Procams

About two weeks ago I sent in the Wiremap an art submission to Procams2006, an event that focuses on projector and camera art. I didn't know whether my submission was quite appropriate because it has nothing to do with cameras, but then again, the public call for artwork says that they're looking for works that (among other things):

• uses active and non-traditional projection techniques
• involves projection onto custom screens, surfaces and objects
• deals with the aesthetics of projected light and digital projection

I'd been anxiously waiting to hear back from them ever since sending in my submission. I got this email today:

Dear Albert,

We are pleased to inform you that "WireMap" has been accepted for the ProCams art exhibit, Projecting Off the Wall. We loved the work and look forward to meeting you.

The exhibit date is June 18th. Our schedule is:

8-noon - setup

1pm-6pm - exhibit

!!!!!

Awesome. It'll be on the fourth floor of 721 Broadway, just one floor above where most of my undergrad theater took place.

I may have to temporarily abandon the production of my cube and really spruce up what I've got to make it as 1337 as possible. A portfolio with ideas of where this project is headed, ideas on how to integrate it with Jitter, possibilities with Maya plugins, with the P5 glove. I'd want to clean up the code a bit to make it more readable, too, just in case anybody asks.

So in a nutshell:

Sunday, June 18th, 1-6pm, 721 Broadway.

If you're in NYC, come!

Cube and P5

I got a P5 in the mail yesterday. Awesome.

It's cool, but it isn't as seamless as I had hoped. I feel as clumsy with my P5 as my parents must feel when they started moving that mouse around for the first time. The width and height dimensions track pretty well, which is what the glove uses to emulate a mouse.

I played one of the games that came with it and soon saw how twitchy the depth dimension is. I'm not sure why, but it will flip around to way far away to way close. At any rate, I've found a hobbyist who's developed another driver that apparently works better than the manufacturer's one. I'll try to install that tonight.

In other news, development for the cube is going well. Here's a little preview of the image with its edges.

I might be able to build it by this weekend, but then again, I might be heading over to DEMF. I can sharpen up my tuts and clean up on my digitz for only $40 for the entire weekend.

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.