Daily Archives: 10 Feb 2014

Nastassia Barber

10 Feb 2014

I had such strange problems getting started with OpenFrameworks that by the time I got to trying to make the add-ons work I just didn’t have time to deal with the lack of Windows instructions, so I did this assignment with Processing libraries instead. I chose two libraries that I found interesting but probably wouldn’t actually use together- blob detection and cell noise. I think cell noise is really interesting as a natural phenomenon and can make some really beautiful things. Blob detection seems like it could be useful for lots of interactive projects.

The biggest thing I learned from this project was that if I intend to use OF add-ons I should decide to get help or use the macs in the studio really early in the project…

cell_noise_screenshot

 

Here’s a  video of some more generated noise.

2.3- Nastassia is pretty scared of news website commenters

For this project, I decided to take data from around 100 comments on articles announcing that the Boston bomber may be eligible for the death penalty. I have sort of a morbid fascination with how happy people seem to be able to get about other people being executed. I got a bunch of comments from several different news sites (but essentially the same article) with Kimono and found the most common words in the comments. I discounted words that show up in basically all written English, like ‘and’ or ‘the’. I coincidentally already had an excel sheet for finding the most common words in blocks of text, so I used that to find them. I did encounter a couple of websites that didn’t work with Kimono, but most did, so it wasn’t a major problem. I also had to continue to struggle with JavaScript, and I’m starting to hate it slightly less!

Trying to get the D3 imbedded properly below, but here is the screenshot. Winner of most surprising word is probably “virgins.”
screenshot_finished

World’s Hotel God Tool

[vimeo 86370143 w=600]

The World’s Hotel God Tool displays some 499,000 hotels throughout the world as individual OpenGL points. The points are controlled by a customized version of Golan Levin’s MPM-Fluid, which I renamed ofxMPMFluid. I made several modifications to the library, most notably adding the ability to specify the starting location of each point on setup, as well as the ability to specify a unique RGBA color for each point, and the ability to reset all points to the original position. I’ll explain the functionality a bit later.

h1

The World’s Hotel God Tool wasn’t my first pass to visualize the hotel dataset. I originally went down the path of placing points on a ofMesh and using ofxGrabCam to manipulate the perspective in three dimensions. The visualization above displays all the hotels on the X Y axis with the number of rooms in the hotel as the Z axis. Below I experimented with with several X Y planes. Here there was a plane for each hotel star rating from 0 to 5. Don’t mind the color choices, they were randomly chosen for this proof of concept.

h2

Below are screenshots of the final design. The points are managed by a MPM Fluid library I customized to give the points a sexy particle effect. The user can grab a section of the map and throw it at another continent, completely obliterating it. You can also adjust the physics settings live using a control panel at the bottom. When you want to start over, just press ‘r’ and all the points will flow back to their original position.

Voila_Capture24 Voila_Capture 2014-02-10_08-37-33_PM Voila_Capture 2014-02-10_08-57-19_PM

openFrameworks Add-ons:
– ofxCSV
– ofxMPMFluid (Customized: Source)
– ofxControlPanel
– ofxXMLSettings

Code: https://github.com/jeffcrossman/WorldHotelGodTool

Spencer Barton

10 Feb 2014

Sleep from Fitbit

Screenshot 2014-02-10 18.30.48

I created a d3 heatmap using my total sleep time over the past few weeks as recorded by my fitbit.

The main challenge here was parsing the data. Temboo/Fitbit returned json with a bunch of escaped characters in unicode. This took awhile to deal with and convert to ascii. Pulling the data was very simple using temboo. Once I had data, python was immensely helpful with parsing and cleaning. I set-up sheetsee to hold my data which was fairly simple but I again had difficulties getting sheetsee to communicate with d3 stuff as they had slightly different formats.

I learned the most about d3 which was a new tool for me. I was impressed by the versatility though I had to work heavily from provided examples.

Github

Live Project (sorry I couldn’t get d3 working in this page):

Andrew Russell

10 Feb 2014

Thereface is a computer base theremin which is controlled by the position of your face. It works by using ofxFaceTracker to find a face on the screen, and return the position in pixels of the face. The top left corner being (0, 0) and the bottom right corner being (640, 480), which is the application’s screen size. The face position is then used to compute both a frequency and a volume to be used as a pitch. The pitch varies from 200 Hz from the far left to 1000 Hz at the far right. The volume ranges from 0% at the top to 100% at the bottom.

The audio is synthesized using ofxTonic, which is an openFrameworks port of Tonic Audio. Tonic Audio is a sound synthesizing library for C++, which allows easy synthesis of various types of waves. Thereface uses a simple sine wave. We update the sine wave’s frequency whenever we detect the face as being in a new position.

Please note that in this video, the audio sometimes stands still while my face is still moving. This is because the face tracking software stopped recognizing my face. I blame the beard. Also, I apologize for the application crash. Thereface worked great until I started using a screen capture software and that was best take I could get.

Github