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:)