Alan Woo wrote a program in Processing, which captures each frame of each movie and essentially creates a ‘pie chart’ of the colours contained within each film producing a simplistic and abstracted representation.
These are the pie charts for The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation & Marie Antoinette by Sofia Coppola.
This one is for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.
Lee Byron ported one of my favorite java applets called Yellowtail to the iPhone. Yellowtail was developed by Golan Levin back in 2000 as a java applet, a few years later he ported the code to Processing.
Lee got himself an iPhone last week and a few days later he got his Developer’s Certificate. He managed to code this nice version of Yellowtail for the iPhone in just 2 days. You can read some details here.
Timbap is a platform-independent application for augmented DJing. It was developed by students and assistants of the University of Ulm (Germany). It provides a rugged tangible interface for browsing your music collection and manipulating playback by scratching, pitching, skipping etc. Like many others it is based on an acoustic timecode signal recorded to vinyl records. In contrast to existing digital solutions however, it completely releases the DJ from mouse, keyboard and monitor. Instead it relies on physical interaction with the standard club turntable only.
It still sounds quite strange, right? So basically it is a projected video interface for selecting mp3’s. Maybe this video will make it all clear to you.
Guessing from the amount of student DJ projects, there are a lot of bedroom DJ’s among the students out there.
‘Volume of Emptiness’ is an installation by John Houck. 35 threads are hanging down from the ceiling, each of them is attached to an electric motor. Those are controlled by an Arduino board, which receives its commands from a Processing sketch. So when the motors start to run, the threads gain a certain volume which subtly shift in size over time. The whole space is then filled with empty volumes.
This project reminds me of ‘Live Wire‘ by Natalie Jeremijenko, a true classic from 1995. It’s also a wire hanging down from the ceiling, but this one displays the activity on a local network.
This new music video for ‘House of Cards’ by Radiohead is quite different. This video wasn’t shot with video cameras or even lights, but with a laser device and some sort of scanner which delivered 3D data.
Two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.
So far so good, the cool thing is that is an open source project on Google Code. Even the 3D data was composited with Processing, an open source programming language and environment, to make the final video. You can also download that data and make your own remix and submit it to the YouTube ‘House of Cards’ group. Here is an interactive Flash 3D data visualisation to get you excited.
Karsten Schmidt (a.k.a. Toxi) was commissioned by PRINT Magazine to create his own generative letterforms for the August 2008 cover. He used the Gray-Scott reaction diffusion model in a Processing sketch (an open source programming language) to generate a 3D typographical model. That 3D file was then printed with a 3D printer and photographed for the cover. You can read a short interview with him at the PRINT Magazine website. In this Flickr set you can find more photos and images of the whole process.
Here is a video of an early Processing sketch, the 2D frames where later stacked to a 3D model.
Physical computing is where it’s at! Machinecollective developed these open source hardware modules based on frequently used components, sensors and indicators. Just think of knobs, sliders and buttons which you can hook up to your software or use to build your own hardware project. The modules are designed to work with Arduino and Wiring, 2 development environments based on Processing.