I’ve been researching bits & pieces of inexpensive tech for art installations that bridge the physical/digital gap in interesting ways. In particular I’m developing tangible music ideas (moving beyond touchscreens and pixels) and integrating vision / motion capture into my realtime gfx stuff. Figure I’ll share some interesting building blocks. First, I recommend the great RFID visualization experiments and process writeups over at BERG and nearfield.org. The reader and tags are reasonably priced if you want to try.

Personally I’m into capacitance sensing for making touch-responsive objects. Here’s a technical article for beginners. If you’ve got an Arduino it’s one of the simplest circuits to build: a resistor, capacitor and, um, any piece of metal. The CapSense library‘s a great intro. Getting more advanced, the MPR121‘s a tiny, inexpensive chip that handles 12-channel touch for you. I’ve got one coming in the mail and am looking forward to tinkering. With multiple sensors you run into interference problems, but I found a neat paper on fighting these effects. (Love this spread-spectrum sensor but it’s waay more advanced to build.)

I liked this post at CDM on using the Kinect as an OSC music & video controller, lots of good starting points there. Another one shows live VJing with one using OpenFrameworks and TUIO. The NITE skeleton tracking component is available for OSX, as is the OSCeleton code. Kimchi and Chips have videos showing the promise of motion tracking + projection mapping.

April 10 – Yuri’s Night Bay Area

I’ll be playing at Yuri’s Night down at NASA on April 10. It is awesome. It’s a collaborative production this year by crews including Symbiosis and Lovetech, so expect top-notch music and art installations.

(photos from Laughing Squid)

March 18 – 5 Minutes of Fame at Noisebridge

Thursday I’m signed up to talk about Loveland at the new Noisebridge space in the Mission. The idea, recent developments, and upcoming website launch and developer’s platform.

I was invited to play a Valentine’s Day party and thought I’d conjure up some hearts for it. These functions at Mathworld looked suitable for some parametric sweetness so I grabbed one.

And shortly had them floating around…

…at the Red Party.

• The Mag+ concept design and Kicker’s notes
• Pranav Mistry’s Sixth Sense project
• MIT gestural screen interface
• Two-handed theremin
• Magic projection
• 3D AR sketching
• Kicker Studios‘ gestural TV remote
• Johnny Lee does amazing things with the Wiimotes
• Microsoft’s Project Natal
• Projection on buildings
• Reactable tangible sequencer blocks
• AR magic
• Emotiv, EmSense, NeuroSky, OCZ’s neural impulse actuator

Projection mapping is a method of painting light onto 3D objects rather than a rectangular screen to give them more life and depth. Create Digital Motion has been covering a lot of recent work, collected under their projection mapping tag. The technique has been taking off like crazy this year thanks to software like the Video projection tools project and patches for vvvv. One of my favorite uses is in the gorgeous film SCINTILLATION created with stop-motion and projection mapping onto orchids.

Back to buildings. I’m digging these because it’s a different kind of augmented reality, one which doesn’t require looking through a video feed. I mentioned previously using decaying cities as canvas; here pictures and information can be superimposed onto large-scale scenery for any number of viewers, and the hardware is becoming increasingly accessible. I’ve seen several light graffiti projects. This performance uses giant arrays of LEDs sequenced and synced with music to turn museum windows into pixels for a light show:

This rendered animation superimposes volumes of digital color onto gray, concrete urban environments (and here’s another).