Everyone who can hold a scissor can participate in this interactive installation. In our workshop you can create a creature by cutting and combining body elements out of old magazines. Thereafter you can animate your creature with the animation maker. When finished your creature appears in a projected virtual landscape.

Contact us for workshops ( at schools, events, company’s ).

No related posts.

‘Identity Match’ is a game where you have to group match people from different cultured backgrounds together. Why do you think they match ?

Do they belong to a certain culture, do they have the same faith, do they like rock music ? Can you see that by the way they dress of by the color if their skin ? The game makes people aware that they tend to categorize people by the way they look.

This installation was developed for the ‘Think outside your INBOX’ exhibition by the Critical Mass foundation. A smaller version of the installation is used in workshops at secondary schools throughout Holland.

Part of the installation is a CMS system to simplify the modification of the content ( pictures, text ). Content can be changed easily by the volunteers who give the workshops at schools.

No related posts.

An interactive light installation commissioned by ‘Februari Muziekmaand Enschede’.

Several light pillars visualize the music by translating incoming music signals to light. The musical elements are floating up inside the pillars, so you can read the rhythm of the music. It enhances and intensifies the experience twice, by ear and by eye.

During the ‘Februari Muziekmaand’ the Drum’n'Bass’n'Piano trio RF&C did an improvisation performance on the light pillars. The installation was also used at Sencity Amsterdam the make music visible for deaf people.

Contact me for information about rental options.

No related posts.

The Extract Project was started as a graduation project by Kasper Kamperman and Sebastiaan Elstgeest. The name Extract refers to “extracting” music and visual content to allow translation of this content to other senses.

The primary goal of the project was to create an experience which starts with the integration of music visuals, light and space and ends with delivering the proof that combined media have an enhancing effect upon each other. Besides that, the visitors can within certain limits influence the experience. An important element is the lounging furniture object. The audience public can experience this special type of furniture, while at the same time the furniture is an integrated part of the experience itself with its multiple synchronized light effects coming from the heart of the furniture piece.

To realize the project we approached students of different educational institutes in Enschede ( University of Twente, AKI, Saxion, conservatory ) and created a multidisciplinary team ( musicians, technicians, product designers, programmers and more ).

No related posts.

For the theatre plays ‘Hypoklisma’ (2004-2005) and ‘Zwarte Helden’ (2007-2008) by Raymi Sambo I’ve created and assembled a (low budget) video playback and live camera system.

In both plays the screen acts as a 2nd/3rd actor, so fast response of graphics and video elements was essential.

No related posts.

When you enter the photo booth you’ll hear a song and see an animation that explains you what to do: ‘press the red button’. After you pressed the button you can record your message for 30 seconds. In another room in the exhibition you can see a remix of your message projected on the wall, together with the messages other people left.

An exhibition installation developed for the ‘Think outside your INBOX’ exhibition by the Critical Mass foundation.

No related posts.

An interactive laser installation developed by Martin Fransen and Kasper Kamperman. The audience is observed by about 1000 red laser beams all emerging from one point. They seem to observe you and they react on heavy movement. Although you’re observed the effect feels very peaceful, the laser creates a beautiful horizon when you’re standing in the middle of them.

To enhance the experience the effect is supported by an minimal and interactive soundscape.

No related posts.

When you walk into a room you see on three of the walls a video projection. On every wall you see people, grown ups, youngsters and community workers, giving their opinion about the conflict. This installation makes the visitors of the exhibition aware, that you can view a conflict from different perspectives. Getting insight in different opinions, can make you judge on a problem in a different way.

I’ve managed to create an affordable video solution by syncing three videos with some Medeawiz players.

No related posts.

The gathered material was combined in an interactive application used for workshops on secondary schools in Holland.

No related posts.

U-turm

The U-turm team made an interactive projection on the Dortmunder-U tower. When a person steps on one of the stages their silhouette appears on one of the windows of the building. Depending on how the person moves the silhouette can move to other windows, leaving a trace where it has already been before. If two or more silhouettes meet on the same window there will be some creative content coming out, symbolizing the new use of the building as cultural hotspot.

The installation uses Quart Composer the generate the visuals. I’ve helped Joost Buijs (responsible for the technical part) finding some different motion tracking solutions for Quartz Composer.

Tested options were :

• v002 Optical Flow 2.0.2 : uses a lot of processing power, so a big framerate drop.
• Webcam piano by Memo Akten : worked good, but didn’t invite for dancing too much.
• Kineme CVTools plugin : used in the end, saves a lot of processing power by checking only certain points.

The team did a good job to find and test the right way of interaction. Its a really powerful and intuitive concept I’m curious how its going to look on the big building.

Scryption – Google mirror.

The team of Scryption made a mirror that shows your digital identity. The concept was based on the theories of Marshall McLuhans ideas. From their concept document :

You enter the area and you will see two different mirrors in front of you. You will be directed to type in your name. The left mirror is just an ordinary mirror that shows the real you. The left one shows up the pictures that appear on Google when doing a search query on your name. This mirror shows you the digital you, the identity that is created by the internet (incl. other people) and by yourself. You will then be able to play with your digital shape since there are sensors installed that react on your movement. A picture is uploaded to the net.

The installation fits to the debate around technological determinism. As McLuhan puts it, “We shape our tools and our tools shape us”. But also that the medium is the message since a mirror always confronts you with yourself. And sometimes you see something you didn’t expect to see.

Saro van Cleynenbreugel was responsible for the technical part. Together with him and project coach Iris Douma we’ve decided to make the installation with Processing. I like Processing because of the ease of code sharing (mail some code and run it directly). However in the end Processing seemed a bit to slow for the task. Especially blending a camera silhouette with images and text cost a lot frames. Maybe next time I would choose and suggest OpenFrameWorks for an installation like this. In the end the application ran at 20 fps, so we couldn’t complain. Due some problems with a Nightvision camera (warning: exposure settings don’t work in that mode), there was some trouble to make a nice looking silhouette.

Libraries used :

• Fullscreen library
• OpenCV library
• Box2D library

Related posts:

1. Computer Vision : Frame differencing
2. Arduino – Unity serial communication

A lot of interactive tools like Flash and Processing serve well to make visual effects. By using relative simple scripts ( re-use and play ! ) you can create complex and cool looking visuals. Most tools let you export the material to image sequences or even video. Make use of them even for non-interactive stuff. Try some examples to create some genenerative art yourself.Lets start using your creativity and start playing, ‘remixing’ and mashing up some code.

Toolkits :

• processing.org
• quartz composer (osx)
• hype framework (Flash)
• Nodebox (Python, nodebased)
• vvvv (nodebased, windows)
• Tagtool/Nodekit (windows)
• after effects expressions
• OpenFrameworks (c++)
• Cinder framework (c++)

Code examples, libraries, inspiration :

• sc/4 : realtime compositing by Minivegas
• memo.tv
• kineme.net (quartz)
• levitated : Jared Tarbell
• Joshua Davis
• incubator : Mario Klingemann
• toxic libs ( processing libraries examples
• processing learning section
• cinema redux : Bredan Dawes (2004)
• yooouuutuuube.com : David Kraftsow 2009 | Alice ( Fagottron )

Books :

Above 20 euro no shipping costs to the Netherlands and Germany !

Related posts:

1. MediaLAB Amsterdam : U-turm – Scryption
2. Computer Vision : Blob tracking – Face detection

For receiving of data on the Arduino I’ll choose the Messenger library. It has some nice simple functions and gives you the opportunity to check if a string is fully received (a ‘carriage return’ is send by Flash at the end of a serial message in the SerialPort class) by Arduino. Of course you can write your own serial protocol. You can find some thoughts about it at the Todbot blog : Arduino serial protocol design patterns.

You can send data to the serial port with the Serial.print() and Serial.println() commands.

Included is the SerialPort class for Flash that makes it easy to send and receive serial data from/to the Arduino. I’ve modified the original (from tinker.it) so it supports start and stop characters. As a stop character ‘carriage return’ is used (‘\r’, or char(13)) that is send when you do Serial.println(); from Arduino.

I advise using a start character (not used in the example below) as well, because sometimes (especially when sending on a high datarate) characters at the beginning if the string can get lost.

The download contains SerialPort.as and example_messenger.fla (CS3).

Download : flash-arduino-as3-messenger

Step by step guide for Messenger library communication

• Download the Messenger library and install it in your Arduino/libraries/ folder ( you can find it by default in your documents folder ). Restart Arduino if it was running.
• Go to File > Examples > Messenger > basic_communication.
• Change

  1	Serial.begin(115200);

  to

  1	Serial.begin(57600);

  if you use my Serialproxy setup instructions from my tutorial ( see Arduino – Flash communication AS3 – AS3Glue bundle ).

• Change

  1	unsigned long interval = 20;

  to

  1	unsigned long interval = 40;

  for more stability

• Upload the Sketch to the Arduino.
• Configure Serialproxy for your Arduino board and run it.
• Open example_messenger.fla and run it.
• If everything went fine you’ll see the led on pin 13 blinking and 6 balls, controlled by the analog inputs, moving on the screen.

Example_messenger code

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
var receivedValues:Array = new Array();



// Arduino connection



/* SerialPort(localhost, netport, start character, stop character)

   for more stability use a startcharacter so you can check if a message is complete

   default stop character is carriage return '\r' 

   A carriage return is send by the Arduino command Serial.println();

*/



var arduino:SerialPort = new SerialPort("127.0.0.1", 5331);

arduino.addEventListener(DataEvent.DATA, onArduinoData );

arduino.connect();



// Setup a timer to send data to the Arduino

// The timer object calls the timerEvent function 20 times a second (every 50ms)

var timer = new Timer(500);

timer.addEventListener("timer", timerEvent);

timer.start();



// toggle variable that is switched by the timer from true to false and back

var toggle:Boolean= true;



function timerEvent(event:Event):void 

{   

    // change toggle boolean to the opposite

    toggle = !toggle;

    

    if(toggle == true)

    { // make ledPin 13 HIGH - onboard led on 

      //arduino.send("on"); // For Messenger checkString example

      arduino.send("13 1"); // For Messenger basic_communication example

    }

    else

    { // make ledPin 13 LOW - onboard led off

      //arduino.send("off"); // For Messenger checkString example

      arduino.send("13 0");  // For Messenger basic_communication example

    }

    

    /*

    When you have a certain amount of values it will be smart to keep them

    in an array (so you only modify the array indexes that change.

    

    You can convert an array to a character seperated string (space character for 

    Messenger library) with the join function.

    

    Example :

    var sendValues:Array = new Array(2,4,8,16,32,64,128);

    arduino.send(sendValues.join(" "));

    

    */

}



// add some balls to the stage to display incoming analog values

var ballArray = new Array();



for(var i:int = 0;i<6;i++)

{   

    var ball:MovieClip = new Ball();

    ballArray[i] = ball;

    ball.width = ball.height = 50;

    ball.y = 10;

    ball.x = 10+(i*60);

    addChild(ball);

}



// Called when data is received from the Arduino

function onArduinoData( event:DataEvent ):void

{   

    trace("received string : ", event.data );



    /* The values from Arduino Messenger are space seperated values. We will 

       store each value in the receivedValues array.    

    */

    receivedValues = event.data.split(" "); 

    

    // change the y position of the balls on stage 

    for(var i:int = 0;i<6;i++)

    { var mc = ballArray[i];

      mc.y = receivedValues[i] * 350/1023;  

    }   

}

Related posts:

1. Arduino Flash communication AS2
2. Arduino Flash communication AS3 – As3Glue bundle

Project: unity-arduino with serial connection

This project uses Unity (which uses C# and JavaScript scripting), the Arduino and/or SerialProxy to connect the Arduino to Unity. Thus allowing custom hardware to be linked to Unity (in real-time).

The link is established in Windows using the Mono implementation of System.IO.Ports.

For Mac/OSX users, I’ve made an implementation that uses SerialProxy because direct serial connection doesn’t work on the mac. The problem is, though, that the SerialProxy implementation doesn’t seem to work either.

Links:

• Unity-Arduino serial-connection on Google code
• Unity : Game Development Tool
• Arduino

Related posts:

1. Arduino Flash communication AS3 – As3Glue bundle
2. Arduino Flash communication AS3 – Messenger

Blob Detection test by samkeene :

Click here to view the embedded video.

Max Meinders made a good description of all the processing steps involved in Blob tracking :
Max Meinders – videotracking.

Face detection

OpenCV also supports the recognition of special characteristics in an image and use those as a blob. Face detection a tecnique to recognize things that look like a face in an image. It doesn’t recognize a certain face ( although thats possible, see Image recognition ), but it detects facial features.

Face Detection with Processing by Pedro Amado

Click here to view the embedded video.

Face detection works with classifiers. You can learn the computer characteristics of an object. So OpenCV can detect other objects as well, as long you have a classifier file for it.

Keywords : Haar Classifier, Viola Jones object detection framework, cascade classifiers.

Tomek made a nice example where he tracks faces in the ‘Black and White’ video of Michael Jackson in realtime in Flash ( you can tried it yourself to with a webcam ) : Machines are looking for Michael Jackson.

Related posts:

1. Computer Vision : Frame differencing
2. Flash AS3 : Apply bitmap filters to a webcam image

Below an example of the difference filter in the OpenCV library for Processing. You can do the same in Flash with the Difference Blendmode.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You can move objects to area’s where most of the motion is happening, like in the Pong example of Ostrich : Ostrich two cursors example

Or you can make some hotspots in your image and check the amount of motion in those. A nice example to get the idea is the webcam piano from Memo Akten (implemented in Quartz Composer and Processing) :

Click here to view the embedded video.

Or you can do other creative things with it (video by WTF? by OK Go, example code in Processing by Memo Akten) :

Click here to view the embedded video.

Code examples and tutorials

If you only want to detect if there is a certain amount of motion in front of a webcam, you can use the activityHandler and activityLevel parameters in Flash. See my example on bitmap filters where i use it the apply a red filter when there is movement :
Flash AS3 : Apply bitmap filters to a webcam image

Related posts:

1. Computer Vision : Blob tracking – Face detection
2. Flash AS3 : Apply bitmap filters to a webcam image