The need for spatial, 3D interfaces is prompting students and inventors to try some creative and economical solutions. Earlier this week, we saw a touch-free, gestural interface built entirely on the principles of electrostatic – yes, as in static electricity. (See the original story, with video.)

Justin Schunick of the team at Northeastern University wrote CDM with more details on the project.

I am the guy who is talking in the video.  We filmed this in our lab today.  We are all seniors in Electrical/Computer Engineering at Northeastern University and this was created for a senior design
competition called "Capstone".  What you see here is a culmination of ~8 months work.

The interface uses an array of copper electrodes to sense a certain change in the electric field created by the device.  The black material covering the electrodes shows how the interface can be hidden beneath surfaces to create a completely invisible interface. It is simple black felt you can buy at any fabric store.  The total cost of this prototype was around $60.00 USD.  [Ed.: Justin notes that that was just an estimate of the parts themselves - let's just say it wasn't pricey. -PK] We created custom software to communicate with our microcontroller with C++ and it enables us to use our device as a new type of XYZ computer mouse.  Think nintendo wii controller without the controller — or minority report without the gloves.  This is a perfect interface for a holographic display.  There are millions of applications and we are just scratching the surface - I am sure you are already thinking of all the possibilities enabled by this device.

And yes, I was right that the whole thing is built around a big felt blanket.

I’m thinking of one possibility – something useful to do with your Snuggie (half sweater, half blanket) after the bar crawl. As seen in the WTF Blanket (NSFW, at least with the sound on, depending on where you work).

In all seriousness, while you probably can’t say this of the Snuggie with a straight face, this 3D interface is truly an awesome use of mundane, everyday technology you take for granted.

More photos:

Ed.: Our guest superstar VJ Momo the Monster returns. Coachella isn’t necessarily a VJ convergence: VJs are aliens in a kingdom ruled by musicians. But with this crew, the gig rigs and artistry were flowing freely. Here’s just a glimpse of part of who and what was assembled. -PK

It’s now a week to the day since the start of the 2009 Coachella Festival, and I’m finally getting down to sorting notes, transferring pictures and video, trying to wrap the whole thing up in my head so I can file it away.

Doing visuals at Coachella was fun as hell, and also the craziest and most seat-of-my-pants show I’ve ever done. I was contacted by Brett Spivey of Xochi Media on March 31st (a little over two weeks before the event) and invited to join their crew. I joined them in Encinitas a week later for rehearsal and mind-melding, which is when I started my Coachella VJ Blog.

The Mission

Our job was to be the House VJs - we would do visuals for anyone who didn’t already have something prepared. Spivey emailed all the performers to find out what they wanted, and the big guessing game began. Some groups got back to us right away, others didn’t respond until we were already setting up at the festival, and some never did. Of the groups that responded, some told us they wanted no visuals, some had a logo or an album cover, and others, like Groove Armada, provided us with Gigabytes of beautiful content we were to work from.

For many groups, we had to guess - Shepard Fairey was easy since he’s also a visual artist and has plenty of prints we can animate, but for someone like Christopher Lawrence, we just listened to the music and organized groups of clips to work from.

The Gear

Oh, so much gear. From memory:

Magic is itself a kind of augmented reality, a willing suspension of disbelief as we watch what we know is a blend between what we’re seeing and what we simply think we’re seeing. We know it’s not all physically happening, but the act of seeing it is enough. So it’s fitting that someone would try to blend magic and augmented reality. The challenge is flirting with a taboo of the digital age: getting people to accept that digital magic can still be magical, and not just empty illusion.

Marco Tempest is a rare character who combines magic and technology. He’s an unabashed showman in the old mold: you know it’s a show, and you know he’s selling what he’s doing. He also has some terrific ideas, and he knows his tech. Marco’s sends us his latest augmented reality, which he says is entirely real-time.

And here comes the reversal of the usual magic trick. In the pre-digital age, you’d keep the illusion alive by sharing as little as possible. Explain the tools, and the trick may be ruined. But in the post-modern, post-digital world of sharing and open source, it’s the reverse. You actually need to share something in order to have credibility. (My guess is that this could be the trend for far more than just magic – look at the musician and visualist worlds.)

Marco writes:

this is 100% real-time stuff - No post-processing. Programmed In C++ with OpenFrameworks, OpenCV, ARToolkitPlus, MacCam and other Open Source goodies…

Being the fan of software pr0n that I am, I thoroughly enjoy the screenshots, which show off the OpenFrameWorks setup [site | cdmo tag]. Incidentally, you can use OpenCV not only with C++, but Java/Processing, as well – check out our tutorial. And Bryan Chung has been working on a version of the ARToolkit library for Processing, too. That’s not to take away from OFW – it’s a really powerful environment, and there remain advantages on the C side.

Here’s what it looks like behind the magic:

 More screenshots

3D Computer Interface from Free Flow on Vimeo.

During long winters with indoor heat running overtime, I imagine you’ve built up your fair amount of static electricity, and as the sparks fly, wondered why you couldn’t put that power to some good use.

Working with electrostatics, a team of students at Northeastern University in Boston have done just that. For their senior design capstone project, they assembled a gestural interface which allows 3D control just by waving a hand in front of a computer. That sort of idea is all the rage these days. The difference here: there’s no camera, no IR emitters, no markers or physical controllers.

You just move your hand in three-dimensional space, and the control data is transmitted to the computer. In fact, it’s one of the more touchless interfaces I’ve seen since the father of them all, the Theremin.

That does appear to be a blanket underneath their hand. Now, being the glutton for punishment I am, I want to figure out a way to do this in which there are sparks.

More on this project as I learn about it, but it looks like it’s got some great potential. The bottom line to me is that there’s every reason to begin interacting with three-dimensional onscreen interfaces using spatial physical interfaces. Joysticks and mice actually do a reasonably good job, but they don’t cover the entire gamut of what’s possible. Now it’s up to the software to start using that control data.

lb to sf via bike from vince mckelvie on Vimeo.

What will become of 3D gaming engines when in the hands of new digital artists? You’ll get plenty of surprises and unexpected artwork. This is no ordinary California bicycle trip: it’s a trippy, Magical Mystery Tour in 3D, played as a game from a (real) stationary bike.

Reader Bince McKelvie writes to describe his project:

Lb to Sf via bike is an interactive installation/game that documents a bike trip my friend and I took from long beach to san francisco. The user rides a stationary bike through a the 3d world by pedaling forward and steering with the bike handle bars. The world consists of three mini games and a huge chunk of the california coast. I am going to be releasing a version that is playable on a computer without the hardware soon. It is made with the blender game engine, a bit of processing, a wii controller and the makingthings board.

By the way, if you happen to be near CalArts in Valencia, the piece will be exhibited there May 2-15.

With the exception of the (very affordable) Wii controller, this is all free and open source technology in the toolchain. In addition to Processing [site | cdmo tag], it’s a fascinating use of the Blender Game Engine. Not satisfied with being just a hugely-powerful, free and open-source, triple-platform (Mac/Windows/Linux) 3D design tool and video composition tool, Blender also has a real-time engine built in – something well worth considering if you’re looking for a live 3D performance and installation environment. That’s already gotten attention for this piece from the excellent Blender blog BlenderNation.

The 3D models and physics are sometimes a bit rough around the edges, but I actually rather like that effect: in a world of look-alike, big budget 3D creations, I can imagine a renaissance of “outside art” for 3D.

Hope to have more details on this and the tools soon.