Project in OF: Nikola Tesla in Sound and Light
“Nikola Tesla in Sound and Light” is a show by magician Marco Tempest who is known for the use of multimedia, computer graphics and interactive technology in his performances. It tells the story of Nicola Tesla in an artistically creative and visually stunning way, using 3-D popups, digital projection (created in openFrameworks) and audio.
While the main video is great to watch, it was the video of the making (below) that intrigued me more. It illustrates the methods that were used to project efficiently onto changing 3-D scenes. The makers first made 3-D sketches based on which physical popups were created. These were then 3-D scanned to determine the geometry of where to project parts of a scene. Also, the face projected onto the storyteller’s (Marco) face wasn’t a static video but tracked and followed his face in real-time.
This project serves as a good example of different domains and techniques coming together to create an elevated experience. It also demonstrates the possibility of exploiting physical spaces to transcend something beyond simply a display or projection. One thing that this project got me curious about is whether a system can detect a constantly changing 3-D scene at runtime and dynamically adjust the projection accordingly.
Link(s):
OF addon: ofxLiquidFun
ofxLiquidFun is an openFrameworks wrapper for Google’s LiquidFun library for 2-D rigid body and fluid simulations. I found this add-on to be interesting because I’m interested in exploring physics-based simulations. Additionally, some of the coolest openFrameworks projects I browsed through used fluid simulations with a number of different add-ons such as ofxFlowTools and ofxOpenCV. ofxFlowTools seems to provide optical flow simulation as well and that’s another thing I look forward to trying out.
Link(s):