I’ve spent the last few weeks working with the Kinect to do some 3D skeleton tracking for an upcoming project. After recording the 3D positions of various body parts using the Kinect, I use the data to create a 3D shape, with its size and structure determined by the positions and movements recorded.
Here are some images and videos of work in progress.
Pleased to announce the release of a new project: The Collabowriters, an experiment in creating a crowdsourced novel.
Just returned after a short but exhausting trip to Calgary and Chicago. With all the connections between Calgary and Chicago and back, I ended up taking 6 flights in 6 days. However, it was good to be moving, and the trip turned out to be quite productive.
On Friday, I attended the artist reception for the Midwestern Voices and Visions Exhibition, which was running as part of the Alliance of Artists Communities’ 2011 Annual Conference in Chicago. It was great to finally meet some of the other MVV artists in person, as well as to catch up with the wonderful people behind the Alliance and the staff from the Bemis Center.
If you didn’t get a chance to check out the exhibit at the Coalition Gallery, I’ve added the piece I presented, Roller Coaster, to my portfolio. Below is the actual video:
I had taken this series of photos during my residency at the Bemis, and if you look past the balloons, you can see what the rest of the studio looked like. I had been accepted on the basis of my balloon work, but for quite some time had been interested in exploring animation. During my time, I began to play around with both hand-drawn animation as well as stop-motion. The idea of turning one of my sculptures into a roller coaster ride just popped into my head one evening, and with the help of a fellow resident artist and a ladder we found on the floor, we made this short film. I didn’t get around to mixing and editing it until about a year and a half afterwards though.
While in Chicago, I also had the chance to catch up with an old friend, Annie Peacenik, a tap dancer and historian. Two years ago, Annie and I had gone on a small tour to New Orleans, combining tap dancing with balloon twisting.
The next day, I took a 7 AM flight back to Calgary to attend the opening of Calgary’s new science center, now named TELUS Spark, along with the Aesthetec crew. While there, I also got to capture footage of Shadow Rock being installed and people interacting with the exhibit during opening night.
During the flight back to Toronto from Calgary, the captain announced that the northern lights were actually visible from the windows. Thus began a game of musical chairs between myself and seat mates in the same row, standing in the hallway and climbing over each other to catch a glimpse of the phenomenon. It was definitely worth the havoc, and we saw shades of green as well as red. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to take any photographs, but I doubt that they would have properly captured the moment.
While working at Aesthetec Studio, I developed ShadowRock, which is currently being installed at the Telus World of Science in Calgary. The final version seen in my portfolio is something like the twelfth version that I made. Here are a few of alternative versions that didn’t make the cut, and one installation I made for fun while learning contour analysis.
One of the earliest versions of ShadowRock I developed. I had just gotten blob detection to work, so that the image of the shadow is treated as one physical object by the software, allowing it to collide and interact with other objects. Each musical object is programmed to behave like a spring, so that when they are dislocated from their original position, they bounce back with a force proportional to the distance moved.
Each musical object has its own unique sound, and when it collides with the shadow or another musical object, the sound is played and a burst of particles is generated.
Later on in the development stage, I thought that one way to make the installation more interested was to make the sound emitted by each object be depended on the object’s location, so that users would be encouraged to create different shadow shapes and interact with the objects in more interesting ways. In the video shown above, the musical objects each play a note in a scale when contact is made, and the exact pitch of the note depends on the object’s y-coordinate.
This is an extension of the same idea explored in version 2, in that the position of the musical object affects the sound that it makes. The difference here is that instead of having the notes be on a scale, each musical object represents one of five instruments (drums, bass, guitar, piano, synth), and samples one of 3 tracks, depending on the y-coordinate of its position. This resulted in a very different interaction, and the user is encouraged to hold certain positions in order to let the tracks play and mix, as opposed to version 2, where there needed to be a lot of up and down movements in order to create interesting sounds.
Somebody in the openFrameworks forum had posted a video of a similar exhibit at the Arizona Science Center, and was asking how such an installation worked. I thought I’d have a go at it and created the above piece. It uses the openFrameworks box2d library to handle the contour analysis as well as all the particle collisions. Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to optimize the program so you can see that it’s lagging in some parts, especially when there’s a build-up of particles.
All of these were written in openFrameworks. Unfortunately I’m not at liberty to release the source code. However, I will try to do a tutorial on blob detection and contour analysis at some point in the future.