– Huffington Post, MotionPhone App Lets You Communicate Without Talking (VIDEO) by Gazelle Emami

Gravilux for Android reviewed in AndroidCentral http://www.androidcentral.com/gravilux-android-app-review

CreativeApplications.net: http://www.creativeapplications.net/ipad/motion-phone-ipad/

San Francisco, April 19, 2012

MotionPhone, a new app for the iPhone and iPad, enables a unique form of visual communication, allowing people to create animations together on iPads and iPhones. The app, created by Scott Snibbe Studio, is the company’s first release since producing Björk’s groundbreaking Biophilia App Album last year, and is a similarly innovative combination of interactive visuals with music.

In MotionPhone, fingers’ movements become colorful dancing abstract shapes whose personality comes directly from the way one moves. “Each person moves differently and naturally creates their own original style of animation.” said Scott Snibbe, the app’s creator, “Each of our movements are as original and recognizable as our face or the way we walk, and with MotionPhone, it’s the first time we get to see these traces of movement.”

As its name suggests, MotionPhone is more than an animation program. Using Apple’s Game Kit technology, the app lets two people connect to each other over local networks to have a ‘visual conversation,’ creating animation together on an infinite two-dimensional plane. The resulting collaborative animations, reminiscent of 1980s animated music videos, or experimental films from the 1930s, can be cacophonous or sublime. Snibbe calls the process ‘Visual Music’ and with the networking component, ‘Visual Jamming.”

The app was originally an interactive artwork that Snibbe says evolved from his days in college studying animation and computer science. Working late in research labs while listening to classic jazz albums like Mingus Ah Um, he created a networked animation program that allows people to improvise animation in the same way that jazz artists improvise music.

The program eventually found the attention of art curators in the 1990s, winning a Prix Ars Electronica prize—sometimes referred to as the ‘Academy Awards’ of interactive art. However, Snibbe always wanted MotionPhone to be distributed widely, at a low cost, so that the program could be enjoyed by everyone. As Snibbe notes, “Now apps like Motion Phone can be sold for the cost of a video rental, instead of the price of a car.”

MotionPhone takes the same social gaming technology that lets you play Scrabble with your friends—Apple’s Game Kit—and uses the system for collaborative play and communication, much like parlor games of the 19^th century. Snibbe believes MotionPhone, despite being almost twenty years old, is the first commercially available networked animation program.

MotionPhone can be found in the iTunes App Store and is available for $2.99 as an ‘HD’ iPad version and $1.99 for the iPhone version.

Buy MotionPhone for iPhone in iTunes App Store
Buy MotionPhone HD for iPad in iTunes App Store

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2OVn4fUHPs

Screenshots and icon:

About Tripolar

Tripolar animates the tangled, abstract, ever-changing forms a pendulum makes as it swings over a base of three magnets, tracing the path it follows when released from the point you touch. The drawing that results is a chaotic system in which minute changes to the start position produce large changes in the pendulum’s path. By invisibly moving the starting position in microscopic increments towards your finger’s position,Tripolar lets you explore the points between pixels, simulating a resolution thousands of times that of the screen.

Tripolar was commissioned for CODeDOC, an online exhibition curated by Christiane Paul in 2002 for the Whitney Museum’s Artport website that explored the relationship between a software artist’s code and the resulting work of art. The original Java source code demonstrates that changing any of the few parameters determining its operation radically alters the work: in most cases making it non-functional, hanging, exploding, imploding, or oscillating.

Tripolar’s name suggests the connection between mental states and chaotic phenomena: if even a simple physical system is so unpredictable and sensitive to initial conditions, what about our minds? Chaos and complexity reign at all scales.

To further explore the boundary between a software artist’s work and the interactive creations made with “users” of the work, the iPhone and iPad versions of Tripolar allows you to move, add, and remove magnets to create an infinite array of configurations besides the original Tripolar configuration. Once you make a change the the original artist’s configuration, the title of the work changes from Tripolar to Untitled, marking this boundary even more clearly.

To read more, visit: CODeDOC, Whitney’s Artport, snibbe.com, and Tripolar on snibbe.com. © 2002-2012 Scott Sona Snibbe.

Screenshots for iPad and iPhone, and app icons:

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1665704/14-of-the-years-best-ideas-in-interface-design#6

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1665704/14-of-the-years-best-ideas-in-interface-design#9

A highlight of the new version is the new music visualizer that creates gravitational music videos filled with color and stars based on any of the tracks in your music library. Gravilux 2.0 also features a new animated typography module, allowing people to create words and phrases made of stars, and then warp them with gravity and antigravity, distorting, collapsing, and exploding apart. Both new features are available as an in-app purchase as part of Gravilux Plus, and you will see more features added in the coming months.

Gravilux 2.0  makes the entire app experience easier to use with a new clear and elegant iconic interface, including a new color wheel for color animations. A new color algorithm enhances full-color animation of stars based on their speed. And the app has been optimized for new devices, rendering is sped-up,  retina support has been enhanced, and you can now share images via Twitter, Facebook, and email.

Gravilux 2.0 is available exclusively in the iTunes App Store for iOS.

iPad screenshots:

iPhone Retina Screenshots:

icon (512×512):

Scott Snibbe Studio, developer of best selling apps for the iPad including Björk’s Biophilia, has released its first Android App – Gravilux – available now in the Android Marketplace, and the Amazon Appstore for Android, including compatibility with Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

Scott Snibbe, President of the studio, said: “I’ve always believed that interactivity has the same capacity as cinema to engage people in emotionally meaningful experiences that go beyond the goal-oriented worlds of games. Gravilux is not a game, a utility, or an educational tool, but instead a purely interactive space for wonder, play, and exploration. Bringing Gravilux to Android opens these experiences to a huge new audience.”

Asked about his choice for a two-week exclusive launch with Amazon, Snibbe answered: “Books are one of the last media in which people focus in rapt concentration, and the market for the original Kindles. Amazon’s Kindle Fire has the potential to promote this kind of attention with other forms of media, such as apps and games, and it’s the type of attention we hope to sustain with our uniquely creative, mind-expanding apps. Gravilux gives users new forms of sophisticated, rich interactive content that go beyond the simplicity of games.”

Gravilux for Android is available  through the Android Marketplace and the Amazon Appstore for Android for $1.99.

About Scott Snibbe Studio

Scott Snibbe Studio is pioneering a new interactive medium with the emotional impact of cinema, yet one where we play an active part in changing, creating, and exploring worlds beneath our fingertips. We produce original, category-defying music, art, and entertainment apps, and partner creatively with select musicians, filmmakers, and writers. We believe interactivity is capable of no less than bringing our dreams to life.

Download Gravilux from the Android Market: http://market.android.com/details?id=com.snibbe.gravilux.activities
Download Gravilux from the Amazon Appstore for Android: http://www.amazon.com/gp/mas/dl/android?p=com.snibbe.gravilux.activities
Video of Gravilux for Android: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tbFAfWZdL0
Press kit including screenshots of app: http://www.snibbe.com/store/2011/11/29/gravilux/
Scott Snibbe Studio: http://snibbestudio.com

Screenshots:

Playing the New Bjork Album, and Playing Along, With Apps, Seth Schiesel, New York Times, October 25, 2011