brightness / colour tracking in processing

Here i am sitting in the dark waving my phone about:



testing out a brightness tracking script in processing which finds the brightest pixel and puts a huge yellow blob on it. it only seems to work well in the dark, when i tried it out earlier in the day it kept jumping to bright pixels generated by my bright window. might be a bit problematic if i use brightness in my final piece, it'd have to be pretty dark to work.

Whilst researching the BlobDetection library i found puppet show a processing / unreal programmage that uses colour recognition to control a character in an unreal environment.


(you can tell they're cool, they play guitar hero)

here's a video of it in action and how it works:



I'm hoping after some rooting around in their code i'll get colour recognition working.

i like ymck..

the band, and the colours.
although i do nothing in print.

i've decided to have some moo mini cards, for my business cards, as they are rather snazzy. and dinky.

i just need to come up with what designs i want to use, as i can use several designs for one bunch of cards.

some early mock ups of ideas:







i want to find a better font though.

my approach to this is to just keep throwing up ideas until i get a bunch that i like and will use.

ymck (the band) are awesome because they give away this.

flickr bahbee

Before i get knee deep in lots of code that makes my head explode, i need to have a little think about what feeds i want to use, and how i could possibly get them into my floor. One feed i think i should and could and must use is flickr! (woo flickr.) As it's a lovely resource of lovely photos, which will make my floor lovely. It will also fit in with my idea of a tactile internet browser, because it's such a big site and has so many photos, hopefully it will bring up lots of different things.

An inspiration behind this is biscuit tin. which is freakin' lovely.
By freakin' lovely, i mean that it has a lovely sense of tactility even though it's completely screen based.

making self hire-able.

As it's the last few months of the last year at college i better start making myself more professional, and get networking. I've set up a linkedin profile, which is slowly but surely getting more and more full. I'm also going to work on networking in other ways as well.

I've also decided to re-do my website, as i think it's a bit pap. Also since i'm no longer thinking of myself as a web designer i've decided to install wordpress which will make it a lot easier to update. another reason for using wordpress is that this lovely little blog is going to die in a few months when i finish college, so i better start working on it's successor. I also seem to work better under some constraints, so hopefully making a bloggy type site will help me concentrate on the assets rather than the layout.

I'm also wanting to include some processing or flash in the site, especially processing as it's what i'm meant to be into, but flash will probably be easier to implement.

I need business cards!

Interactive floors + tables

Just raiding the exibition part of the processing site, but hey, it's research.

the first floor i found was Body Navigation by Ole Kristensen (Spring 2008)


they're playing pong, which went a bit crazy but is still awesome.

It's a performance piece, designed to react to the movement of dancers, so it's quite artsy and different from what i'm wanting to do, but it's responsive to the dancers movments in a quite natural way which is something i want in my piece. Infrared blobtracking was used to track the dancers movements, and the graphics were drawn by open gl in processing.

I've also been looking into interactive tables, two of which that i've found track object placement.

The London College of Fashion graduate show for 2007 and 2008 featured interactive tables by moving brands.

When a students card is place on the table, it brings up photos of their work. By turning the card you can scroll through their work.







Each card has a symbol or tag on the back like the one above, which is tracked by the program. Processing an reACTvision were used.

Another interactive table i've found is mæve by werk5.




The table was created to create "visual and tangible access to the social and intellectual networks behind architectural projects". I'm not quite sure what that means but i like how the objects placed on the table create connections between one another. It adds another element of play to the already tactile experience.



The table was created with Processing, reACTvision, and Gestalt.

jist of the new project:

I'm going to create an interactive floor. Which is going to be kind of like a giant internet browser that you walk around in, but it only brings up feeds.

The general idea is that when an object or certain colour appears on the floor, it will bring up a feed relating to that object or colour, so a picture frame will bring up photos, green will bring up frogs etc.

I'm also wanting to make it a tactile experience, which is why i'm using picture frames to bring up photos. i'm also wanting the user to become part of it, so i'm thinking of providing hats for people to wear, which will bring up different feeds. so instead of just looking for the colour green, the program could look for a green frog hat, and then bring up the frog information when it appears.

here are some notes, that might explain my ideas better: