Stilla is a new collaboration between Patrick Juchli and Bernhard Frey, an iPhone app that combines photography with 3d projection. The app allows you to take multiple photos from different views, remembering your orientation and positioning those photos in 3d space related to another another. Not to be confused with traditional panoramas, Stilla allows you to blend multiple images in 3D space on the same axis.

Continue reading.... Stilla [iPhone]

Karl D.D. Willis, Ivan Poupyrev, Scott E. Hudson and Moshe Mahler have just released details of their latest project at Disney Research, a novel interactive system that allows multiple people to play and work together using a custom handheld device. The device combines handheld projector, IR camera and a ranging sensor. The project is a step forward from MotionBeam, first project by members of the team developed with Disney and  Computational Design Lab at Carnegie Mellon University.

The system is immediate and simple: users simply project onto a surface and their projection becomes aware and responsive to other projections nearby. Interaction can range from projector-based games, such as boxing with projected characters, to everyday tasks such as exchanging contact information by ‘dragging and dropping’ onto another user’s projection.

The system consists of a hybrid mobile projector that outputs both visible and invisible projections at the same time. The invisible projection contains tracking data that can be recognised by the device camera, allowing accurate location tracking of multiple projections and lightweight communication between devices. The games range from boxing match to task management and file exchange. See video for details.

Continue reading.... SideBySide [c++, Mobile, Mac, Games]

In the decade where videogames were born, everything virtual looked like rectangular blocks. From today’s perspective, the representation of a tennis court in the earliest videogames is hard to distinguish from a soccer or a basketball field.
‘PING! – Augmented Pixel’ is a seventies style videogame, that adds a layer of digital information and oldschool aesthetics to a video signal: A classic rectangular video game ball moves across a video image. Whenever the ball hits something dark, it bounces off. The game itself has no rules and no goal. Like GTA, it provides a free environment in which anything is possible. And like Sony’s Eyetoy, it uses a video camera as game controller.

What I found interesting when I developed this game, is, that it could have been made already in the seventies. The technology that I used for it is (in a way) similar to what Atari used for the first Pong. It becomes even more awkward, if you think that the electronic components for capturing and evaluating a video signal are cheaper than the rotary game controllers that Atari used. But still, from an economic point of view it makes sense that Eyetoys weren’t the ultimate controllers of thirty-something years ago, as a video camera was probably very hard to afford back in the days.

For those who want to know how it works:

The game is programed with AVR-GCC on an ATmega8 microcontroller that runs with 16MHz. The controller gets basic videosignal synchronisation information from an LM1881 sync separator that triggers two hardware interrupts. One for a new image, the other one for a new line. The controller evaluates the brightness around the pixel (/ball) via its comparator input. Drawing the white image overlay is realized with a simple pull-up resistor in the signal line.

Continue reading.... PING! Augmented Pixel [Tutorials, Games]

‘The Simple Act of Making a Mark’ by Alan Rorie is a recursive drawing machine that attempts to abstract the creative process.The machine begins by looking at what is placed before it and detects patterns within it. The machine then traces those subtle patterns, amplifying and solidifying them until generative patterns emerge autonomously.

The Simple Act of Making a Mark began when I was imagining what would happen if you cyclically 3d printed and 3d scanned an object, and although this is a project I’m working on, I realized that I could explore this space faster if I limited it to two dimensions.  The original idea was to use a pen and a fresh sheet of paper with each loop.  But late one night I put some table salt on the drawing platform to see what would happen and I loved the result. I view this work as a platform rather then work that has a completion point. In the future I’m going to experiment with different drawing media and styluses.

The installation uses an Arduino Uno, an AdaFruit Motor Shield, a single USB HD web camera is used for both the computer vision and to build a time lapse movie of each loop. The software is built using Processing with Messenger, controlP5, fullscreen libraries, and v3ga blobDetection. In addition gCode command structure was used and Bresenham’s line algorithm to determine where and when the steppers should move.

Project Page

Created by Chris Lee & Henry Chang, PulseMirror is an interactive installation device that collects and translates participants’ pulse rate into a mirrored visual image. The mirror image is created by a series of circles that pulsate heart rate data collected from different participants.

Participants input their heart rate by placing their finger on the device for 15 seconds. The device which incorporates an Arduino detects the heart rate is detected and a random circle on the screen will become the representation of participant’s heart rate. Those circles on the screen will change their color to form a mirrored image that is captured by the webcam on the monitor.

See also R133 (sadly no longer available in the AppStore)..

’360frames times infinity’ is a photo booth installation built on top of the 3frames website, an ongoing Eyebeam supported project by Aaron Meyers. Also available is an iPhone app you can download here allowing you to create animated gifs on the go.

The installation shown at the Eyebeam’s MIXER event includes 8 ps3eyes webcams that surround an enclosure in 360 degrees, generating bullet time-style animated gifs that are uploaded to 3frames. The installation is also accompanying projected visualization created in Cinder which displays more than 1000 of the most recent uploads to 3frames as an infinitely scrolling starfield, updating in realtime to reveal the latest uploads as they happen. See video below.

3frames for iPhone uses asihttprequest by all-seeing interactive,animatedgif by stijn spijker, rcswitch by robert chin, and twitter-oauth-iphone by ben gottlieb.

Platform: iPhone
Version: 1.0
Cost: $2.99
Developer: Aaron Meyers

Created by Naoki Nishimura, Helvetica Face is a Livetype format font. This new Helvetica family font changes the “typeface” based on the posting of a new “face”. The site allows you to record your face within the font, adjusting the threshold resulting in a new glyph you can download.

While normal fonts which are governed by software rules on how to show the internal form (=data), Helvetica Face doesn’t have this internal information on the form. What is does have is external data given in the shape of a image of your face, and how to show that form is the only rule. For that reason, through the given data, the form continues to change without bounds.

Livetype is a new font format which takes a variety of data and can change the form of it in real time.

livetype.in/face/

Candid shots from Union Square NYC subway created using Kinect and SLR camera by James George in collaboration with Alexander Porter. Video is forthcoming but for now only images below. We couldn’t wait but post these 3D fragments of time and space recorded in public. So good!

Created using openFrameworks. For full set of images, see James’ flickr.

/via @factoryfactory

Previously: Sniff [openFrameworks]: Interactive projection of a dog that …

With new technology come new landscapes. These may appear in the form of users, social groups, tools and work but in some kind of form they are connected, relating to one another and feeding from one another. Kinect is describing a new form of landscape, driven by arrangement of points derived from our physical environment.

Landscape, first recorded in 1598, was borrowed as a painters’ term from Dutch during the 16th century, when Dutch artists were pioneering the landscape genre. The Dutch word landschap had earlier meant simply “region, tract of land” but had acquired the artistic sense, which it brought over into English, of “a picture depicting scenery on land.” Interestingly, 34 years pass after the first recorded use of landscape in English before the word is used of a view or vista of natural scenery. This delay suggests that people were first introduced to landscapes in paintings and then saw landscapes in real life. (source)

It is no surprise that Kinect is attracting so much attention, not from innovative technology perspective but rather being able to create complex realtime landscapes of our physical environments. The technology of kinect is far from revolutionary, what makes it innovative is that it’s now in the hands of everyone interested in 3d scanning / virtual point landscapes for mere $150 (examples here and here).

Whilst most of the current usage of Kinect in creative development has been in the form of technical demos or replicas of what we have already seen in the past, Robert Hodgin has been exploring new territories, not in the form of what device can do but rather how the digital point data can suggest and describe these new digital landscapes, both procedural and accidental.

More on Robert’s flickr and vimeo.

For more interesting work done with Kinect, see our list on linkli.st, updated almost daily.

No idea what this is. I thought to myself, what would happen if I quadrupled the VBO grid resolution. I got mutant flower in a sea of pink blobs. Hmm.

The Cinder-Kinect block can toggle between supplying the RGB video feed and the IR video feed. The nice thing about the IR feed, aside from it working in pitch black and making everything look super creepy, is that it is perfectly aligned with the depth map. No alignment necessary.

Created by Karl D.D. Willis, Trace Modeler is an application that uses real-time video to create three-dimensional geometry. The silhouette of a foreground object in a video frame is subtracted from the background and used as a two-dimensional slice. At user-defined intervals new slices are captured and displaced along the depth axis. The result is a three-dimensional model defined by silhouette slices over time.

Trace Modeler was built using the openFrameworks and the OpenCV library to recognize contours from the video image. Source code is available for download here.

Project Page

(re-descovered via Cedric Kiefer)

See also Beautiful Modeler [iPad, openFrameworks]