ADA is an analog interactive installation made by Karina Smigla-Bobinski. It’s helium filled sphere spiked with charcoal pieces, trapped in a white room. I guess it’s quite clear what happens as soon as someone interacts with the sphere …
found at Colossal
SenseWall (preliminary) from Tiago Serra on Vimeo.
Multi-touch walls have been a closely-guarded novelty, but they’re evolving into something else: a real, usable platform that focuses on content and not just gimmicks. In the process, a hard-working community is building richer, standards-based, cross-platform, free and open source tools. The result: faster iteration, broader access of artists to the technology, and soon, hopefully, better and better work.
Tiago Serra writes with his latest project, based on the Community Core Vision project. He includes a call for works that I think a number of CDM readers may want to check out.
I recently developed a multitouch wall called SenseWall, located at a Computer Science and Design university in Portugal.
In terms of hardware, the display has an area of 2.8m x 1.05m and it consists of 2 XGA ultra short-throw projectors amounting to a total resolution of 2048×768. For the multitouch sensing, this is an LLP setup using 8 infrared lasers, 2 PS3 Eye cameras and a custom compiled version of the excellent CCV tracker (ccv.nuigroup.com), giving us a touch resolution of 1280×480.
This installation is an open platform for anyone interested in doing something with it. Although it is a multitouch enabled surface it also has a pair of cameras at the top for computer vision applications, a microphone for sound input, speakers for sound output and an RFID reader (http://www.touchatag.com). So there’s lots one can do with it.
By open platform I mean that our intent is to have college students use it at will, being in class courses or just for fun.
A webapp is being developed by a few students so that anyone can upload their apps through a web interface making them available instantly on the SenseWall. This will be also open sourced once finished on GoogleCode.At the SenseWall there’s an “app launcher” showing the available applications name, author and date.
My main purpose with this installation is to let pupils learn new HCI concepts and hilight their creativity by giving them the tool to do so. Only if I had something like it when in college
I really enjoy you’re work so I’d like to invite you to submit any TUIO (http://tuio.org) based app, or any other app that uses micro/vision/rfid, you’d like to see there, and I’ll be more than happy to send you a video of it.
I do feel that it is also a great opportunity to showcase any artist/designer/coder.
This post, by definition, overlaps with the worlds of Create Digital Music and Create Digital Motion, so I’m cross-posting — absolutely not one you want to miss, both because of the event in New York, and because the landscape of works here engages issues about which readers here I know are passionate.
Music and visuals are each themselves endless wells of potential; put them together, and “infinite possibility” probably isn’t an overstatement. This July, label Ghostly International is working with researchers at New York’s Eyebeam research center to do a free, one-week intensive on dynamically-generated visuals for sound. Before you read on, that deadline is the end of today NYC time, via a fairly simple online application form. Check out the full details and application form.
The event is led by artists Aaron Meyers (Flying Lotus’ Fieldlines) and Aaron Koblin (Daisy Bell). I asked Mr. Meyers for a round-up of the kind of work that he’s done…
Read the full story on Create Digital Motion
Hubero Kororo designed this interactive CD cover for the band Uceroz. When you open the CD packaging on the side, ink is set free and bleeds into the cover of the CD. I really like this idea.
found at yatzer
Puddle of Life - Darwin Exhibit from Tiago Serra on Vimeo.
Here’s a really elegantly-designed multi-touch table. It uses two really key pieces of open source technology: the Community Core Vision (“CCV”) tracker, formerly known as tbeta, and a lovely framework for coding visuals called PyMT.
PyMT, as the name implies, is a Python-based framework. I’ve gotten to know Nathanaël Lécaudé, a talented artist and coder who was nice enough to put me up a couple of nights while I was in Montreal; he’s one of several core coders. They’re doing a lot to really encapsulate functionality in widgets in a nice way. Features of PyMT include an event framework, specialized widgets for gesture, touch, and layout, and connections to OpenGL, OpenGL shaders, and sound. You can even work with the enduring, evergreen synthesis language Csound using its Python bridge, the oddly-named but powerful Ounk.
Of course, that’s all plumbing. It’s nice to see this applied to something powerful and educational. From the Vimeo description:
"Puddle of Life" is an educational multi-touch installation that was designed for Coimbra’s Science Museum (Darwin exhibit), demonstrating the theory of natural selection, as part of Darwin’s 200th anniversary.
The installation is composed of a round multi-touch table whose surface represents a virtual environment where 4 species of creatures live in. Each of these little creatures have different physical characteristics visually expressed by it’s quantity and/or size: Vision, Locomotion and Fur.
The player interacts with the game by touching the surface. He has to maintain full awareness of his creatures emotions (visually represented by a cartoon like ballon) and using this information to properly choose the mating partners on the control console. This console also allows the user to select the most appropriate descendent from 4 possible mutations, resulting from the reproduction.
The player’s objective is to help the species he controls achieve the highest number of creatures of its kind. Since this world suffers from climate change the player must assure that his creatures are well adapted to this ever-changing environment by choosing the best balance between mating partners and descendants.
The species move in a swarm, but they split when the predator is near. When a creature sees food it warns the nearby siblings and they all run towards it. Of course only the ones who have best locomotion reach it. The vision gives them the ability to see the predator sooner and the ability to see the food further ahead too. The fur is useful to them when the temperature is low but harmful when it’s hot, leading the creature to a shorter lifespan.
The player wins when they reach about 18 living creatures and loses when all of it’s creatures die from cold/hot, predation, famine or old age.
Photos: flickr.com/photos/tserra/sets/72157619458503007/with/3619335559/
Technical Specs:
LLP multi-touch table
CCV tracker - nuicode.com/projects/tbeta
pyMT framework - code.google.com/p/pymt/
Cython - cython.org/
Rabbyt sprite library for pyglet - matthewmarshall.org/projects/rabbyt/
Animation and artwork: Adobe’s AE, Ai and PS with Fasticon.com icons
The project is the work of Tiago Serra and his collaborators, who have also been PyMT contributors (see comments). Great work, gang. We’ll be watching for more.
