behavior can be recognised as emotions in lamps.

Nowadays, we interact with mobile phones via 15-20 small buttons, which makes it extremely hard to reach certain functions. To write the word "hello" needs 15 button presses on an average mobile. We also need long keystrokes to find someone in the contact list with hundreds of names. Voice dialling has been available for many years, but it isn't reliable at noisy places, and we just don't feel confortable to talk to our phones when others are listening.

Mobile Hero is a prototype of a brand new j2me based mobile game, with witch you can play your favourite songs with your mobile phone. While you are playing, the game shows you when and which button to press (and hold down). If you do well, you can hear your favourite hit. Of course its not as easy as it seems...

Jamming with mobile phones
Music sharing website

Our goal is to create musical content that was specifically created using (interconnected) mobile phones by utilizing phone interfaces that radically expand music-making competency for a larger number of people. Mobile musicians could create increasingly more complex sound loops from samples and they could mix and manipulate the created music further .

Our project aims at creating a mobile application that will be a personal and essential guide for touring the city of Budapest. While you cruise through the city, this product will enable you to watch videos about nearby interesting places with the help of mobile Internet. These videos are created by researchers from Kitchen Budapest with the help of a friendly-faced Hungarian stand-up comedian.

Our multi touch wall is a 2 by 1 meters touch sensitive surface, where one can interact with the projected media with one's fingers, hands, as well as more people at a time. We programmed a set of simple applications, where one can paint with hands, navigate a mind-map collaboratively, for example. We built this interface so we can learn and develop interesting and new kinds of contents for such interfaces, which are becoming more and more popular nowadays.

The night-light system “Home Moonlight” starts to operate when it detects motion in the room, and makes just little light, enough to sense the space, furniture, and things around in the room. The pleasant light covers the whole flat, following the direction of movement, and slowly fades out when movement ceases in the space. This light is weak enough not to disturb sleepers in the room. The light sources are not visible or hardly noticeable in daytime. When the daylight goes off, Home Moonlight lamps switch on automatically with a smooth fade-in.

No Copy Paste generates music and visuals in real-time, utilizing live coding, which emphasises the expressive possibilities afforded by programming languages as a means for defining and manipulating computational processes. The aesthetics of the performance is determined by the programming method, in which all musical and visual materials are built from elements found on the spot.

Participating researchers

Papp Gábor, Kovács Zoltán, Németh Péter, Szalai András, Nagy Ágoston

How does it work?

PIXELIGHT - is an intelligent lighting system based on two geographically different places linked by Internet.
Usually we are not conscious about the complex role what light plays in human life (among many issues: it shows how time passes, it influences our perception of space and time or simply how it can determine our daily mood...). The project focus on phenomenas of light, which could provide communication between people and places in a metaphoric and sensitive way.

Rotary cellphone is conventional inside, but retro designed outside. You can connect your mobile device to this phone via bluetooth. Then dial the number and call anybody you want, with your own cellphone.

Some years before, when rotary phones were usual, nobody could imagine, that some years after phones will be chordless. Using this phone is a good opportunity to remember, that the technology is developing by leaps and bounds.

In this project we make patterns by using plants as they were photographic materials. We set plants and use artificial light covered by different pattern to leave trails.

We have a new way of research what we would like to realize in this summer. There are some kind of grass which sheep like and which they do not like. If we set a field by mixing two different hayseeds, we get a latent picture or pattern and sheep will make it visible while they eat.

(By summer resident David Boardman during August of 2007.) TransDanube is a networked object, a spime, a blogject, a "thing that thinks". It is a home-made boat equipped with technological stuff that flows randomly along Danube river according to its unpredictable dynamics. It's our Balkans' Voyager I spaceship. No way to control it. We can just collect data from TD's boat as they come. Right now it should be located somewhere between Budapest and the Black Sea. Google him. Or watch what's going on around the tiny and fragile boat.

WifiPed is an electricity supplier driven by the pedalling force of the cyclist. The rotary movement of bicycle can easily be used for generating electricity during sport, which feeds the Wi-Fi router.

Paricipating researchers

Szonja Kádár, András Böröcz

Why do we prepare it?

ZuiPrezi is a zooming presentation editor which allows you to easily create stunning presentations. With the help of ZuiPrezi you can create dynamic and visually structured zooming maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings. ZuiPrezi has a very intuitive interface and support for online sharing.

More on the zuiprezi.com website.