I have just finished 2 weeks of workshop in Oslo together with Ståle Stenslie, where we have been working on a theatrepiece Ståle is doing in september in Oslo. The play is going to have 5 stories the audience can listen to, and at the same time the audience will (one at the time) have a speciel suit on with 64 vibrators (like the ones in mobile phones), and some sensors. And it is this suit i have been working on. First of all making the electronics (controlled by a Arduinio) work, and secondly making a application (in Processing) to design the “animations” that are going to run on the suit together with the recordings of the stories.
Later we are going to add interactive elements to the timelines that are created with this application. But for now the people in Oslo will work with this and the test suits we got until i come back.
I visited my friend Ole Kristensen some days ago to see how far he was with the technical setup for TimeMap. And i got some video recorded of his presentation of all the elements. I havent been working on the project the last month since i was doing Hush Little Baby theatre play, so i looked forward to see what he had accomplished. This week we then moved all the stuff the rehearsal room, and the next couple of weeks he will be trying it with dancers, before we go to the right location. And i will have some more time the next couple of weeks to help him a bit with getting the last programming done.
The last 2 weeks i have been working with Ole Kristensen on developing tools for the next dance performance by Ole and Tina Tarpgaard (the same persons as Body Navigation). The main tool we have been programming is a interactive physics simulation of letters falling down when something (here a dancer) touches it, or in other ways react in physical simulated way. We have been coding in OpenFrameworks (C++), and used the open-source physics engine Bullet to build up our code, and used some standard OpenCV blob tracking to detect a person on a stage.
We have also been working on making a new blob library that is not a perfect match around a body, but instead like a bubble with a person inside. It can give some really nice organic effect when the forces are very low in the bobble, and it just follows slowly the movement of the body. This is build by me with some basic physics laws.
For now we got this video of it, but we will cut something better later
For the last couple of months i have been working on a multitouch table together with Ole Kristensen for Vision4. It has been a project i have worked on on very part time, but it has been funny to investigate all the techniques and materials i needed to do it. And now we have made a presentationvideo of the table. It is very much a technical preview, so the demos are more to demostrate what is possible. I have builded the table myself (in my garden), and the code is primary done by me, with some help from Ole Kristensen.
The hardware The surface is a thin glass plate with a Lee filter 400 underneath to project on. In the bottom of the box there is an ordinary surveillance camera with a IR filter in (so it only sees infrared light, and not visible light), and a BenQ short-throw projector and a lightbulb wrapped in some color filters. it does give some visible red light, but its not very much. This technique is called DI (Diffused Illumination).
The software The tracking of the fingers with the camera is done by the opensource application tBeta, and send with OSC to my own openframeworks application that does all the graphical work. I might release the code at some point.
If you have any suggestions or questions, feel free to ask me!
I have been playing around with perlin noise in processing, and come up with some pretty organic worms i think. Not rocket science, but funny to look at
