As inspired by mememamo’s Visual Space Music, I bought some Ikea Saxan curtains last year for DIY rear-projection experiments.

Initially these were used for a series of pixel-cloud shaped screens at the Game On opening 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.

Arduino the Cat, Breadboard the Mouse and Cutter the Elephant from hmt on Vimeo.

Media artists and design houses around the world: you’ve got nothing on this group of eight to eleven-year old English girls, bravely exploring interaction design, soft toy hacks, and physical computing using the open source Arduino platform to animate cats, mice, and elephants.

Just how comfortable are these kids with technology? Comfortable enough that a robotic, killer elephant with glowing eyes is “cute.”

Give them a couple of decades, and I think they’ll invent Cylons. I can’t wait.

Thanks to Kyle McDonald and Memo Akten for sending this my way. As Kyle puts it:

Metaphor: "Could you put it in it’s head like a brain?"
The joy of interactive art: "Ah, that’s so cool!"
The joy of conceptual art: "I love diagrams!"
Hacking consumer devices: "We could just attach it to a remote control car."
Developing scripts: "When sensor is deactivated by…"
The frustration of similarity: "My idea was to do a walking dog!"
There is so much here. This is like the entire media art scene rolled into one six-minute video.

Brilliant.

Now I have to sing “I believe that children are our future…”

More information: Seaweed Studio Workshop

They add in that blog post:

It was interesting to see the contrast between the two groups - the younger ones appear to me more cautious to stay within boundaries of what they have previously seen as they worry about many things being ‘impossible’, which for me was quite unexpected. They had less patience with trying to learn the technological parts, although had a good idea of how the flow of action should be for their ideas. Given a slower teaching pace and a more graphical interface, I believe they would have gained much more control over what was happening.

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

Musician Christopher Willits has an ongoing series for XLR8R Magazine in which he talks his own technical workflow. In the latest episode, he adds live visuals to his Ableton Live set using Max/MSP/Jitter. What’s nice about this is you see how some clever mapping can make visuals integrate neatly with music.

I’m somewhat insane, so my own setup often involves simultaneously running visuals separately with no communication with my music software. That allows me to set up less-direct relationships between visuals and sound.

But, while the techniques could be combined to a variety of setups, this also serves as a nice introduction to how you might use patching in Jitter alongside your music software.

Curious to know what you think of the presentation and content here, as I hope we’ll do more videos like this ourselves.

What You Talkin’ Bout, Willits? Part 10 [XLR8R]

Projector-type 3D scanning seems very functional, but I would expect it to lose accuracy as the object size decreases. So for scanning small objects (such as Lego), Lego genius Philippe Hurbain has come up with a scanner made of lego.

Philippe’s instructions also includes (under “3D reconstruction”) a technique for creating a “complete” 3D model out of several combined scans, using open source 3D software MeshLab.

More information (and via) Dansdata