HalfdanJ » vision4

Multitouchtable prototype

Jonas Jongejan — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 23:48:52 +0000

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!

Tosca

Jonas Jongejan — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 20:29:22 +0000

Tosca is flying in the air with wings. She is actually lying on the floor under the eyeliner

Vision4, summer 2008, Kopparberg Sweden
Vision4 was asked by Opera på Skäret to do the visual work for Tosca, and i was hired to do the video programming and assisting on creating the material. Opera på Skäret is a old big sawmill in the middle of nowhere that now is used by a private opera company that makes one to two plays each year, getting people from far away with special train to see it.

We builded 3 small eyeliners in this beautiful room hanging in long wires from the roof, and created virtual walls in the room. A mac pro running isadora was the core of the system creating the 3 projections, and in one scene i had Eyesweb running to track the opera singer and make blood float out of the body reacting on the movement of the singer. It was accomplished with a custom programmed addon for isadora i did myself. The material was otherwise primary prerendered video made by Arthur Steijn and me, and a couple of times live cams places around on the stage.

Opening of Arab Capital of Culture

Jonas Jongejan — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 23:18:47 +0000

Vision4, winter 2008, Damascus Syria
Vision4 was invited to Damascus to open it as Arab Capital of Culture 2008 in the big opera of Damascus, and i was hired to do the video technics and assisting on animation. It was a crazy eyeliner project with very limited time far away from our usual workplace. I was there in 3 weeks, the first two weeks we builded the eyeliner (12x8m), produced all the video material together with the video designer (Arthur Steijn) and a photographer and the concept developer Mikael Fock. And the last i was there alone with Mikael putting all the bits together for the show. The result was a big show shown on Syrian tv and seen by the president of Syria and Turkey and lots of other important people. The evening with most nerves in my live! A really crazy trip.

The technical setup was one big front 20.000 ansilumen projector for the eyeliner (we got it from Denmark by plane), one smaller back-projector and a mac pro running Isadora controlling both screens.

The Third Tango

Jonas Jongejan — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 22:50:37 +0000

Vision4, fall 2007
I helped Vision4 doing the re-performance of The Third Tango in Svalegangen i Århus. The Third Tango (or Den 3. Tango in danish) is about the storyteller Carl Quist Møllers journey into his dreams about a girl. The play had live music by a tango orchestra, and used the eyeliner technic for visually taking the audience into a unreal journey filled with movie effects live on stage.

My job was to make the technical video setup, but we chose to remake the setup from last time and convert all the video into Isadora on a Mac Pro.

The Miracle

Jonas Jongejan — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 22:42:43 +0000

Photo from technical setup where you see the frame that was going to hold the eyeliner foil. Photo by me

Vision4, summer 2007
This was my first theatre project. I assisted light designer Andreas Buhl on the play called The Miracle (Miraklet in danish) by Mikael Fock and Vision 4. This was a big eyeliner production on Kaleidoskop K2 in Copenhagen about a man that became pregnant – a true miracle. The eyeliner was used to make real film effects live on stage (like slowmotion bullets and 3d mazes the actors got stuck into).

My job was to help setting the eyeliner foil up, setting up the technical part of projectors and computers, and help a little bit producing some of the video material. The setup consisted of 2 front projectors, and 1 back projector all controlled with Pandora.