Closing out our (unexpected) Week of Optical Flow feature, Michel from the vvvv forums has ported Andrew Benson’s optical flow implementation to that DirectX-based, Windows-only, free for non-commercial-use patching environment. (Jitter and Quartz Composer, mentioned earlier, each use OpenGL, not DirectX.)
Since it is DirectX, the shader uses HLSL instead of GLSL. In technical terms, folks, that means it’s one letter more different. I can illustrate: Gary the gregarious gorilla would become Harry the hreharious horilla. You see? (Kidding. HLSL is actually closer to NVIDIA’s Cg, but all these things are built on the same basic principles - and they’re all just shader languages.)
This is just a first go at this patch, so vvvv users wanting to improve upon it, go for it!
Last time we checked, the VVVV “How to Project On Complex Geometry” article was in its infancy. Now it’s been renamed as How To Project On 3D Geometry (why?), and stands as a great overview to the subject, with some specific patches for trying various setups in VVVV, and discussion on the technical aspects of advanced techniques such as virtual 3D and multi-beamer setups.
I expect I’m not alone in this: I use to spend time as a kid listening to long records of Beethoven and other stuff I loved, doodling endlessly in a sketchbook. I immediately found stimulation in the challenges of synesthesia: did that squiggle that was so much fun to draw while listening to a phrase really mean anything? Did the art look like chaos, or could I lose myself in the tunes the right way so that somehow I recorded what I was hearing? Later, composing scores and experimenting with graphical notation and struggling to play piano parts for Cage scores, I wondered about the same things in reverse, as a record for musicians.
So, amidst the various experimentation with visual coding tools and reactive visuals, I enjoy experiencing people’s code ideas. Even those sketches that seem to be unsuccessful or incomplete are interesting, because they show potential.
It’s terrific looking through defetto’s Vimeo stream, with lots of synesthetic ideas. It’s a digital take on my old sketchbook, only it’s instantly shared and the music plays along:
defetto, aka Pedro Mari, has lots of good stuff going. Above, a recent take on Jan Jelinek (Loop-finding-jazz-records) - Moiré (Piano and Organ). See also his photo stream on Flickr and behance portfolio. Other reflections as you’ve tried these sorts of things?
Updated: As noted in comments, the tool in question here is the superb Windows-only, free-for-non-commercial-use vvvv, a visual patching tool for multimedia and real-time visual synthesis. [CDM tag | site] I had Processing on the brain and forgot to make that clear.
If you’ve only been watching passively, have a go with vvvv. Or try Processing 1.0: the download now includes the terrific, stable, and accessible Minim audio library standard.
On Tuesday I assembled a small posse of visualists at the State Library of Queensland to test the venue for our proposed projection mapping setup at the Game On Launch Party later this month.
As with any tech run, we discovered good and bad news. The good: That venue is just as cool as we had expected. The bad: We didn’t have access to the truss we’ll be mounting our projector on for the launch, so “real” 3D mapping isn’t really an option for this project, as we have contributors from around the world delivering content, and our pre-show setup time is extremely tight.
Fortunately, VVVV ninja Kyle McLean came to the rescue with some quick patching which allowed us to identify the most promising surfaces for “2.5D” mapping.
So we’re not going to be able to unleash the full might of our 3D model on the event, but this does mean that content will be a little easier to produce as we’re back to reasonably boring rectangles. Karl Kwasny has also given us some fantastic custom game character illustrations to work with for our animating and remixing pleasure.
If you haven’t already got in touch with me and you’re now totally inspired and would like to get involved, email gameon@createdigitalmedia.net and I’ll bring you into the loop.
Conventional projection hasn’t come very far since the magic lantern days of a century or so ago. Projector + flat, rectangular surface = image. But naturally, with computers, it’s possible to do far more.
The idea is to contextualize a projection in its surroundings, and give the illusion that instead of being simply a rectangular surface (not that there’s anything wrong with that), the image interacts with the reality of a space, objects, and surroundings the way we’d expect. Our own Jaymis Loveday asked last week about the possibilities of mapping — check out the discussion that ensues. I know he’s working away on some projects, but I have to point to the magical, evocative video above of some experiments. ggml writes:
hello. here is a clip with some mapping scenes i have done in recent months using vvvv. they are contextual approaces to improvisation sets, made on the fly, rather than pre-mesured setups. lines are drawn with a 2d drawing-patch, using a mouse pointer, observing the projected image in real space rather than the screen image. other objects are put into proper perspective using the homography node (something like PSP’s distort).
And several of you pointed out that vvvv, the Windows-only, 3D and visualist-savvy generative modular tool (free for non-commercial use) has an edge in this stuff. The reason: the ever-vigilant vvvv community was nice enough to put together an extensive tutorial.
From the vvvv wiki: this is either an explanation of mapping geometry for beginners, or a way to use a Brownian Motion source to build an Infinite Improbability Drive / primitive food synthesizer for making Earl Gray, hot for Captain Picard.
It’s listed as a work in progress, but like other corners of the rich and wondrous vvvv wiki, there’s quite useful stuff there, made friendly even if you’re new to the topic. Now, the actual topics covered so far are just the basic first steps, but they should get you going. For fancier techniques, I hope this is an area we’ll revisit over the coming months. If you’ve got more resources, send them our way and perhaps we can put together a wiki page of our own.
And yes, I’m now back from my European Road Trip which means you can again look forward to daily posts on the CDMs.
0
