Envision is an installation that maps a projected animation onto a physical space.
This project first caught my attention because of its impressive visuals, animation transitions, and synesthetic effects. I am fascinated by augmented reality projects and other projects that use limited and localized hardware to drastically enhance relatively large environments.
I think this project could benefit from some physical interactivity- maybe interacting with the physical surfaces could have some influence on the nature or outcome of the animation.
pCubee
pCubee is an handheld multifaceted display that allows users to interact with virtual environments by tracking the user and its current orientation in space- resulting in the illusion of perspective and dimensionality from the user’s point of view.
This is a novel project because it allows an individual to interact with a virtual 3D environment through tangible manipulation. It presents a way of interacting with 3D virtual environments that is less dissociative than conventional virtual reality and more physically interactive than most augmented reality applications I’ve seen.
My only criticism is that they don’t suggest any practical applications besides mere amusement or gaming…after all it’s just a tech demo.
F L U X by Candas Sisman
This is a short digital animation that evokes some qualities of synesthesia due to its synchronized audio and evolving forms- kind of reminiscent of works by Universal Everything (creators of Advanced Beauty).
Given the quality of the animation and mastery of the artist, I don’t have much to critique- I would like to see more of her work.
Just Landed is a visualization of airline flights by Jer Thorp using Processing. Twitter is searched for passenger’s Tweets containing the phrase “just landed”. Tweets are parsed for a destination, and an home location is taken from that passenger’s profile. Each data point becomes an arc in the animation.
It is a clever use of social media as a new data set. Information which ten years ago would have been available only to large airlines keeping careful records is now published freely online, and by no conscious decision of anyone involved. However, the animation is a bit misleading; many assumptions are made when interpreting the data. (For example, all passengers are assumed to be coming from their home.) The inaccuracy is a compromise made in order to create impressive visuals from informally-gathered data.
appearing disappearance | 0:35 min | d 2007 | Advanced Beauty
Seidel uses a particle system to create vivid complex forms inspired by sound.
I love the gorgeous colors and surprising intricacy of the image at the peak of generation. The resulting composition and purity of color from something that is pseudo random is enviable. A longer duration or multiple iterations would help though, the moment where the system finally resolves itself is far too tantalizingly short. The great linear quality of that first black stroke is lost in the original mess of colors, and it would be great to capture and relish similar moments. (Though a mere 35 second clip time makes it simple to additively watch and pick out the details)
MorphoLuminesence is a digitally fabricated kinetic light sculpture that reacts to its viewers. Arduino controlled infrared sensors pick up people standing or moving underneath the work and servos shift the individual petals to create an ever fluctuating surface. Between the constantly shifting form and the range of colors from the multiple RGB leds virtually countless lighting effects can be achieved.
Flawless execution asides, “Morpho” offers a dynamic and customizable experience to the user. Embracing both form and function, its gorgeous, interactive, and creates a beautiful atmosphere. I especially like the form of the original curve. It would be interesting to have a version that instead of creating a choppy moving surface once people were detected changed the arc of the surface to focus the most amount of light where the person was standing.
Crystallization | Iris van Herpen and Daniel Widrig in collaboration with .MGX
Crystallization is a generative 3D printed shirt created for Iris van Herpen’s Spring 2010 collection shown at Amsterdam International Fashion Week and London Fashion Week. Utterly impractical yet completely mesmerizing, Crystallization is one of the first few pieces utilizing digital fabrication/rapid prototyping in couture, which by definition sort of undermines the point of couture (you pay the ridiculous prices for a handmade one of a kind), but still is ridiculously cool. I love the way it just balances on the figure using two simple shoulder holds, its actually extremely visually interesting from the back as well. It of course begs the question of a future where you can buy clothes online and simply print them out at your desk. Although the complex form and seashell like design work well on the runway, unfortunate shorts aside, it would be interesting to have a more accessible ready to wear version that actually could be mass produced taking full advantage of the technology.
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Meischeid is a small animation by French director Matray.
3D primitives are displaced with various noise textures corresponding to different frequencies on the piano. The textures are animated by hand along to the music in After Effects. So, somewhat disappointingly, there is no music-driven procedural generation. But it is a beautiful interpretation of deconstructivist forms, and one which would lend itself naturally to automatic generation. I appreciate the use of simple polygons and particles as a material; ever since Pixar’s sub-pixel subdivision, digital animators have been trying to hide these basic building blocks of computer graphics. I also happen to be a freak about Blender, the 3D software used here.
Electric Sheep is a distributed computing project by Scott Draves (PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon) generating a continuous fractal animation. Users anywhere can contribute their computers to the effort, view the results in real-time, and select their favorite patterns to be favored in the genetic evolution of future “sheep”.
The project amazes me aesthetically and technically–the way simple rules, when iterated, produce landscapes too vast and too volatile to ever be quite grasped by human senses.
The project succeeds in all it attempts. The functionality of audience-selected patterns connects users around the world in wordless visual play. By using viewer’s personal computing devices, it reveals the power available to us in consumer technology. However, it stops short of extending into the real world. Once we step away from the computer, the ongoing parade becomes invisible to us; we can only experience it with the help of our digital prosthetics.
The Reverse Geocache™ Puzzle is a locked box that contains a GPS module and LCD screen powered by an Arduino designed to unlock only at a certain destination. By pressing the button on the box the LCD displays the distance to the secret destination. This project is delightful for many reasons: The mystery of the box’s surprise; creating a catalyst for a new and exciting adventure in the real world; and forcing contemplation of blindly following an electronic device.
It would be interesting to see a modified version that could iterate through a list of coordinates, making for an adventure with many stops. This could be used in a scavenger hunt around a museum or zoo. Instead of a passive tour, students would become active learners enticed by the unknown contents and driven to explore. Trivia questions at each stop could even have to be answered and inputted before proceeding.
The Real-time Cartoonifier takes a video feed and using an FPGA, transforms and simplifies it, ultimately displaying the result. The prime benefit is the ability to see a cartooned version of something in effectively real-time. Contrasting a real-life image of yourself with a cartooned or otherwise digitally-altered version is fascinating: It reminds me of a funhouse mirror, but with infinitely more possibilities.
For the final project of a course on FPGAs it’s impressive, but we can also consider the augmented reality opportunities. Though out of the scope of their project (and likely to require more processing power than an FPGA can provide), a reasonable expansion would be interleaving the cartooned result with an actual cartoon adventure or cartoon-styled game. This addition would embrace the whimsy of the original project and give the viewer something to do after the novelty of looking at himself as a cartoon has worn off.
The Noun Project aims to collect universally recognized symbols and make them available in high-res for free.
This project is fairly new (launched early December 2010) and is inspiring for providing for the greater good in the visual world. It helps us to not have to re-invent the wheel. It also helps uncover design/visual history (see author and year created in detailed view).
As the database grows, the ability to browse will be necessary. If something like this was open sourced, it would be fun to synthesize information such as most popular icons vs. most downloaded icons.
As the title suggests, this is what it sounds like: an iPhone app which can be used to control a robot. All the controls are multitouch input.
This is inspiring because it makes robotics accessible — particularly in my case since my background is art/design. The multitouch input is intuitive which brings up the idea that anyone can control a robot with ease. As a bonus, the creator explains how he did it in detail w/ the source code available online (Read: 200 lines of Javascript and Python).
In its current state, the controls are still basic. However, it is obvious that this can be a good baseline for some really interesting projects in the future.
Snow is an installation which uses white feathers and air pressure to simulate the flow of real snow.
This piece intrigues me because of its minimalistic presentation and ability to pose introspection on an everyday encounter. Yoshioka extracts what is beautiful about snow and gives it to the viewer on a silver platter. The way the artist executed this concept is inspiring: Simple and effective.
At first, I thought that the flow of the feathers was affected by the viewer. That would be a worthwhile route to expand a project like this: giving viewers the ability to control an element they would not usually be able to. It would amplify the emotional high from this piece.
This project, called “Solar Rework”, is a really fantastic visualization of audio that uses colored blobs, bright colors and glassy “waves” to represent audio data. I think it’s cool because it visually conveys the idea that the sound is “washing over” the blobs in the scene. I really don’t have any complaints with this one, except that I wish there was source I could download and try out myself.
Cosmogramma Fieldlines is an interactive music visualization created in OpenFrameworks. It was created by Aaron Meyers for the release of an album by the band Flying Lotus. I really like the steampunk, ink and paper graphic design of the project, and I like the way the lines radiating from the object in the center converge around the “planets.” I think it’d be cool to change the interaction approach so that the user could “strum” or otherwise manipulate the radial lines instead of the planets, but it might be harder to do?
The Graffiti Analysis project by Evan Roth makes an effort to capture the motion of graffiti in an artistic fashion. I’m interested in using the Kinect to capture hand gestures representative of audio, and I think this is a really cool visualization of gestural input. The way that velocity information is presented as thin rays is visually appealing. I think it would be more interesting if the project incorporated color, though–since real graffiti communicates with the viewer using color as well as shape.
eCLOUD is an installation piece suspended from the ceiling of the San Jose International Airport that uses special tiles to display weather data for select cities. The tiles are opaque in their resting state but become clear when electricity is introduced; this technology is more commonly used for the window glass of variable-privacy rooms like bathrooms.
I love that this project presents mundane information in an interesting format: Even the most preoccupied travelers can feel rewarded for sparing a glance. The piece presents data in a form that is qualitative and dynamic, contributing to its attraction. The medium is not limited to decorating the ceiling, but could serve as floor tiles or wall coverings. Introducing direct human interaction by allowing people to select the cities from a station or mobile device would make the experience more engaging: A definite plus to travelers stranded for hours due to weather.
Over at KinectHacks, DieTapete used the Kinect to spice up his Christmas party. The Kinect projects the image of the people dancing in darkness, but replaced with psychedelic colors.
Critique
It looks like he just projects the image on the wall, with the people replaced with colors. I would like to see this projected onto the dancers themselves, covering each person in light. You could also use different colors for different people, and combine their colors if they started dancing together! This confirms that the Kinect works fine in a really dark environment when picking out people. It suggest that it could be used in many dark situations, but I really like the idea of using it at parties.
– Ward
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Over at CreativeApplications.net, a team from AirCord has brought the iPad into the third dimension. By placing a glass prism with a special film on top of an iPad running a split-screen app written in Open Frameworks, the team creates a hologram viewable from all angles. I find it interesting how they calculated the angles and properly rendered the image three times on the iPad, so each face of the prism would reflect the appropriate view. I also think it’s really interesting to see someone improving so drastically on an already amazing and popular device.
Critique
Although the prism still allowed the team to use the iPad’s microphone, it totally obscured the touchscreen. If they could somehow make the faces of the prism touch sensitive like the iPad screen, that would be something even more amazing.
This project suggests that the iPad, could be used as engaging 3D presentation tool – especially on a table with people gathered around it.
– Ward
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Over at KinectHacks, Bener Suay used his Kinect to control the Nao robot! The robot mimics his moves, using his initial location and arm height as the origin of a coordinate system. I find this really interesting because it is so amazing to see a little robot copying what a man is doing. This is probably as close as we are to Avatars.
Critique
His calibration moves are so broad and clumsy. Perhaps there are more subtle moves he could do and correctly observe with the Kinect to turn on the robot and its motors? Maybe even mimic how the robot slumps then rises, so there is complete visual continuity between the two of them. This suggests that the Kinect is pretty solid when it comes to positioning. It looks like more projects could be done on the assumption that the Kinect knows where the origin is, and it does not lose it.
– Ward
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