Video documentation
The video documentation is online, the work in progress blog is now closed.
The video documentation is online, the work in progress blog is now closed.
It was a great opening and this ends the 2006 Master in Electronic Imaging !

Thanks to Shengfang, Benoit, Olivier and Mr Maurice who made the trip to Scotland from Brussels and Paris.
Today was the last day of the installation week. I have been busy putting cables around the installation and trying the sensors… Yesterday they were not working properly till I remembered the manual where they stated that it is better to put some cardboard or vinyl under the mate (always RTFM !).
It was working better, indeed… Nonetheless, I had to troubleshoot the signal coming to Max/MSP. The midi signal comes with values between 0 and 127 and not 0 and 1 like in the programming I did… So I had to work hard to put an end to the code before the end of the day… It now works fine !

After working at the woods workshop, climbing on the scaffolding, today was the flooring day. I had a good price for the 4 x 2 m of vinyl that I put around the installation to hide the sensors.

The sensor part come from a French company called Interface-Z wich makes reasonably priced, resistant sensitive mates (Tapis sensitif). It is more reliable and cheaper solution than using video cameras in order to track the position and eventually the number of people in an installation.

Finally, we got the first projection on the ground and it’s working perfectly. I can’t say I had any doubts about that…

Also, thanks to Mark Holden, we hanged the whistling box. That one will probably need some more thoughts but it’s worth trying. On this picture, it’s on the right, hanging in the air…

Tomorrow, I’ll be working on the interactive aspect of the installation… I’m sure some great surprises are awaiting me there…
First day of the installation week… Well, till today, I wasn’t even sure whether I would get scaffolding or not and I finally got it ! The problem was that, in the Uk, you need a certificate in order to get on the scaffolding and most of the technician were on a summer break at the moment. CITYroom is not too far at the moment but it’s getting better, for sure ! Tomorrow, the electrician is going to come and we’ll sure know what is going to happen to the installation space…

I have been working on the different elements of the installation at the excellent and friendly wood’s workshop of the college. Thanks to the help of Roody and Jason, we were able to make the “periscope” that will be used to project an video on the floor (from 7 m high) and let the door stand by itself. Here is the door being painted at the workshop.

Well, without going to much into details, I thought I could describe the key programming work behind the installation. For speed reason, I only use the openGL tools included in Jitter. On a Mac 2×2Ghz with an ATI 9600, the patch is running at 45 fps.
This is excellent when you know that two videos are run in realtime, 3d geometry is being done according to the sound environment (jit.gl.plato), a blob (my interpretation of a virtual shadow) is executed at the position of a new entrance in the interactive space (jit.gl.isosurf) and the interactive algorythm takes into account the number of people and their position to show the different vision of the city (two videos made in After Effect ) and return to standby if no one is there. The result of the dissolve is sent to jit.gl.videoplace. Finally a mask is put over (jit.gl.sketch) at the place where is the bed so it fakes the idea that the video is showed underneath.
For this installation, I’m using Max/MSP/Jitter. Till now, I was using the 4.6b11 beta version of it because it gives access to the power of core image. An element embeded into the tiger (10.4) release of Max OS X that is now usable in Jitter with jit.gl.imageunit. Well, it seems that everything that I was hoping for has arrived : the final version of max/msp and jitter is here and we are d-9 !!
Since a few months, I knew that I will be using the Interface-z system in order to capture the number of people. A number of pressure matte will be laid on the ground at some strategic places. But a few days ago, I decided to enhance the interactive experience by augmenting the number of mattes. So, monday, I contacted Interface-z but no answer… August is Paris is famous for not having any Parisien around… Fortunately, today, they contacted me from Italy and their are going to send me the necessary cables. Right on time for the exhibition… or…