Salvation _ Automata Midterm

“Nail hammering, finger nail pulling, brain stirring, body spinning.
What do you feel watching those shadows thriving darkly?”

A hand-crank automata with Cam & Followers system.

Refined version of this.

{Walk & Talk}

Walk & Talk

is the final project of me and Ziv for Spatial Media.

Ideas

For the final of Spatial Media, there’s no restriction on content and context, so because of the struggling process of brainstorming, we decided to make a project helping brainstorming! Getting the inspirations from Land and Sea, a game heard from Ziv from Israel, and the Boundary Functions of Scott Snibbe that exploring the relation between people and spaces, we built up a system that people can expand their territory by walking and shaking, and once people stop moving, their territories will shrink and eventually disappear. Based on several researches proved that “Body Movements Can Influence Problem Solving”(e.g. Science Daily, May 13, 2009), it has the potential to be installed in office space, and help employees brainstorming.

Concept

Each person in the game is assigned an initial territory, which he can expand by walking. If they don’t walk, their territory gets smaller. Also, if they don’t talk (to brainstorm or just chit chat), their territories will shrink. This way, people have to walk and talk in order to keep his/her territory.

Context

This game can be used for multiple purposes, e.g. DECISION MAKING • BRAINSTORMING • VOTING ON IDEAS • BUDGET PLANNING. Overall the main function is provoking thoughts about sharing and space with movements.

Technique

Tools: OpenFrameworks, Kinect*1, projectors*2.

Developing

1) The first attempt to expand the territories based on the blobs movement captured by Kinect.

2) Using ofPolylines to smooth the shape of geometry.

3) Beautiful mistakes ;)

4) Final version of color-filled geometry.

Triangulation!

Triangulation.. Finally! Want it so bad for a semester. Luckily having a winter break to do it. Have a lot of rooms for improvement but still, one step further!

*UPDATE*(in the middle of writing this post UGH)

New version. Normal speed!

In the middle of documentation, the ill performance, both low speed running and wrong color picking bothered me a lot, so I went through the whole codes again and making adjustment around. And then I found out what the problem is! It’s the random plotting of points for triangles! It not only slows down the process, but also causes the ill performance of choosing the right color for the triangle. OH YEAH SO HAPPY. It’s the similar “bitter yet sweet moment” I usually will have when coding… I think I’m ready for the new semester!

Old version. x3 speed! Slow and chaos.

Old Line version. Slow but it seems to have better outcome with the random plotting points methods!!

Image Gallery

Basic idea of code

1. capture image from webcam and save as PImage source
2. iterate through source, pick up every pixel, compare either a) colors or b) brightness difference(I found comparing by colors will be more accurate).
3. if the difference is bigger than certain threshold, plant a point in class Voronoi. Voronoi does all the calculation to transform points into triangles.
4. for each triangle gotten out from Voronoi, using getCentroid() to pickup the color to fill the triangle built up with beginShape(), endShape() and vertex().
5. wipe out Voronoi and build a new one every 10 frames to speed up the performance.

References

• from Robbie Tilton. ITP alumnus! This is where my base came from! Clear description made me not afraid of trying the code out! From him, I got the idea of using Cols and Rows to boost up the performance, and plotting points for triangles with a random deviation of 5 pixels to make it look less grid-like(BUT randomness is not good for picking color, and it also slows down the performance).
• from Jan Vantomme. Very well documentation! From him, I learned the difference between getCentroid() and getSites(), and also learned that, since getCentroid() and getSites() don’t return the voronoi regions and points in same order, to fill the right color for right position it has to be looped to iterate through, picking and filling up the color at the same time.

Inspiration & Further

• amazing algorithmic portraits by Diana Lange.
• triangulation tools done by Bezalel workshop, so complicated yet the outcomes are so gorgeous.
• hemesh –> being able to make 3D triangulation mesh(printable too)

Code, as below: Read The Rest

ICM_Glitchtchtchitch

ICM Final– Glitchtchtchitch.

Manipulation and surveillance visualization.

Featured in ITP Winter Show 2013(See all the pics!).

Glitchtchtchitch is a live interactive installation showing multiple short-lived fault in a system. By bringing out the imperfection of technology with massive pixels manipulation, sound distortion, and multiple screens display, Glitchtchtchitch visualize the transient fault and the incapability of communication. Although mainly sending serious messages, with the effect of headless illusions, heads displacement, and delay, it leaves audience undergoing an experience without too much pressure.

Glitchtchtchitch is presented by running more than 10 Processing sketches at the same time, and using 2-3 projectors to increase the amount of screen, the variety, and increase the level of distortion.

Main idea –>  In order to cubify heads, instead of just altering pixels, I made an object “Cube” to get, restore, alter, and display the pixels of specific range. Also to achieve the headless effect, besides the library OpenCV, I took a background image beforehand, and display its pixels within certain ranges, once detecting a face. ALL THE SOURCE CODES

Notes

• Speed issue has room for improvement.
• Different scale presentation style(projectors included) looks nice.
• From user test and presentation feedback, people love headless and delay effect the most. Because they’re the most bizarre, unrealistic, and uncommon visual impact.

Problems with solutions

• OutOfBounds —> constrain(xxx, 0, numPixels-1)
• flip horizontal —> video.width-fx-1
• can’t cover image with pixels[ ] —> solved by using pixels for both
• improve the sketch speed —> P2D, PFrame,
• connect to webcam? PS eye? —> camera list, example

References

• scale PImage http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17705781/video-delay-buffer-in-processing-2-0
• Minim noise http://code.compartmental.net/tools/minim/manual-noise/
• hide menu http://processing.org/discourse/beta/num_1224367967.html

Original proposal –> Here.

Ani_Butter

With amazing Kate <3

links: trailer, production post.

Set gallery and our lovely character melty close shot.

Ani_Butter_Trailer

Enjoy the greasy!

Ani_Butter Test Shot

which is totally useable!

Working on Sunday to pull it off. Setting up took the most of the time, and the filming was definitely less than 1 hour… But it’s totally worth it! What a lovely home of a little cube of Butter. And Kate showed magic to knit the rug. UNBELIEVABLE. It’s a magical world of cardboard and bread :D

More to come :)