Initially these were used for a series of pixel-cloud shaped screens at the Game Onopening night.
The Saxan curtains (US$4) were great for this kind of shaped, temporary screen. The white PEVA material is bright and contrasty when rear projected through glass, and we used a black PVC “Joining and Sealing Tape” to create our screen shape, projecting the cloud on the curtain and then applying the tape directly to make the outline.
We’d initially planned to use gaffer tape, but quickly changed out minds as the first test piece stuck unevenly, and tore the curtain when we tried to move it. The PVC tape we found felt like thin, wide insulation tape, and was somewhat repositionable, while still sticking firmly and providing some structure to the thin curtain. After our shape was outlined, it was a quick and simple process to cut out the desired shape with craft knives.
Moderat caught my eye tonight, as I rather like their roadcase/sets design:
Digging a little deeper though, and I realised that they’re a rather sexy collaboration between Modeselektor and Apparat, with a luscious studio DVD and live visuals produced by Pfanderei.
The live show looks lovely, with 3 rear-projected, portrait-oriented screens silhouetting the artists and their LED augmented road cases.
… objects built in material form, rather than on screen. Studies of physical forms rather than post-production effects.
It’s a wonderful process for building a live visual set. Collaborating closely with the ear-botherers, shooting specific material for each track, building a studio DVD, and then breaking it down for performance. Definitely the way to create beautiful performances.
2009 will be remembered as the E3 game event that embraced computer vision. Far from me-too answers to the Wii’s gestural controllers, we saw remarkably different visions of how computer tracking might work.
As expected, Sony had their own motion tracking system to unveil at their press conference. But unlike Microsoft’s 3D camera, Sony opted to build on their already-lovable PlayStation 3 Eye camera with wands with spheres. The controllers look ridiculous, and lack the magic of the Microsoft demos. But don’t dismiss them out of hand. (Sorry, there’s no way to write this story without lots of abstract puns.)
Much of what Microsoft showed was “conceptual” video – and some of the hands-on demonstrations had noticeable latency problems. Sony’s approach, meanwhile, was really quite literal in its demonstation. The tracking looks extremely accurate in 3D space, and latency appears to be minimal.
Above: Video of the press conference – check out how quick and accurate the tracking looks
The other good news for people working as artists and not necessarily mass-market game developers is that you can start to play with these ideas right now. Whereas Microsoft seems to have “lost” the once publicly-available 3D camera SDK for their solution, Sony is using an off-the-shelf camera you can buy right now and doing the rest of the work in software. I really like the use of tangible interfaces with cameras, because you can get more predictable tracking results, and you get the tactile feedback of having something in your hands. (I’m not sure I’d be as excited as they are about having a glowing ball on the end, but maybe I need to channel my inner raver.)
Anyway, here’s my humble prediction: it doesn’t matter how cool the demo looks or what sweeping statements anyone makes. Gameplay alone matters, and that means that what has to happen next is dependent entirely on the tracking working reliably and quickly, and developers building smart stuff around it that works as games. The same, naturally, is true for anyone doing broader interaction design and live visuals.
Sony is also getting further into the augmented reality arena. They have a Tamigotchi/Nintendogs-style augmented reality pet simulator, EyePet, for the console (see Joystiq’s hands-on), plus Invizimals, an augmented reality title for the PS3. Of the two, Invizimals is the most interesting. It’s funny that they immediately design it for kids (too bad, as I can see some office antics with this sort of thing). It’s also evident just how hard designing an effective augmented reality game can be. I don’t think skepticism would be wildly out of place – it’s clear that there’s something powerful about the concept, but not clear just what it will be.
And I don’t need to remind you, if you haven’t joined our tangible interface virtual party Saturday, head to http://hackday.noisepages.com/ – ARToolkit augmented reality is very much on the plate of stuff we’d like to see people play with. (The other schemes we’re using, Trackmate and reacTIVision, are better suited to 2D tracking on a surface, though they’re very, very reliable for that task.)
Shamus Young’s “Pixel City” feels like flying in a helicopter into the art from Ghost in the Shell, or discovering a metropolis inside your computer. The latest work from an undiscovered YouTube talent, the software itself will be released under an open source license. I don’t need to tell you this could inspire other experiments for urbanist visualists wanting to work with real-time landscapes.
It’s also interesting that the process itself becomes part of the artwork: it’s by understanding how each element is pieced together that you really connect to the meaning of the whole.
This is a demonstration of a program I wrote to generate and fly through a dynamically generated city. You can read the step-by-step of how it was made at my website:
Squarely in the “because you can” category: YouDisco is a research project at New York’s Eyebeam that simultaneously streams up to eight YouTube videos onto a rotating virtual disco ball. Frame rate is … well, impressive given what it’s doing. The project is the work of Jennifer Jacobs at Eyebeam “with the help of Jeff Crouse.”
What is interesting about this is that you do get interesting effects on a computer screen when you leave 4:3 rectangles behind, just as in projection.
Along the same lines, though focused on a mash-up of two videos side by side (sometimes to hilarious effect):
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