Keep Your Resolutions Dance Party NYE 2009 from Robotkid on Vimeo.

How did you spend your New Year’s Eve, visualists? And how much do you love live visuals and dancing?

Our friend Robotkid (aka Josh Randall) just showed me this video of the frigid dance party in Boston, complete with –10-degree (Fahrenheit) wind chills and only 10-degree weather. (That’s 12 C, –23 C wind chill.)

Despite the finger frostbite risk, that is a Lemur multi-touch controller you see briefly. This does reveal a certain challenge with capacitive touch as an input method: because it requires bare skin, you may freeze your fingers off. Correction/update: Matt Boch who was handling the Lemur notes that because it is resistive, not capacitive, it can be used with gloves. The real problem: the organic technology of you, freezing to death.

Apple even went as far as patenting winter-friendly iPhone gloves, as reported this week by AppleInsider. Gizmodo calls that embarassing, but for all we know, the blogger lives in California.

Who else out there did live visuals (in person or via a warm, cozy streamed event) New Year’s Eve?

7 responses to “Freeze Your Booty: Lemur VJing on New Year’s Eve in 10-Below Wind Chills”

  1. Louis Muloka says:

    That looked awesome! Thanks for the video!

    Awesome to see VDMX with standing below 0 temperatures. 😉

    Kind of reminds me of the Igloo Fest (winter edition of piknik Electronik) in Montreal : http://www.igloofest.ca/

  2. m@tt boch says:

    Indeed, but the Lemur is resistive, so it handled my gloves OK, it's just that I eventually got too cold to really move my fingers. Good thing I had an audio-reactive autopilot mode in my patch.

    I thought about this a bunch before the gig, and used Tavo's iPod gloves to use my MacBookPro's capacitive touch pad. Too pad it only has the index finger, so multitouch gestures weren't really possible.

    In hindsight, I wish I'd allowed for more variable control of my patch via Wiimote, as waggling would've kept me warmer.

  3. Peter Kirn says:

    Ah, good call, m@tt. I hadn't tried to use the Lemur with gloves on, so I couldn't speak from experience. 😉

    It's like the opposite of the problems at Burning Man, here!

  4. grigori says:

    Cold… brrrrrrrrrrr

    🙂

    My New Years was up at the tropical North queensland through the wet season. NYE night went great, but the following day it got pretty crazy as massive rain floods came through the party site.
    http://i544.photobucket.com/albums/hh334/styhp/DP
    http://i544.photobucket.com/albums/hh334/styhp/DP
    http://i544.photobucket.com/albums/hh334/styhp/DP

    better then any hollywood movie, i tell ya!

  5. jamthehut says:

    shit sorry, i am not used to using href tags by hand anymore.

    I was in Verona to visit the NYE party at http://www.izona.it Interzona where Play Paul performed, and was struck by yet ANOTHER Exyzt sampling.
    http://blog.antivj.com/2008/exyzt-installation-ri
    And at breakfast I called out the staff on it, messing with them saying they ripped off the Killers. Turns out they had seen the Killers version, but unfortunately only one week before New Years, much too late to do somethign about it. "Yes we stole it, but we stole it from Etienne, not the Killers."

    I made my first, yet very time consuming cellphone video movie. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykXIFOpuPao

    You can catch the cube ripoffs here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykXIFOpuPao#t=3m18

    For those who are envious of how smooth the edits are, I point you towards using Fastcut software on a 1ghz powerbook g4 on which only the upper 2/3rds of the screen still work. (my screen limitations on my portable limit my app use to some strange alternatives)

  6. Abdul Smooth says:

    12 dec Celcius? No worries! Wouldn't really freeze your finger tips in that… Scooter weather still… I once did a couple gigs in Montreal with -15deg + windchill!!!! Then again, canucks are crazy 😛

    BTW. Marmot made some iPod-friendly gloves a while back; still use my pair: they're called the Marmot iGloves: http://marmot.com/fall_2007/womens/gloves/liner/i

    a./

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