My xport has arrived. Tom Igoe was kind enough to give me a small board to work with my xport, I have ordered the parts from digikey and I am hoping to build and working this through spring break! Here is a source page called Lantronix Devices Archives from Tom Igoe’s site. Lots of code! Let’s keep this url here too.

I am just keeping these for archives. There are bunch of pdfs popped up on the google, I haven’t checked them in details, here they are:

Computational Videography Videoshop: A New Framework for Video Editing
SPATIO-TEMPORAL TEXTURE SYNTHESIS AND IMAGE INPAINTING FOR VIDEO APPLICATIONS
Seamless Video Editing
VIDEO REGION SEGMENTATION BY SPATIO-TEMPORAL WATERSHEDS
Analysing Video Sequences using the Spatio-temporal Volume
SPATIO-TEMPORAL SEGMENTATION OF VIDEO BY HIERARCHICAL MEAN SHIFT ANALYSIS
Spatio-Temporal Segmentation of Video Data

I was reading this good article called Segmentation and Reassembly of the Digital Moving Image by Susanne Jaschko, and she was giving examples of different works starting from 1993 Toshio Iwai’s Another Time, Another Space which comings and goings of people through the station were filmed by cameras and were manipulated in realtime by the computer to deform shape, time references and showing a different time-space environment on each monitor, and going with Manovich’s soft cinema which she gives as another example of searching new ways in video. Iwai’s example is good because he is playing with the spatiotemporal attribute of time, and it looks like he is the first one to play with this. Zerrfalten by Stephan Schulz and Nelson Vergara is another example of this play. There is an pdf in english tells in detail the process.The important part is segmentation of the data and re-using this in a new sense. The article is stressing the digital moving image’s liberation in today’s culture and manifesting that it is leading to new artistic models representing the complex concepts of time and space.

Well she is right at some point, because I came to this project actually before reading her article. Khronos Projector by Alvaro Cassinelli is a video time-warping machine with tangible deformable screen.

from the site:

The Khronos Projector is an interactive-art installation allowing people to explore pre-recorded movie content in an entirely new way. A classic video-tape allows a simple control of the reproducing process (stop, backward, forward, and elementary control on the reproduction speed). Modern digital players add little more than the possibility to perform random temporal jumps between image frames.

The goal of the Khronos Projector is to go beyond these forms of exclusive temporal control, by giving the user an entirely new dimension to play with: by touching the projection screen, the user is able to send parts of the image forward or backwards in time. By actually touching a deformable projection screen, shaking it or curling it, separate “islands of time” as well as “temporal waves” are created within the visible frame. This is done by interactively reshaping a two-dimensional spatio-temporal surface that “cuts” the spatio-temporal volume of data generated by a movie.

This project is interesting to me in two ways. First, it is good because it is commenting on the linearity that we are having in our everyday lives in front of the screen. It is showing us a new way of perceiving this phenomenon. The second, it is doing this with a tangible interface. This means a transparent interface between the user and the subject. I am really curious about the algorithm behind the morphing between the different timelines of the videos, they look really slick, it looks like opening a door in timeline. I want to do some experiments on this in jitter.

I came across to Khronos project before but now I have found the time to understand it yet better. It has won the Grand prize at Japan Media Arts Festival.

Golan Levin has an informal catalogue of slit-scan video artworks as he named at this site.

We have ordered bunch of 880nm IR leds from super bright LEDs. Also I have come up with this useful information from the jitter list. Our webcam’s sensitivity could be dropped to 10-15% when it is sensing 880nm comparing to sensivity at visible wavelengths. We will see what we can do with our ISight.

Someone on the list suggested illuminating the scene with lots of tungsten lights with many layers of deep red gels. Actually Mark helped me suggesting some different gels for this :
Roscolux Colors #19 x 2 (two sheets)
#83 (one sheet)
#90 (one sheet)
and then putting a Lee #87 filter in front of the camera with nightshot mode. Someone on the list also suggested using a ex-view chipped camera which is very useful for IR lights. Sony had one here. Those informations can be useful in the future.

This is the class that I was going to take but dropped because of my health problems back in the time. I ordered my xport yesterday, I am excited :) Also I was on the floor today, playing with my arduino board and basically trying to make it work. In the end it wasn’t working but I was still happy because it just gave me a break from only-coding world. Also the news is Sparkfun starts to sell those and they cost only 30 bucks! Rob told me their ability is kind of restricted though, I might hook myself up another board and play with it in the summer since the program thinks to give the pcomp class with arduino’s next semester.

Apart from that, the flash news is, yes I have ordered an xport and thinking to do a a project where network involves for the end of semester. I really want to get my hands dirty with physical networks.

Let’s see. What I have been doing, I have been messing around with code so much, lately I have found a great class notes from Jeffrey Traer’s Introduction to CS class from princeton. There is nice examples of Euler Step in the examples which make me grasp it better. Actually Daniel Shiffman was right, we are doing Euler in our examples as well, only without adding a timestep. Maybe it is supposed to take this long for me to understand. I want to implement springs/nodes into a2z midterm.

So this was one thing, another is I need to think about how I can use the information of tags and links in a more meaningful way in terms of visualization rather than displaying information.

John Doyle is giving a talk in Berkeley Toyota Distinguished Lecture Series on March 10, I need to check this out later, I am sure it is going to be fun. I have read a great paper from Julian Bleecker named “why things matter?” Nicolas from Pasta and Vinegar mentioned about this after the conference of lift06.

The short of long is, ( I think I mentioned abou this before, because it really draws my attention) we need more things(spimes) that need to be around us which is going to have blogging capabilities. That means, they can feedback the network and this information could be used in our daily lifes,simply it is just as we check the weather from the internet everyday. But add this a mobile ability and realtime feedback and maybe more ubiqutiousity.

I find two things, use of biology as a model and using networks, really important for our near future applications that we are going to build in order to make our lives smoother. The biggest challenge to this could be the mass of information which makes sooo much noise.

Well it has been a funny week, I was playing with delicious API and trying to parse the data I got into some kind of visualization. There was some problem displaying text on eclipse though, so I ported whole project into processing and continue there. Here is the link to my midterm project overall. It still needs to be improved and I believe I am going to extend it in the following days.

Nicolas (From Pasta and Vinegar) explains a nice point of different results of location awareness through mobile apps. It turns out that sometimes getting the location of your colleague automatically doesn’t help to communicate,and having lack of availability of this information push you to communicate more with him/her. I think this is a really good point in an era where we think if something is done in technological terms then it is a good thing. Still as far as the technology goes there is this website navizon and they offer a location based system where users periodically update their surrounding wi-fi locations and make it shared so that users without can benefit from that. (P2P wireless positioning.) It is a good approach, as it will allow us to point ourselves without the help of GPS in the long run.

Screwed up as always :) Well I have some stuff at my hand but I think I generally dive in the code so much that I forget the build something on top of it.

This was my proposal for the records.
Right now I have this: The canvas consists of vector fields 120×120. The particles move according to that. The mouseDrag puts a little spice to it. Actually whole vector field thing started with trying to discover how magnetic field forces work. In the end I couldn’t quite simulate the magnetic field force but this is what I come up with.

This is my second example from last week: I just added a sin/cos lookup table and producing them according to that table as their location. It could be improved to make a fireball maybe…

So this is my third example, which I totally screwed. It was supposed to be this: Last week after I got bored with Magnetic Force concept, I thought it would be great to mix particle systems with waves which means springs in here. Then I started searching on the subject and came up with really good explanations:

Pixar – Physically Based Modelling – Particle System Dynamics – pdf file.
Particle System Example – Paul Bourke
and one smooth Traer Physics Library.

A normal type of person wouldn’t bother with underlying equations but since I am the biggest geek and also the biggest failure in math, I just took this as an opportunity to prove how I suck at math once again. I have crashed to this derivation concept. Actually it is kind of interesting, it could be used to calculate different positions of your objects in different timesteps and it could come handy at some point. So I have totally biased with it, and tried the port the C code into processing which you can see the result until yesterday Shiffman reminded me about Zachary Lieberman’s Madrid workshop website.

It turns out he applied Euler Method to his particle system and it is in processing! That’s what I have been looking for all this week, an implementation of ODEs. So Yesterday I started and re-wrote the C based code referencing the Lieberman’s way.

Of course it couldn’t work in one night… So I went ahead and hacked Lieberman’s original code to create what I would like to create. In the end it was a great work labour for me overall. I enjoyed it very much, and also I realized that even if I were curious about math side of these applications, I shouldn’t lose the whole picture.

Following Josh’s great idea of collaborating for the end semester show at Tonic, I am keeping the sources that I have found which could be beneficial in terms of think-tank. I was reading Joseph Paradiso’s paper Electronic Music Interfaces, and he is pointing out good ideas approaching how to build a electronic musical interface.

I think the question we have to ask to ourselves is before starting any production, how I am going to approach to it. Is it going to be an extension for a current acoustic instrument,or is it going to be a total new interface? Personally I am kind of curious about two things currently. Using slit-scanning as a real time composition tool and using brainwaves to perform and compose.

I have found couple of good papers around those subjects:
Computer Music Research page of Plymouth University, UK
Interfacing the Brain Directly with Musical Systems: On developing systems for making music with brain signals
Tactile Composition Systems for Collaborative Free Sound
An Informal Catalogue of Slit-Scan Video Artworks by Golan Levin.

Those could be a good start for inspiration.-