These things are being developed by the Robotics Institute on our campus. I’m partially amazed and partially terrified. I’ve heard they work wirelessly and they want to have snakes where each module has a camera so they can break apart into independent pieces, spread, and reassemble automatically. Some of the climbing behavior is pretty impressive…

Read more about this technology at the Modsnake website.

Two topics that I have been been reading a lot lately, Domain Specific Languages in Ruby and screencasting have converged to create a very cool little project called Castanaut. I found Castanaut via Peter Cooper of Ruby Inside. Castanaut is essentially a programming language for screencasts. So in castanaut you can write things like this:

launch "Safari", at(10, 10, 800, 600)

type "http://www.inventivelabs.com.au"

hit Enter

pause 2

move to(100, 100)

move to(200, 100)

move to(200, 200)

move to(100, 200)

move to(100, 100)

say "I drew a square!"

Thanks to the flexibility of Ruby, you can write your screenplay as a script and run it to automatically create a screencast. How cool is that? While this might take some of the personal touch away from screencasts, it could also be a powerful tool for those who need to create them in a more systematic way.

SIGGRAPH 2006