Albert Hwang

Since I quit my day job, I’ve been focusing most of my efforts on building the second version of the Wiremap. Here’s a video explaining the process of a big Wiremap.

This was filmed about a week ago. Since then I’ve drilled all 256 holes and sanded it down. In order to elevate the large piece of plywood, I constructed four booms. Take a look:

The boom is a vertical iron bar stuck inside a ready-mix concrete base. The container is a modified bed riser (here are some images as an example of what I mean by that), with the tops cut out with a jigsaw.
And here’s just one of em:

So after I mixed the cement and poured it into the bed risers, I propped up the metals bars using a level, making sure the bars were sticking straight up.

And here’s a close-up of the base:

The cement is still drying, so I’m going to wait another day before I set up the planks. Sometime in the next couple of days, though, I should be able to drop the strings and get a first draft up and running.

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I’ve moved everything over from phedhex.blogspot.com to this site, www.phedhex.com/blog. This WordPress blog software is pretty flippin’ sweet – it did most the work for me. I’ll still have to categorize my posts, fix the broken images (my blogger account won’t let me hotlink em), and design and build a theme for this site. At any rate, welcome to the new home.

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I have a thing for 3d glasses. Here’s a pic from a blog entry of long ago:

When I made this photo sometime in February, I thought it’d be fun to make a 3d dance video.

In order to make a 3d movie, what you do is you take two camcorders and you separate the lenses about eyewidth apart. You film a scene with both lenses simultaneously, and you get some video editing software to filter it through to make a moving 3d image.

So sometime back in July I did just that. I borrowed a friend’s camcorder and filmed me freestyling. The dancing ain’t my best, but the 3d effect came out pretty good.

Just FYI, to really get a sense of what’s going on here, you’ll need to get yourself a free pair of stereoscopic 3d glasses from rainbowsymphony.com. I’m not exactly sure why they’re givin em out for free, but heck, I’ll take.

PS. If you want a better version of this video, get a hold of me (hwang.al at gmail dot com) and I’ll email you the .avi so you can fullscreen it. It turns out that it looks way cooler when it’s bigger.

Dancers dance in a 3d medium – we weren’t meant for video. It’s the difference between a painting and a sculpture. Some forms translate well, liquid and tuts, while other forms don’t, miming, digitz.

Forms translate differently because the natural inspiration behind them translate differently. For liquid you have the sine wave, for tuts you have ancient Egyptian wall paintings.

My inspiration for miming is the everyday 3d objects that I encounter. I need real space in order to create real things, and I want to assume that anybody watching has access to that real space. When I digit, I’m building 3d contours like a digital wireframe, or I’m traveling across space like a centipede. These are volumetric, and they don’t flatten as nicely as, say tuts.

So this video succeeds in adding weight and texture to my body – and the digitz and miming render nicely.

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Thanks for everyone for bearing w/ the dry spell of blog entries (even though most of you reading this are probably geeky enough to be plugged into the RSS).

At any rate, back in March I was featured as a dance teacher in Cao Fei’s opening at Lombard-Freid. Other than the ritual of free wine and cheese that is the “Chelsea Art Opening,” I got to watch myself in a video teaching old Chinese people how to dance hip hop. There was even some footage of me doin some breaking of my own.

I thought that would be the last I’d hear from them, but sometime last month they sent me a media packet. Not only does it include two large prints of me gettin jiggy w/ it, it also includes a sticker sheet, with two stickers of me – one of me pulling a handplant, and another of me teaching an old Chinese guy how to raise the roof.

Have a looksee:

Here’s one of those large prints:

And the other…

This is the sticker sheet. That’s right, I’m on a sticker:

Here’s that first print, but in sticker form:

And, the best for last:

In dance news, I’m scheduled to work with Morgan Murphey, a friend and in a piece where I dance in my underwear. Rehearsals start as soon as MMurph gets back to the city in the first week of September. I’M GONNA BE A DANCER MOMMA!!!

In digital news, I bought www.phedhex.com, where I’ve set up a Wiki to document all my digital work.

Also, I plan to move up outa this blogspot joint and into a phedhex.com hosted WordPress blog. For a casual reader, this doesn’t mean much (except that you’ll go to www.phedhex.com/blog), but for a geek RSS reader, you can subscribe only to Movement posts, only Digital posts, or if you wish, you can continue to feed into all work. I should expect to have that up in maybe a week.

Till next time…

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You know how they make greeting cards so that you don’t have to come up with the words yourself? Someone should do that for bloggers who don’t let the world know what they’re up to.

So, I’m quitting my day job to persue this Wiremap thing full-time. I’m also really busy writing an application for Eyebeam’s residency program. It’s due on Monday.

I promise: in a couple of weeks I’ll update you on everything, including the acquisition of www.phedhex.com, dance work with a friend from college, the media packet from Cao Fei (my very own hip hop sticker), dancing in the light of a projector, an anaglyph dance video, and perhaps the most exciting development of all, mirage, a water version of wiremap.

Tune in sometime in the next couple of weeks, because I’m damn excited to get back in the groove.

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I’ve been so busy lately that I missed that hack247.co.uk mentioned me in their website. Here’s the link, and here’s the excerpt:

Although a bit of a mouthful, The Real 3D Cyberspacial Globe is an impressive custom 3D Display It works by projecting directly onto the suspended wires, allowing the user to create 3D objects on a real 3D space. This is made all the more impressive by the fact that it is a DIY effort….. To find out more visit the constructors website at http://phedhex.blogspot.com/

Thanks guys.

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So Dan Selman wrote some code and named the program Voxra. It looks like it’s coming along really well, and it also seems promising that this implementation will be pluggable from outside sources. He also has some experience with 3d music visualization with OpenGL, so he may be able to apply some of that experience to this project.

So on my end of things, I’ve been hacking away and a proposal concept to take to Mark Bolas. It’s called Mirage – a Wiremap composed of drops of water. There are a few awesome advantages to water. Firstly, I’d be able to drop water at varying depths, compared to the wire’s fixed depth. This will give a fuller rendering effect.

Second, and I feel more importantly, a viewer would be able to walk into a rendered volume. They’d be able to physically interact with cyberspace… sort of. The effect would be a little quantum. As soon as you touched the rendered volume, your hand would interfere with the signal and be an intersecting surface. What I mean is, if you put your hand into a floating globe, a chunk of the globe would disappear and show up on your hand as a projected image. By involving a human body, 3d reverts back to 2d.

I figured that the proposal would require some media along with it, so I’ve hacked out a wiremap applet that works with gravity and falling water. It can be seen here. It uses the old engine that I had. In order to get a good feel of what it would look like on a big scale, I made the acceleration due to gravity 10 inches/second^2. This projected image would be correct if the image hits a water wiremap of 16 meters.

I’m trying to do it on a smaller scale, but when things get small, acceleration due to gravity gets relatively big. Even fast computers can’t really keep up and the drops of projected light start to chop, which means the lighting will be spotty. I’m not sure if this means that the rendered volume will chop in and out of existence, or if it means that it won’t exist. I’ll have to do more testing.

I have my eyes out for 8′ x 4′ x 5/8″ plywood to build that new wiremap. I believe I’m resolved to string or yarn. I think I’ll be needing 512 washers, 256 meters of string, and a whole lot of time.

I’ve been trying to go to Lincoln Center with my new projector, but I tell myself I’ve been busy. I think I’m getting pretty tired of that excuse.

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In news completely unrelated to wiremap, I’ve been playing around with standing / dancing in front of a projected iTunes Visualizer. From the point of view of a lighting designer, the effects are goddamn stunning. I plan on uploading something onto YouTube really soon.

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Lately I’ve made two pretty amazing contacts lately, both with some really exciting developments.

First, I met Mark Bolas at ProCams 2006, who was interested in helping me find funding and other collaborators to build bigger and better things. I’m currently working on a proposal for a 3 meter tall water fountain that would render volumetrics. With this, you could walk around in a water fountain w/ a ball of light floating around you. I’ll publish more details the more I hash it out.

On the back end of the project, I’ve met Daniel Selman, the man who wrote the book on Java3D, literally. He emailed me after I posted on a Java3D forum seeking collaborators. He’s been applying voxels (volumetric pixels) to the Wiremap concept, and he sketched up a little something:

Cool.

I am still in the process of moving into my new house, so I’ve been really busy lately. Luckily, however, when our new place is completed, me and my two roomies will share a studio space, where I will build a 3′x3′x4′ Wiremap, and where one of my roommates will build large cardboard alligators for Art in Odd Places.

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So I’m designing Wiremap v1.02 (v1.0 didn’t work, v1.01 was showcased at Procams 06). The prototype is for a space that is 4′ x 3′ x 3′ with 256 white rubber tubing. The tubing comes in at about 25cents / foot – I bet I’ll be able to get a bulk discount, but at 3′ / tube, it comes to about $200. I’m planning on cutting on the required tubing by sloping down the ceiling of the Wiremap.

Too bad coat hangers aren’t 3′ wide, eh?

So in the design phase, I’m using Ruby. Using Ruby as a beginner programmer feels a little daunting. The rigidity of Java forces me to recognize the language’s parts of speech every time I encounter them. Ruby is sometimes too transparent.

Also, got an email from Mark Bolas. Sounds like there is a possibility of making this Wiremap into an already existing water fountain, or even comissioning for a new water fountain. When I get more time, I’d like to show up to the Lincoln Center fountain and shoot some Itunes Visualizer into it to see what happens.

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In other news, I did some dancing and made it into a 3d image w/ blue/red 3d glasses. I’ll upload that as soon as I’ve finished moving into my new place.

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Procams 2006 (see previous post for explanation of event) went very well today. I met some very interesting people and got a lot of positive feedback on the Wiremap. It was also great to talk continuously about the project, and seeing which questions came up most often.

The questions most commonly questioned was how long does it take to calibrate, what is the best angle to view it at, how was the wire placement designed, and what were the wires made of.

The Wiremap takes about 30 minutes to calibrate. I use a calibration tool, and then I run the calibration program for them, where you line up your projector in such a way that blue is the dimension closer to the projector, and red is further away. A video of this is available on YouTube here.

Because the Wiremap is truly volumetric, it should be consistent from any point of view. It was funny to get this question over and over, and it sort of pointed at the idea that in order to engage with certain technologies, one must place oneself in a proper, conventional relative position.

In terms of wire placement, each wire must correspond to a sliver of light, but its depth is independent of that sliver (how far or close it is to the projector). The wires are placed randomly across that independent dimension.

I did at one point consider making a pattern with the depth, but it turns out there are quite a few advantages to randomizing it. When random, the overall aesthetic hints to the fact that there is no optimal point to view it from, while if it were patterned, certain points of view would be better than other points of view. I decided to steer away from this because in nature, when we interact with real 3d objects, we never worry about looking at it correctly – it’s either there or it isn’t.

The last question, what were the wires made of, came from the confusion that many people had that the wires themselves were emitting light. They don’t. The wires are glossy white, so they reflect light really well. The wires were made of cut and straightened coat hangers, and the projected image is the only thing that creates the 3d model.

I met some very cool people… in no particular order:

• I met Jason Eppink, a friend I met on YouTube, for the first time in person. He had a lot of insightful aesthetic observations
• Jeff Han, the designer of the Holodust, the inspiration behind the Wiremap, was there to talk to me. He was surprised at how convincing the whole thing was. He also remarked that the display was way more convincing when dynamically moving.
• Perry Hoberman and Mark Bolas, USC faculty and colleagues were there. They seem to have been doing quite some work in this field using projectors to build volumetric renderers. They had a lot of insight, intriguing questions, and quite a bit of experience with the principles behind the project.
• Laura Venner a, “NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador,” came by and whipped out her hunk of aerogel (a substance that is 99.8% air, .2% of silicon dioxide) at the request of the guys from USC and shot some projector beam through it. Awesome…

I also wrote up an artist statement and technical information packet for the event, which can be seen here.

Most people understood the globe right away, and most people had difficulties wrapping their minds around the cube. Some people couldn’t get the globe until after it was explained to them, and a few could comprehend everything about the cube in all rotations.

Thanks for everybody who showed up. Keep checking back as I embark on making either a 6 foot tall one, or one that has 256 wires (or a 6 foot tall one with 256 wires).

There were alot of photos and video taken at the event. If you happen to be one of those folks, I’d love to get copies of those pictures / videos. My email is hwang.al@gmail.com.

Wow, I’m becoming one of those bloggers who has way too much disorganized content… a textbook blogger. I’ll work on it, I swear.

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