Obsessively Programming

I was buying tickets on Fandango last night for four people. They have a pulldown for how many children, adults, and seniors you would like to buy tickets for - the default is zero. I almost selected "3" thinking it meant four, because computer programs start counting at zero instead of one. That would have been really embarrassing.

"Oh, sorry guys. I accidentally bought three tickets instead of four because I counted myself as zero."

I've been obsessing over this Wiremap maybe a little too much lately. Here are the discoveries I've made for myself:

Because I come from a digital background rather than a physics or architecture background, the Y axis represents up and down, NOT forwards and backwards.

The Z axis represents forwards and backwards. And guess which one is positive? Forward is obviously positive.

This puts me at ends with the classic physics and architecture models. For example, as a grad physics student friend of mine noted, under my model, the charge of an electron is positive, and the classic "right hand rule" for physics equations all become left hand rules.

I've done lots and lots of consideration - probably a bit too much - on this point.

At any rate, I now must move on. I'm in the process of building 3d cubes and such in my Wiremap. I hope to be done in a week.

Wiremap Works!

And here's the program that runs the thing. (And if you missed it, here's the video explaining the project.)

So it's finally a relief to see exactly what I was envisioning when I came up with this project. It feels very 3d (even more so in person where you have more depth perception than from a single camera), and is very alive. It really feels like cyberspace is finally coming out of its box to really play.

The guy who owns the projector is a theatrical multimedia designer just starting to get into Jitter. We're thinking that if I can open up some input sockets in this program, he might be able to control the thing from a music visualizer. L337.

In the next couple of weeks, I want to really clean up the code. I also would like to build a few more programs - a bouncing ball, a rotating cube, and other things with elementary and natural motion, like collisions and gliding and hovering.

I also would like to talk with people who are all into the Maya and AutoCAD thing, because there has to be a way to configure a plugin, right?

On top of this, I'm still waiting on my P5 glove. If all goes well, with the glove, I'll be able to digitize a human hand into pure, digital light. Then interactions with digital 3d.

Wiremap update

So thanks to Dave Tennent, I had an amazing time playing with his projector and figuring out how to work the with the wiremap. It turned out to be way harder to calibrate it than I thought it would be. My initial settings required me to find the projector's focal point (location and orientation) within a half a centimeter and a half of a degree in order for anything to come out right. The biggest problem was the blur. A projector isn't made to focus on a surface that is only 7" away from the lens. It blurred so bad that the signal from one sliver of light would bleed onto another, and, especially with the wires that were closer to the projector, the signal would be all blurry and a composite of three (itself and the one on either side of it).

So after a break, I figured that it would work if I removed every other sliver signal and, correspondingly, every other wire. It worked.

The footage above still sorta blows my mind - the fundamentals of 3d has been achieved.

So I came home and designed a new Wiremap customized to the specifications of Dave's projector - height, depth, and degree are all taken into account. It'll be about twice the size.

During my testing I noticed a conceptual problem - a floating globe of digital light just registers into my brain as a floating circle (from multiple angles). I don't really know how to fix it - maybe I could color the globe according to how close it is to the center of the circle, or outline it. I also hope that if the wiremap is bigger, I'll be able to feel that the globe actually exists in my 3d dimension, instead of a cyberspacial, and by default a 2d one.

OK...

This is a 19" CRT monitor underneath a 9.5" x 32" OK button. If you click on the photo and follow the link to the bigger picture, you'll notice that the resolution on the OK button and the accompanying finger doesn't seem to get any better. That's because it doesn't.

They are printed on regular old 8.5" x 11" paper, and then glued down to foam core. I can take my OK button anywhere.

Virtual Globes...

I built a program that projects a 3d globe onto my wiremap project, but now all I need is a projector to do it with. I loaded the program up into my portfolio. Check it out here.

Virtual Boxes

I just completed editing a video this morning. It's me playing with cyberspacial fields through dance and video. Check it out:

Here are some of the screenshots of the things of the workspace:

This display is kinda neato - it's the animation tweens of the blue boxes that float around. I had three boxes in total, one for the big solid, and two extra for when they split up. Sometimes I made them invisible (opacity at zero) but they still were floating around... it's like a window running in the background or something.

And here are my keyframes. Mostly scale and position, but some instances of rotation and opacity.