mesh modeller that uses KINECTs depth perception and homemade data gloves

 

a simple mesh modeller that uses KINECTs depth perception and homemade data gloves for a more real world oriented user interaction in virtual 3d space.
realized only with open source software

SixthSense

sixthsense

 

SixthSense: How It Works: A webcam captures video, including specific hand signals that the laptop reads as commands. A mini-projector then displays the relevant content — e-mail, stock charts, photos — on the nearest surface  Bland Designs

Imagine a wearable device that lets you physically interact with interfaces that appear in front of you on any surface, where and when you want them. You can watch a video on your newspaper's front page, navigate through a map on your dining table, and flick through photos on any wall. The "Sixth Sense" system from Patti Maes' Fluid Interfaces Group at the MIT Media Lab does all this through a prototype built from $300 worth of off the shelf components. You can even take a photograph by simply holding your hand in the air and making a framing gesture.

 

SixthSense is a wearable gestural interface device developed by Pranav Mistry,

SixthSense - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

SixthSense is a wearable gestural interface device developed by Pranav Mistry, a PhD student in the Fluid Interfaces Group at the MIT Media Lab. It is similar to Telepointer, a neckworn projector/camera system developed by Media Lab student Steve Mann^[1] (which Mann originally referred to as "Synthetic Synesthesia of the Sixth Sense").^[2]

The SixthSense prototype comprises a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera contained in a pendant like, wearable device. Both the projector and the camera are connected to a mobile computing device in the user’s pocket. The projector projects visual information enabling surfaces, walls and physical objects around us to be used as interfaces; while the camera recognizes and tracks user's hand gestures and physical objects using computer-vision based techniques.^[3] The software program processes the video stream data captured by the camera and tracks the locations of the colored markers (visual tracking fiducials) at the tips of the user’s fingers. The movements and arrangements of these fiducials are interpreted into gestures that act as interaction instructions for the projected application interfaces. SixthSense supports multi-touch and multi-user interaction.

Voyagers [openFrameworks]

Voyagers - permanent installation for @NMMGreenwhich by @Lightsurgeons @obviousjim @tgfrerer and others #openFrameworks | CreativeApplications.Net

 

Voyagers [openFrameworks]

Created by The Light Surgeons for the National Maritime Museum in London, the installation “Voyagers” engages with England’s long standing relationship to the sea, featuring thematic images and film from the museum’s collection animated atop a continually flowing ocean of typography across an abstract wave shaped structure. Together with a number of other projects, the installation opens to the public tomorrow. We got a chance to take a sneak peak earlier today and get some insight into the making together with what we enjoy most – the debug info and some fantastic behind the scene images.

 

James George from the New York studio Flightphase collaborated with TThe Light Surgeons to create custom application to animate the content in realtime.  Created using openFrameworks, the applications use a number of different tools to communicate the narratives. The ocean effect of type sweeping across the installation surface is a 3d wave simulation created using a vector field. The complete simulation is stitched and mapped across seven projectors covering the 20 metre triangulated surface.  The image sets were designed by the Light Surgeons to relate each of the six themes of the museum. openFrameworks parses the layouts and generates animations that cascade down the wave. Also, at the far end of the gallery is a Puffersphere, which is an internal spherical projector.  During the course of each cascade of images the puffersphere collects thematic keywords that relate to the images and prints them onto the surface of the globe. Likewise, the type waves trigger projected content of the sphere as they “hit” it’s surface. The audio created by Jude Greenaway is mixed dynamically by interfacing openFrameworks to SuperCollider over OSC.

James used Dan Shiffman‘s Most Pixels Ever library for synchronizing the application.  He has also released a number of changes to the library that can be found here (github). The team has also built a way to synchronize parameters over the network using MPE – github and through developing content for the Puffersphere, the team created a lightweight library for animating the surface of the sphere and can be found here.

Full credits:

Design/Direction: The Light Surgeons, Bespoke Software Design: Flightphase, Sound Design: Jude Greenaway, Additional Programming: Timothy Gfrerer, SuperCollider Programming: Michael McCrea and Exhibition Design: Real Studios

National Maritime Museum

 

tactile pixels to create an electrical field you can feel.

Tactile Pixels Will Make It Easy To Read Braille On Touchscreens

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By Kwame Opam on July 10, 2011 at 9:00 AM

It’s a familiar complaint. Even as companies like Apple try to tie the computer interface back to the natural world, touchscreens are still woefully flat. But recent developments, including Senseg’s new E-sense technology, could bring real-world touch into everyday computing. 

Obviously, this is nothing new. Research into programmable friction has already yielded impressive results, especially in the realm of stickiness. But this concept accomplishes the same goal by using “tixels” or tactile pixels to create an electrical field you can feel. Your skin responds by feeling whatever the interface wants it to feel: Buttons, perhaps, or even the fur of a virtual pet.

The project sounds really promising, and Senseg already has Toshiba backing them. Imagine video chat aided by tactile pixels. Being able to gentle touch the face of a newborn baby. Or the hand of a distant lover. The possibilities are as endless as ever. [The Next Web via Geekosystem]

Using The Kinect To Make Any Surface Multi-Touch - 3point calibration

 

Today in the Department of Kinect Hacks, we’ve got an official-looking hack showing off how you can use the Kinect (and its open-source drivers, of course) to turn any flat surface into a multi-touch trackpad or projected Surface.

It’s pretty straightforward, really. The Kinect looks at the scene in 3D, you establish a plane and boundaries for the interaction area, and boom, multi-touch.

This little demo was put together by a seasoned interactive surface team, Patten Studio, from whom I hope we can expect to see an open demo app of this thing.

[via Reddit, where they're getting good at catching these little experiments]

Kinect Hacks: Flash, HTML, Unity and Silverlight integration

 

Blitz, an interactive marketing agency, has released its source code and scripts for a Kinect mod that outputs data compatible with Flash, HTML, Unity and Microsoft Silverlight. The company, which helped launch Halo: Waypoint with Microsoft and 343 Industries, explains that the device's standard C++ programming language was too limited for budding Kinect hackers.

 

http://www.joystiq.com/2011/01/13/kinect-hacks-flash-html-unity-and-silverlight-integration/

Has Anybody Downloaded The Kinect PC SDK Yet? | Gizmodo Australia

 

Has Anybody Downloaded The Kinect PC SDK Yet?

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By Nick Broughall on June 17, 2011 at 3:45 PM

One of the most exciting things about Microsoft’s Kinect gaming peripheral (aside form Dance Central) is the awesome ways that hackers took it and used it to create really interesting and new user interfaces for engaging with technology. And now that Microsoft has officially launched an SDK that lets users create their own apps using the Kinect camera, we’re wondering if any of you have downloaded it yet. 

It’s an amazing technology that opens up the doors for lots of future applications, many of which are likely to be created by people playing around with this SDK.

If you have downloaded it, tell us what you think in the comments below. What are you planning to do with it – will you be trying to create something amazing, or just stuffing around for laughs?

Museum of the personal: the souvenir and nostalgia

Museum of the personal: the souvenir and nostalgia

Essentially, I am interested in dealing with
photography's capacity to hold nostalgic significance for the possessor.

Souvenirs

Museum of the personal: the souvenir and nostalgia

 

Souvenirs generally fall into two distinct types: a souvenir of a place,
or a souvenir of an event. These types sometimes overlap, and once purchased
both aspects are considered intrinsic to the narrative of the object. For
instance, someone may say 'I bought this key ring at Stonehenge last summer'
or 'I bought this tee-shirt at Big Day Out last year.' As contended earlier,
it is obvious that a mass-produced kitsch materiality limited to the realm
of tourism does not bound the souvenir as an object. Souvenirs can also be
precious objects from the start¾for instance souvenir commodities from jewelry
factories and gem fields. Rather, the souvenir can take any material form
as long as the relationship with the possessor is intact. By this, I mean
that there is no separation or rupture of the narrative cast by the possessor
regarding the object. This relationship is at once fetishistic, nostalgic
and above all capable of generating a narrative or discourse with the aid
of the owner. Without the narrative, the objects meaning is invisible, not
able to be articulated without the possessor's input, its role as a stand
in or partial object is lost.

 

Sweatshoppe – Video Painting « Urban Projection

 

Sweatshoppe – Video Painting

Got a mail to a fantastic project going on in New York. I just post the mail here :

Multimedia performers Sweatshoppe have been wheat pasting buildings

with moving images all over New York. Mapping video projections to

LED-lit paint rollers, Sweatshoppe lay their projections on a surface,

paint-stroke by paint stroke. They call new digital performance style

“Video Painting” and have demonstrated the end result here:

SWEATSHOPPE, 4spots, the landing extras from SWEATSHOPPE on Vimeo.

How it works: The software controlling the video was written in Max.

The paint roller does not use any sort of paint, it simply contains

green LEDs. The software tracks the color green and outputs the x y

position which are sent to drawing commands and the strokes are

textured with video.

Sweatshoppe is video artists Bruno Levy and Blake Shaw. They plan on

eventually releasing the software, but only after it is much more

refined, buffed up with features and is user-friendly.

SWEATSHOPPE Video Painting

 

SWEATSHOPPE Video Painting @ DIS-PATCH Festival Belgrade from SWEATSHOPPE on Vimeo.

calibrate CCV

Community Core Vision (CCV) – Calibration | Seth Sandler

 

Community Core Vision (CCV) - Calibration

 

In order to calibrate CCV for your camera and projector/LCD, you'll need to run the calibration process. Calibrating allows touch points from the camera to line up with elements on screen. This way, when touching something displayed on screen, the touch is registered in the correct place. In order to do this, CCV has to translate camera space into screen space; this is done by touching individual calibration points.

 

 

Optical Multitouch Techniques

Multitouch – How To | Seth Sandler

 

Optical Multitouch Techniques

Each technique utilizes 3 main components:

1. Infrared Camera (or other optical sensor)
2. Infrared light
3. Visual Feedback (projector or LCD)

 

Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus

Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus by Julius von Bismarck & Benjamin Maus | CreativeApplications.Net

 

The “Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus” was designed by Julius von Bismarck & Benjamin Maus. It is a drawing machine that illustrates a never-ending story by translating words of text into patent drawings.

Seven million patents — linked by over 22 million references — form the vocabulary. By using references to earlier patents, it is possible to find paths between arbitrary patents. They form a kind of subtext.

The machine attempts to show how new visual connections and narrative layers emerge through the interweaving of the story with the depiction of technical developments.

Basic procedure

1. The program downloads and parses a part of the text of a recent best-selling book.

2. The algorithm eliminates all insignificant words like “I”, “and”, “to”, “for”, “the”, etc. The remaining words and their combinations are the keywords for the patent drawings.

3. Using the keywords in chronological order, it searches for the key-patents

4. The program now searches for a path connecting the found key patents. This is possible because every patent contains several references to older patents – the so-called “prior art”.

5. All key-patents and the patents connecting them semantically are arranged and printed.

6. Goto step 1.

 

 

Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus

 

The Works of Silke Hilsing: Impress & Virtual Gravity | Designerscouch #thecritiquenetwork

 

The Works of Silke Hilsing: Impress & Virtual Gravity

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Virtual gravity is an interface between digital and analog world. With the aid of analog carriers, virtual terms can be taken up and transported from a loading screen to an analog scale. The importance and popularity of these terms, outputted as a virtual weight, can be weighed physically and be compared. Therefore impalpable, digital data get an actual physical existence and become a sensually tangible experience.

 

Virtual Gravity [Processing]: Weight of digital data / project by Silke Hilsing | CreativeApplications.Net

Martin Wattenberg & Marek Walczak - Apartment

Database Aesthetics » Martin Wattenberg & Marek Walczak - Apartment

 

Saturday, 9 Feb 2008

Martin Wattenberg & Marek Walczak - Apartment

In Wattenberg and Marek’s Apartment, “viewers are confronted with a blinking cursor. As they type, rooms begin to take shape in the form of a two-dimensional plan, similar to a blueprint. The architecture is based on a semantic analysis of the viewer’s words, reorganizing them to reflect the underlying themes they express. The apartments are then clustered into buildings and cities according to their linguistic relationships.

Each apartment is translated into a navigable three-dimensional dwelling, so contrasting between abstract plans/texts and experiential images/sounds.

Apartment is inspired by the idea of the memory palace. In a mnemonic technique from a pre-Post-It era, Cicero imagined inscribing the themes of a speech on a suite of rooms in a villa, and then reciting that speech by mentally walking from space to space. Establishing an equivalence between language and space, Apartment connects the written word with different forms of spatial configurations.”

Experience the project here.

Martin Wattenberg: Apartment

Martin Wattenberg: Apartment

 

 

Viewers are confronted with a blinking cursor. As they type, rooms begin to take shape in the form of a two-dimensional plan, similar to a blueprint. The architecture is based on a semantic analysis of the viewer’s words, reorganizing them to reflect the underlying themes they express. The apartments are then clustered into buildings and cities according to their linguistic relationships.

Apartment is inspired by memory palaces. In a mnemonic technique from a pre-Post-It era, Cicero imagined inscribing the themes of a speech on a suite of rooms in a villa, and then reciting that speech by mentally walking from space to space. Establishing an equivalence between language and space, Apartment connects the written word with different forms of spatial configurations.

In some versions the computer constructs a 3D as well as 2D structure. In a few later installations, viewers can collaborate, with two people able to merge their apartments into
a combined structure.

Curiosity cabinets were history's first happenings,

Jonathan Salem Baskin's Dim Bulb: Two-Headed Babies

 

Curiosity cabinets were history's first happenings, or performance art pieces.

Over time, science got more rigorous, and education more common.  The scientific method robbed life of myths and superstitions, and replaced them with facts and repeatable processes.  We lost our experience of magic, only to have it replaced with steam engines. 

Serious museums emerged to educate people on this shift. 

 

curiosity cabinet painting

WELCOME TO THE DALI HOUSE (PLEASE MIND YOUR HEAD)

A bit more rooting around in other people’s boxes of stuff lately. Nothing to get alarmed about though. Specifically it’s the curiosity cabinets alluded to in previous posts on Mark Ryden

Studio Bility's Curiosity Cabinet

Studio Bility's Curiosity Cabinet | Apartment Therapy Los Angeles

We've always loved curiosity cabinets, and this one from the Icelandic husband and wife design team of Studio Bility is no exception. The unit opens from all four sides, offering a myriad of storage slots for all shapes and sizes of curiosities to artfully present when the opportunity arises..

Projection Mapping definition

Projection mapping on the rise

 

As visualists have noticed already and known for some time now, projection mapping is cool. And now it seems that this technique is going mainstrem in a big way as it is beginning to be used more and more in commercial contexts. In my city I am noticing more and more outdoor video projections – some of them using mapping techniques.

For those who stumble upon this article and are not familiar with the term, projection mapping is the technique of beaming video (with a standard video projector) onto three dimensional objects and adjusting and masking the image so that it seems to follow the shape of the target object instead of spilling out onto walls etc. The result can be surprisingly effective and eye catching as the video is no longer a flat square on the wall but becomes an object in space – an animated sculpture if you will.

 

projected onto the floor of the gallery that allows the visitor to walk ‘through’ it

Group exhibition, Ljubljana and Ribnica/Slovenia: You Own Me Now Until You Forget About Me. | CONT3XT.NET

 

Martin Wattenberg and Marek Walczak

(with additional programming by Jonathan Feinberg)

Apartment (2001-2004) | Website, projection

In Apartment Martin Wattenberg and Marek Walczak were inspired by Cicero’s mnemonic technique of a memory palace. The user establishes an equivalence between language and space by typing words and phrases into the computer. After being automatically processed, language takes the form of a two-dimensional blueprint projected onto the floor of the gallery that allows the visitor to walk ‘through’ it. The semantic relationships of the written words are connected to spatial and contextual configurations and at the same time cause their architectural re-organisation.

http://www.turbulence.org/Works/apartment/#

tiles on wall arrangement

y Giovanna Rinaldi and Misha Davidoff's Final Show

Senior Studio

Apr 30, '09, 6:59 AM

The Method of Loci - The Mental Walk

Method of loci - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

'the method of loci', an imaginal technique known to the ancient Greeks and Romans and described by Yates (1966) in her book The Art of Memory as well as by Luria (1969). In this technique the subject memorizes the layout of some building, or the arrangement of shops on a street, or any geographical entity which is composed of a number of discrete loci. When desiring to remember a set of items the subject literally 'walks' through these loci and commits an item to each one by forming an image between the item and any distinguishing feature of that locus. Retrieval of items is achieved by 'walking' through the loci, allowing the latter to activate the desired items.

The method of loci is also commonly called the mental walk.

In basic terms, it is a method of memory enhancement which uses visualization to organize and recall information. Many memory contest champions claim to use this technique in order to recall faces, digits, and lists of words.

more to do with their technique of using regions of their brain that have to do with spatial learning

 

It is generally applied to encoding the key ideas of a subject. Two approaches are:

1. Link the key ideas of a subject and then deep-learn those key ideas in relation to each other, and;

2. Think through the key ideas of a subject in depth, re-arrange the ideas in relation to an argument, then link the ideas to loci in good order.

It has been found that teaching such techniques as pure memorization methods often leads students towards surface learning only. Therefore, it has been recommended that the method of loci should be integrated thoroughly with deeper learning approaches.

Example:

During the mental walk, people remember lists of words by mentally walking a familiar route and associating these objects with specific landmarks on their route. An example of this would be to remember your grocery shopping list in a mental walk from your bedroom to kitchen in your house. Let's say the first item on your list was bread; then mentally you can place a loaf of bread on your bed. As you continue mentally walking you can place the next item, assume it is eggs, on your dresser. The mental walk continues like this as you place consecutive items along a familiar route that you walk. So when you are at the grocery store, you can then think about this walk and “see” what you placed at each location. In your head you will remember bread being on your bed, and eggs being on the dresser. This can continue for as many items as you want to place on your path as long as the route continues. The more dramatic the images, the more vivid the memory. For instance: instead of "bread", try to visualize a giant loaf of bread; instead of "eggs", imagine broken eggs all over the place.

Memory - linking landmarks -the roman path