Carnival Mirror - Performance 13th October 2007

Remember the silly mirrors in carnival funhouses? The ones that made your face look stretched? This piece is a variation of that kind of mirror. The program used, picks up the brightest spot in the audience and distorts it.

Project Overview

At first I got an inspiration from an interactive game, named Human Joysticks. I decided to make a game in processing and interact with a Nintendo Wii Remote. I started of by developing a game, which turned out to exceed my skills and I decided to change my concept a bit.

The inspiration for the actual piece came from those silly mirrors in carnival funhouses. I started experimenting with images in processing to see if I could get any effects on the background image. After I made the spot where the mouse went over distort on the image, I developed my code from an image to a life feed. I got the life feed (video camera) to work and when I moved the mouse, the spot where the mouse went over distorted. I had to find a way to interact with the life feed so thought it might look good to have everything dark in the performance and only light up the audiance, that would make the piece misterious and interesting. I tryed to find out how to track the brightest spot of the life feed in processing. At this stage I had the life feed, the trak for the brightest spot, the distort of the brightest spot of the life feed working, there was only one thing I wasn't happy with. I thought the camera tracked to many bright spots and made only a lot of small dots distorts. I needed help with finding out how to make bigger and more distorted ripples, after I got that I was very happy with my installation. I wanted it to distort slowly and softly, like the sound track I was going to use for the installion, MUM which is an Icelandic band. In the performance I had a LED headlight on my head, faceing the audiance. I also gave the audiance green Glow Sticks, so they would be able to control the ripples.

Final Processing Experiments

Experiments with the processing code

Tracking the brightest spot

I decided to use glow sticks along with the LED headlight, to track the brightest spot in the crowd.

Carnival Mirror - Presentation_slides

'Crazy Mirror' makes your iSight (more) fun

I found this great program for a Crazy Mirror, which is just like the performance programs in the new Mac Book Pro computers!



Remember those silly mirrors that you used to find inside those goofy fun-house carnival rides? The ones that gave you the figure of Grimace or a stretched-out face? Now, you can re-live those carnival mirror glory days with Crazy Mirror, the latest piece of Mac freeware from Tatsuo Unemi. The program boasts a number of distortion effects to make you look, well--crazy! You can record Quicktimes of your craziness, as well. If you have kids, they'll eat this up. And it's a universal binary, so it will run great on your new Intel-based Mac.

Download the Crazy Mirror program!

Inspirational Video

The KHRONOS PROJECTOR

A video time-warping machine with a tangible deformable screen.

by Alvaro Cassinelli

The Khronos Projector is an interactive-art installation allowing people to explore pre-recorded movie content in an entirely new way. A classic video-tape allows a simple control of the reproducing process (stop, backward, forward, and elementary control on the reproduction speed). Modern digital players add little more than the possibility to perform random temporal jumps between image frames.

The goal of the Khronos Projector is to go beyond these forms of exclusive temporal control, by giving the user an entirely new dimension to play with: by touching the projection screen, the user is able to send parts of the image forward or backwards in time. By actually touching a deformable projection screen, shaking it or curling it, separate "islands of time" as well as "temporal waves" are created within the visible frame. This is done by interactively reshaping a two-dimensional spatio-temporal surface that "cuts" the spatio-temporal volume of data generated by a movie.

Here is a link to the projects website : The Khronos projector

FUNNY MIRROR

This is a video of a funny mirror/Carnival mirror

From gaming to a Carnival Mirror

I have been struggling a lot with gaming in processing, Morgan was helping me yesterday and we decided that the best thing would be changing my idea a little bit and get away from all this gaming thing. I'm still going to use processing and just change it so I have a live camera feed instead of the Wii Remote.





I want to make a live camera feed and then stretch the face, by stretching the pixels and people can look at themselves like in a funny mirror. The program would track the brightest/darkest spot of the image and stretch it.

Processing - difficulties

Building the game:

At this stage I´m trying to find out how to change the ball so it goes wide when it hits something. I´m also trying to find out how to have 3 different backgrounds, beginning image, middle image (when you are playing the game) and a final image (when you are game over)

Micro Image

A continuing exploration into emergent form. Autonomous software elements interact with their continually changing software environment.
© 2000-2004, Casey Reas.

My motto for the summer is to learn how to make a script similar to this one. I have got a lot of good ideas for visuals but the technical skill is stopping me.

Video Games Live - Classic game themes Orchestrated

This is a live game, thats similar to my project but not exactly how I want to do it.

Sand becomes interactive game in New Delhi

I like this project it looks like its the new solution for sport accidents:)

The Apple Remote

What does the Apple Remote do?

The Apple Remote is a remote control, made for use with Apple products with infrared capabilities released after October 2005. The remote is largely based on the interface of the original iPod shuffle and has only six buttons. The six buttons on the remote are for Menu, Play/Pause, Volume Up, Volume Down, Previous/Rewind, and Next/Fast-forward.

The remote was originally designed to interact with Front Row in the iMac. On 10th of January , 2006, the MacBook Pro with support for the Apple Remote was announced.

Can I use the apple remote for my project?
I think I might find a way to use the apple remote with flash or with processing to make an interactive game on the screen!

The AMS2HID User Interface

The tunable parameters available in AMS2HID for mouse-event synthesis, have a look at the Instruction page

The Apple Motion Sensor As A Human Interface Device

Apple added a feature called Sudden Motion Sensor (SMS) to the PowerBook line in early 2005. The sensor attempts to prevent data loss by parking the heads of an active disk drive after detecting a "sudden motion", which could be due to strong vibrations or a fall.

Interactive Game System, Lightspace Play

Project 3 - slides

Proposal - Project 3

Human Control

I want to make some short of a enjoyable game. I want it to be very easy to play and have clear and obvious instructions. I thought of using either processing or flash for my game and make it work with a movement camera feed, a Wii remote or the Apple remote. I had an idea of 2 balls, or a ball and a flat line under it. The bottom ball would hold up the top one up and if you drop it, you are game over.

The inspiration for this certain game is from a game which I played when I was a kid. We needed to be 3 kids and 1 kid at a time, had to hold a soccer ball up without dropping it and the 3rd person was the judge with the timer. The winner was the person who could hold the ball up the longest.

News Breaker

NewsBreaker is an awesome game, when you score a txt pops up from the news and sometimes you get an extra bonus for scoring certain lines. I like to have my installation as some kind of a game for the audience, so everyone can play and so everyone is having fun.

See Sound

Interacted sound/visuals

Laptop Orchestra

Laptop Orchestra by Toshiba is basically "an interactive synaesthetic instrument, designed for performances of audio visual compositions in real time." Video from NextFest '06 after the jump.

The space conformation of the fifteen laptops, arranged on regular rows, brings back to the formation of an orchestral group. On each one of them is installed a Software consisting in algorithms which activate sounds and abstract visual shapes based on color spectrum. Each laptop has its own sound and its own instructions for the construction of a shape. Interacting from the orchestra conductor podium, lightly touching metal stems, it is possible to activate or deactivate each single laptop , permitting the generation of an endless number of different compositions

Growth Interactive Audio Visual Installation

I have been thinking of making something like this for my project, either a remote that the user can make music with or make the user make sound and that turns into visuals.

Design for interactive media - UCLA D/MA

Input:
Develop an event/game which lasts 10 seconds. It must respond to data from the mouse or keyboard.

I like to have a look into interactive gaming with a live camera feed!

Here is the website for this game, try it!

Human Joysticks [NewsBreaker Live - interactive cinema game]

I would like to do something like this for my 3rd project, some kind of a game for the audience.

Beyond Interactive Cinema

"The movie, by sheer speeding up the mechanical, carried us from the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configuration and structure. The message of the movie medium is that of transition from linear connections to configurations."

Marshall McLuhan

This link is to an interesting article about Interactive Cinema

LOOP Live Cinema Trailer

live cinema: the erasers at synch 2006

Aranda / Lasch

Tooling is about what rules exist within this hypothetical “pre-material” state that influence its movement into the realm of the material. Like Bentley’s snowflakes, the source of wonder behind one crystal is not the storm it came from but rather the elusive internal logic that remains resolute and unmoving through all crystals.

Have a look at the construction at their page!

REAS design

Reas is an artist and educator living and working in Los Angeles. His work focuses on defining processes and then translating them into images. He is an associate professor in the department of Design | Media Arts at UCLA.

Have a look at Reas work!

Ersilia - Final product

Ersilia - Presentation

This is a link to the Ersilia presentation

Ersilia - Documentation + Final proposal

This project is build on a story named Ersilia, which is a city. I wanted to make a dark interface were the viewer is building up transparent strings. When the strings reach certain amount, they turn into a spider-web. The interaction is controlled by a remote so the user can make the strings and control how many have been drawn. The project is controlled by a Nintendo Wii remote, processing and DarwiinRemote.

DarwiinRemote is a tiny software which reads data from and sends data to the Nintendo Wii Remote. DarwiinRemote allows you to control other applications by using a Wii Remote, in my Ersilia project it controls all the interaction in processing. I decided to build an infrared LED circuit, connect it to the Wii remote and make it fallow the infrared lights. The interface is of a house in Ersilia city, the user is able to draw black and white strings around the house, the string is black on light spaces and white on dark spaces. When the strings reach random amount, the house disappears and the strings turn into an interactive spider-web.

The interface - Ersilia turns into a spiderweb.

Photographs of the final product