[Hizook via Engadget]

We gather around the group in a circle, about two or three metres away from the Tesla coils as the band performs. This is not some “don’t want to dance in front of the stage” kind of teenage awkwardness — if you stand too close when the band plays, you might actually get electrocuted.

When the lights go down, a loud buzz generates, followed by streaks of lighting into the air. Then the music begins, followed by the sound of drums that are as precise as can be. What follows is an overload of light and sound that is pure amazing, a melange of familiar melodies from our favourite video games (Mario and Zelda themes), TV shows (Airwolf) and pop songs (”Sexyback”).

Once the band stops playing, we still can’t roam freely. First, they must discharge the coils, ridding them of any stray lightning bolts that might be trapped inside.

Consisting of a pair of Tesla coils—plus a pair of LED-equipped robotic drums and an Open Labs sound console—the ArcAttack experience is largely automated, suggestive of a future era when a musical performance isn’t about the people playing the instruments, but rather the technology involved.

ArcAttack hails from Austin, Texas and certainly don’t fit the mould of what most consider a band should be. But that’s a good thing.

John Di Prima is the man behind the boards, responsible for the execution of the live show. He controls the coils and drums, plus mixing in a few new sounds during the set. He’s also responsible for most of the songwriting and drum programming.

Patrick Brown, aka Parsec, is the master of ceremonies, decked out in steampunk-esque attire consisting of a Faraday Suit with a string of lights that react with the Tesla coils, plus the requisite lightning-proof goggles. He’s the link between the crowd and the show. He found the Di Prima brothers at an Austin Burning Man event and jokes that he’s managed to not get kicked out yet.

Joe Di Prima designs, builds and maintains everything for the group, serving as the technician when the show is on the road. When they’re composing and recording, he plays guitar. With a background in electronics repair, Joe eventually linked up with the engineering department at the University of Texas, where he first learned about the magic of Tesla coils.

I took a few minutes to interview ArcAttack—what makes them who they are—besides the Tesla coils, of course…

——

Gizmodo: What does your setup consist of?

Joe: It would be two DRSSTC (Dual Resident Solid State Tesla Coil) units which are MIDI controlled. There’s a fibre optic cable running to some digital logic boards that are in the Tesla coils.

John: The Open Labs MiKO MIDI console hosts the PC Software (Fruity Loops) that we use to actually sequence the music.

The MiKO is just a Windows machine with a bunch of nice MIDI interfaces, cased in metal—which is nice because we have a lot of EMF emitted from the coils. I actually used to run it off my laptop, but it would crash all the time.

Patrick: The drum machine has a solenoid for every drum, and they’re MIDI controlled also…from the MiKO.

Gizmodo: How did you get the idea to create a musical show using Tesla coils? Had it been done before this?

Joe: When we did it originally, it was the first time it had been done in this manner. There are a few ways that you can audio modulate a Tesla coil — this way is known as PRM modulation. Now there are a few dozen people that picked up on it, but nobody does it to the scale that we do. It’s still fairly new, and surprisingly still fairly unknown.

When I first saw a solid state Tesla coil in operation, I understood how it worked. After a few minutes of playing with it, I got the idea that, many years later, I put into practice.

Gizmodo: Who are some of your musical and tech influences?

John: Well obviously Nikola Tesla. For music, we all have pretty different tastes. But the cool thing with our project is that we can do anything from Pantera to the Chicken Dance and people would dig it. I listen to electronic rock, Kraftwerk, Daft Punk…if I could do a show with Daft Punk, you could shoot me afterward.

Joe: I didn’t know what music was until three years ago. For tech influences, hard to say, but Faraday, all my mentors at all the repair shops, my dad (who was a biomedical engineer) and Steve Ward, the father of the DRSSTC, who I met at the University of Texas.

Gizmodo: What are some of the weirdest/favourite/disastrous shows you’ve played?

John: Joe had to tackle a cop once.

Joe: Yeah the cops had come shut down this rave we were playing at, and the Tesla coils were still running. He was coming over to shut our stuff off, not knowing exactly what it was, and he was walking straight into the Tesla coils. So I grabbed him and pushed him back. Amazingly he did not Tase me. He was actually kinda grateful. Funniest part is, after they kicked everyone out, they walked around and asked if we could turn the stuff back on.

Patrick: My favourite show so far was when we played DragonCon in Atlanta a few weeks ago. We did the Mad Scientist Ball. We had our big Tesla coils and a Faraday cage, and revealed our new stage show, which assisted people in transforming themselves into true joy…by being bathed in the Tesla coil rays.

During our stage performance, there were about 15 people that we put into the cage, and this one guy named Dr. Satan had big metal wings that he put onto his back. We get him up there, but the cage is kinda small, and he has metal sticking out all over his body. So we tell him “don’t move.” Soon the entire crowd started chanting along. That was pretty cool. [And obviously Dr. Satan lived through it.]

John: We were in the Netherlands for two weeks, and we played a heavy metal fest where they put us in front of this church that was lit all demonic looking. On our stage, there were these big glass viewing areas where you could see the deceased founders of the town. I think that’s pretty much the most epic thing ever. Heavy metal music through lightning over visible graves.

Q: What is the one gadget you can’t live without?

Joe: My iPhone.

Patrick: My Dell laptop.

John: The Open Labs MiKO console. If it was human, I’d marry it.

The Chrome Frame allows IE to use HTML5 and other open source technologies, including high performance JavaScript enhancements, that Internet Explorer’s Trident Engine is unable to render. One of the largest barriers to the mass utilisation of HTML5 was IE’s lack of support for the standard. When people install the plug-in, and developers add a X-UA compatible tag, websites can have HTML5 elements without sacrificing losing a large segment of the potential user base. Without the X-UA tag, pages render normally using the Trident engine instead of the WebKit Chrome renderer.

One of the major advantages for Google in issuing the plug-in is ensuring IE compatibility for Google Wave. Users with the plug-in will also have the benefits of offline storage and utilisation of the canvas tag. It’s no secret that Google believes that the traditional desktop base is going the way of the dinosaur—making HTML5 and enhanced JavaScript a ubiquitous standard is the first step to emulating desktop environment via the web.

OK, great. Now let’s see how many of the IT departments that refuse to upgrade from IE6 allow their users to install some crazy Google plug-in. [Ars Technica and Google Chrome Blog]

The formal name for this MakerBot is the Cupcake CNC, and is able to rapidly prototype anything. It consists of a series of belts and pulleys, laser cutter, a wood cabinet and a stepper motor. And really, it’s hard to complain about anything that plays “Television Rules the Nation” as a pure aside.

Read more about our Giz Gallery 09 here and see what else we’ll be playing with at the event.

Features:

•Cool glowing blue tube with 8 digits and alarm on/off dot
•Adjustable brightness
•Alarm with volume adjust
•Precision watch crystal keeps time with 0.002% accuracy!
•Clear plastic enclosure protects clock from you and you from clock
•Battery backup will let the clock keep the time for up to 2 weeks without power
•Selectable 12h or 24h display
•Displays day and date
•10 minute snoozer
•Integrated boost converter so it can run off of standard DC wall adapters, works in any country regardless of mains power
•Great for desk or night table use, the clock measures 4.9″ x 2.9″ x 1.3″ (12.5cm x 7.4cm x 3.3cm)
•Completely open source hardware and software, ready to be hacked and modded!

Again, the design is completely open source, so if you prefer to build from scratch you can hit up the project page for the full schematics, source codes and files. [Ladyada via Slashdot]

Ars says the details are pretty slim for the time being, but they predict that the OS would feature the full suite of Google Apps (just out of beta today, btw). They don’t think the OS would be an Android port either, since the Android browser uses significantly different chunks of code than Chrome. Android is also designed around touchscreen functionality, so that makes sense. But Ars doesn’t dismiss the possibility that they might be working on a lightweight, standalone Linux OS, either. But for now, as it’s still in rumour phase, we’ll have to wait and see. [Ars Technica]

Instead of creating a proprietary copy of these pieces of infrastructure, Powerset decided instead to turn to Hadoop, a Lucene subproject that is a framework for running data-intensive applications on large clusters of commodity hardware…Unfortunately, there was no Hadoop equivalent to Google’s BigTable storage engine.

Because we have benefited greatly by leveraging the available Hadoop technology, Powerset decided to give back to the community by developing an open-source analogue to BigTable that is built on top of HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System). After all, we need to develop it, anyway, it isn’t part of the Powerset “secret sauce,” and we, in turn, could benefit from contributions from other members of the community.

In other news, Satan called. He said the snow in hell is great but it’s freezing down there, so bring your skis and a big coat. [Cnet]

DoubleTwist was created by the famous DVD copy-protection reverse-engineer who calls himself DVD Jon, so you know it’s friendly to the budget-minded poweruser. So far, it’s been a joy to use, but it’s still in beta and has some flaws. Here’s what it does now, and what it should do:

What doubleTwist Does:

Manages Photos, Music and Video on Your Computer
It watches your Music, Photos and Movies folders, and lets you drag and drop any other folders into its media browser. There’s also a Spotlight-esque search function to check your folders. Music is organised in sortable list form, while photos and videos are displayed as tiles.

Lets You Maintain an Online “Feed” and Send/Receive Media To/From Other doubleTwist Users
DoubleTwist has a built in social-networking aspect that lets you create an account, add friends and shoot files back and forth. You can post video, photos and music to a “feed,” which is basically a media-rich version of the Facebook wall, and it gets syndicated to all your friends.

They say you can send any type of file back and forth on doubleTwist, which seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen. We haven’t yet had the chance to fully test this feature, but they remain pretty vague on its limits . And for those who aren’t signed up, you can send them an email link to the doubleTwist servers, where they can view/watch/hear the content you want them to receive.

Connects to a Variety of Phones and Devices
DoubleTwist is really touting its ability to connect with devices here, especially BlackBerry and Android phones. (Not surprisingly, you can’t yet sync with Apple products.) When you plug in your device, it shows up under its model name, and doubleTwist organises media files in the same way it does for your computer. You can drag and drop freely between the two devices. (see top photo)

Auto-Converts Files to Provide Compatibility With Your Device
Because it only works with devices it knows, doubleTwist autoconverts media files as necessary. So if you have a .mp4 video file that your phone doesn’t support, doubleTwist will detect this before uploading and convert appropriately. (We’ll be testing this to see how long a movie in the wrong format might take.)

Connects to Your iTunes Library for Access to Playlists and Other Stuff
Like other media devices and apps, doubleTwist can read your iTunes Library XML file, which provides access to playlists and podcasts, in addition to the the rest of your library. Most of the crap that pops up in the left column of iTunes will show up here.

Uploads Photos and Videos to Online Services
With Flickr and Facebook integration, you can drag, drop and tag your photos, then upload them with a click, and without exiting doubleTwist. The same thing goes for sending videos to YouTube.

WHAT DOUBLETWIST SHOULD DO
iPhone and iPod Support
As we mentioned, there’s not a lot of love for iPhone and iPod yet, but the doubleTwist team says this functionality will actually appear in future versions.

AirTunes Support
One of my favourite features of using iTunes with an Airport Express is the AirTunes streaming feature. There are 3rd-party apps, such as AirFoil, that take advantage of this feature, so it shouldn’t be too hard to work this into future versions.

Native Playlist Support and Streaming Libraries
For now, there is no way to import or create music playlists, aside from what’s already in iTunes. You also can’t connect to other people’s libraries or an iTunes Music Server on your network. This means you’ll still be using iTunes for some stuff.

Advanced File Categorization/Organization
Right now, the categorization and organisation of media files are a bit rudimentary. Music shows up in a list view, but the only sortable categories are Title, Artist, and Time. Photos and Videos only show up as tiles, with no other view or sort options, except adjusting thumbnail size.

For people with tons of files, this doesn’t quite cut it.

I also don’t really like that when you play a song, it launches a second window which compiles the list of songs played while the app has been open. But there’s no way to remove songs from the list aside from closing the app, nor can you keep playback all in one window. It’s not major, but kinda bleh.

BOTTOM LINE
DoubleTwist is an extremely promising app that really could become the de facto standard for media players if they continue to develop and improve on this beta. The idea of not having to use iPhoto ever again (I hate it), or getting more functionality than what VLC offers for videos is pretty exciting.g. [doubleTwist via MacRumors]