Hacks

Music for 18 Bouncy Balls

You're Steve Reich, you're in a vintage Paris music instrument shop, and you have a bouncy ball gun, or two. A chaotic nod to Music for 18 Musicians.

Play Source

Rainbow Letters

A typing playground for small children.

Play Source

Little Green House

An ambient weather-accurate view of a house that time travels.

Visit

Here comes the sun

London was looking dull on Street View, so I thought I'd bring the sun out. It became a Google Chrome Experiment.

Try it Chrome Experiments Coverage

Beepy

A heart rate monitor using your webcam. Sit still with your forehead in the box, and it reads your pulse from tiny changes in skin colour, based on MIT CSAIL's video magnification work.

Try it (needs a webcam)

Live typing statistics

A live look at how you type: how long you hold each key, plotted as you go, and a heatmap of your keyboard. A spin-off demo from the neuroQWERTY research.

Try it

mediCAPTCHA

Stop spam, fight malaria. The idea: CAPTCHAs that ask people to spot malaria parasites in blood smear images from phone microscopes, so every login helps with a diagnosis.

See the idea

Optical toys

Speckle, a one-pixel checkerboard that shimmers as it shifts. Tunnel, an endless drift down towards a light.

Speckle Tunnel

Alarm tones for the Ramos

Alarm tone design for the Ramos, a nixie tube alarm clock and Kickstarter project by Paul Sammut.

nex2

A simple site for viewing any two web pages side by side, and sharing the result with a short link.

Try it

The sound of SoundCloud

The SoundCloud logo as a waveform, made from white noise.

Version for SoundCloud True waveform

whsprs

An online version of the game telephone. Whispers are geotagged from the moment they start, so you can see how they spread around the world as people listen to and re-record their nearest or a random whisper.

Built at Music Hack Day San Francisco 2012, at TokBox.

Only the landing page survives; the recording side needed the old server.

cloudverb

Hear any recording in any space. Using the Web Audio API's convolution, it played any SoundCloud track through any SoundCloud impulse response, so a clap recorded on your phone could put a track in that room.

Built at Music Hack Day London 2012, at Facebook UK.

No longer online.

cloudchamber

Put the National Physical Laboratory's reverberation chamber, one of the most reverberant spaces in the world, online. Anyone could submit a track, which was played into the chamber, recorded, and posted back to SoundCloud with its reverb.

Built at Music Hack Day London 2011, at the Barbican.

No longer online.