Bottle wall (no sound) from Alex Beim on Vimeo.

Organic LEDs? Interactive visual fabrics? Bah. The future is BOTTLES, man. Alex Beim sends along this lovely-looking display made from bottles illuminated by LED lights, which makes for the Official CDM Saturday Diversion Post. (Um… yeah, the first and last of those.)

The real lesson: if you can shine light through it, you can do lovely stuff. Looks really purty. Thanks, Alex!

lights on from thesystemis on Vimeo.

Digital visuals are often confined to a screen or a panel of wall. So there’s something magical about projects that get an entire building as a canvas. “Lights” is a live audiovisual performance for the Ars Electronica museum in Linz, Austria. The facade has some 1085 LED windows, controllable in real-time. The performance involved coordinating these windows with broadcast music.

The work was put together, stunningly, in just three days. OpenFrameworks, the artist-focused, C++-based code framework for “creative coding”, became a critical part of the process, assembling all of the real-time visuals. Zach Lieberman, co-developer of OF, also worked on the project and describes its ingredients and team:

this project was made as a collaboration between 4 different folks,
including daito manabe (musician & hacker), damian stewart (artist and
one of the creators of rjdj), joel gethin lewis (formerly with united
visual artists, where he worked on projects like massive attack’s LED
show) and myself (developer of openframeworks).
–> (daito) [daito.ws]
–> (joel) [http://www.joelgethinlewis.com/]
–> (damian) [http://frey.co.nz/]

we did alot of stuff with software that might be interesting for your readers — the tools involved (abelton, max, pd, openframeworks, dmx) and the challenges of a display like that, etc….

Breakdown of the tools:

• OpenSoundControl (OSC) for connecting audio and visual elements (and as Zach and I discussed privately in an email, it’s really the power of being able to relate different media, physical, aural, and visual, that defines the project more than any one tool)
• Max/MSP and Ableton Live for the audio score
• Pd (Pure Data), Max’s open-source cousin, for recording audio and OSC control signals

Zach notes “what I liked about it was how eye opening it was to feel that you can use each tool for what it’s good for.” 

vellum | slices of a virtual sculpture | seoul | 2009 from 2minds on Vimeo.

Our Modernist and Post-Modernist towers of capital are familiar sights. I live here in the shadow of the Chase Manhattan Building and across the street from an IM Pei block. But the magical thing about projection is the way in which it can transform a form - not only overlaying light or movie-style images, but actually recasting its structure.

Artist Robert Seidel sends us his installation work on the multiple LED screens of Seoul, South Korea’s COMO at SKT Tower. He describes it as an “unrolled landscape,” “slices of virtual sculpture” atop the building.

The results are quite beautiful, turning space into a canvas for new work. And, oddly, that’s to me part of the legacy of the Modern Skyscraper. In their odd neutrality and large open volumes, they’ve become spaces on which expressive art can be projected in a variety of media.

Robert Seidel: Vellum

What if virtual reality and seamless three-dimensional interfaces arrived, and they turned out to be a lot simpler technologically than you imagined? Well, perhaps you know a technology is within reach when it can not only be implemented, but implemented in a way that’s elegant and lightweight.

The latest in the ongoing YouTube-able head-tracking and 3D-manipulation videos is this creation by Timo Fleisch at the Center of Technology and Art Berlin. He has lots of resources on XNA programming, as well; thanks to a C# library, XNA and Wii mix nicely on the PC. (Less so on the Xbox 360 for obvious reasons, but XNA makes a lovely development framework for 3D on the PC, not just the console.)

http://www.vrhome.de/ [link is incorrect on the YouTube page]

The idea is pretty easy to grasp:

• 2 Wii remotes, basically acting as simple near-infrared-spectrum tracking cameras (which means, in fact, you could substitute something else if you really wanted)
• Head tracking, via emitters on glasses, as first widely popularized in a Wii video by Carnegie Mellon’s Johnny Lee
• Polarized 3D glasses, for 3D perception (and Coraline fans, natch)
• A 4-LED “LED Beacon” which allows three-dimensional manipulation of objects on the screen.

As a performance or interaction interface, I actually find the head tracking to be a bit awkward, especially as you’re still looking at a flat screen. But I love the manipulation via the “beacon.” I think there’s a lot that can be done to make manipulation of 3D spaces and objects more intuitive and more gestural - and naturally, that could lead to some lovely 3D performance tools, too (not to mention making modeling 3D objects less of a pain).

Stay tuned, same VR time, same VR channel.

Found via Veronica Pejril on Twitter.

The fantastic brightness of LED screens makes them one of the pinnacles of display technology for large events and installations. However their relative expense and size makes them inaccessible for smaller venues or budgets.

Enter Evil Mad Scientist’s Peggy LED board. The Peggy 2.0 board allows the 25×25 LED to be addressed individually, and Jay Clegg’s Peggy Video project takes advantage of this, mixing in some Arduino (on CDM)and Processing (on CDM) to create a 625 pixel screen capable of 30FPS, monochrome video.

This isn’t a simple, off-the-shelf solution, and it’s still reasonably expensive: The Peggy boards cost US$95 without LEDs ($190-265 with), but if you want to add LED video to a project, this is probably the best combination of cheap + accessible you’ll find.

Via Make.