Project 4 - Further Construction

After a short drive to sylvia park, we managed to buy ourselves some rather expensive styrofoam (60$). I have no idea why it was that expensive, but we ended up forking over the money for it. That day we went straight to the 3D lab in order to sculpt some components to the roller. These components were to be used in order to contain the arduino board and also the webcam away from sight as to make the device a little bit easier to look at ascetically. In order to get the right shape we sanded it down after cutting out a rough estimate. This foam would also be used for our time based visualization.

I cant help but feel we are falling behind. It seems as though we are focusing in on such minute details without actually focusing on the project as a whole. We have the ideas but it seems we don't know how to go about executing them. After experimenting with the foam in regards to our visualization I found that our original idea of threading string through it in order to lift it up in layers wasn't quite going as planned. The string was actually cutting into the foam which meant it couldn't possibly rip through it when being used with a servo, this is a risk I am not willing to take after spending 60 dollars on it already. I think that using this type of foam was a very bad idea.

I have completed all the programming successfully and it is ready to be used, its simply waiting for the device to be fabricated. Its getting frustrating waiting around for things to get done. Despite going to the 3D lab to help I cant help but feel as though I am not needed. There doesn't seem to be a need for 4 people in the 3D lab. Nevertheless I am determined to get this project completed even if the deadline is very close within our view...

Project 4 - The last Day. So close yet so far away...

Today I wanted to get some testing done but due to complications of implementing a webcam into the program instead of a built in laptop webcam proved be much harder than at first thought. My computer wouldn't support the webcam for some reason and I ran into continuous errors. I consulted forums and found that I was not the only person to encounter this. I followed all instructions such as re downloading quicktime, Qtcap, and quicktime for java but nothing worked so  we tried it on Toms computer which worked surprisingly enough (dam macs). However his computer had MORE problems than i had. For some reason openGL would not work and we had to find patchwork code to fill in some gaps so that it would work on a mac. The arduino codes also did not work as the numbers were printing out random WTF values such as 0 and even 44 million. It was not surprizing that this caused major problems. To combat this error we worked for more than 4 hours trying to figure out the problem and evidently it turned out that the structure of the program meant that the arduino serial code had to be placed below the open GL code.... And this is the exact reason why i hate programming. Tedious problems take hours to crack. Another problem we currently have is that the video flickers if we use the flex sensor values to change the intensity of the 3D effect. The smaller increments of X and Y mean that there is less flickering which is strange because it uses much more GPU and CPU power. However if we play with the ratios of the arduino flex sensor values we could fix this i think.

We also decided that it would be a good idea to take the program out into the city using the webcam to see what kind of results we would see in the real world. We found that it worked very well, however in some places the sun was too bright and made seeing anything hard. However since the program works on brightness intensity we can use this to our advantage when objects are silhouetted against the brightness it will give a greater 3D effect. At the end of the day we managed to get one test in using the device on the fabrication concept. To get variation in texture we simply created our own course for it to run over using our books :)We used books because we assumed that this would be the maximum variation in texture we would encounter such as uneven bricks out in the city.

Project 4 - Programming ALMOST Done!

After hours of tedious programming trying to communicate arduino with processing I have finally succeeded in my mission. This aspect was the main feature of our project because without it, the flex sensors would be absolutely useless. I found out that there is a huge different in arduino between the ports A0 and 0, including A5 and 5. When i was using analogRead to record the values, it was generating a string that was vertical in the arduino serial console. This did not coincide with my processing code because my processing code was looking for a string that had a horizontal structure similar to this: xxx,yyy. This is why I could not convert the string into 2 int values within processing. I feel as though i have a much broader understanding of how programs talk with each other  Before this project I didn't even think it was possible to do something like this. Using these values from the flex sensor we can now feed them into a 3d pixel program that I have altered. By doing this I hope that I can change the intensity of the 3D illusion. The code is based on color intensity and vertexes. If I can find a good use for the variables I can convert the texture of surfaces onto the video which will give us a point of view of the city from the materials that are put together to make it. I think this is a great idea and I think it will be easily done from this point onwards. All we need to worry about now is the physical visual presentation rather than the video side of the project.

Project 4 - More Research WITH SUCCESS

Today I did a lot of research in regards to the video that we are wanting to present. Not only that but we also talked about a physical presentation that we wanted to commit to. In regards to the video, we were mainly focussed on Max Msp. However, although this is a program mainly based on video processing, it is very limited in the fact that you cannot dig deep into your artistic imagination. Vertex shaders are also very hard to use and there is little about them on the internet, thus creating a texture on our video as I wanted would be almost impossible. Numerous posts were made on the cycling74 forum and not a single one was answered. And so I swayed more towards Processing itself. I was unsure of how to run videos in it but I found that there is a library that can be used to process live video feed to be altered. I wanted the pixels to jump out at you depending on how rough the texture is. I found a video on youtube that did exactly that. It turned the pixels into 3D squared that changed depending on color. The intensity could possibly be altered using the data we collect from our flex sensor. In regards to the physical side of things, we thought that we could construct a jenga tower that could be shaken by the data being read to symbolize an earthquake.

Project 4 Programming Progress

Today we started the day completely lost as to if we were even able to communicate Arduino with Max Msp. After doing a bit of research and digging deep into my prior electrical engineering knowledge i decided that using a voltage divider would be the best option to set up the 2 flex sensors. We walked up to surplus electronics, purchased a few components such as resistors and wired and headed back to AUT to piece it all together. Looking at a simple diagram I set up the breadboard and hooked it up to Toms Laptop to test it out (as my Max Msp has conveniently expired its trial version...) After consulting the teacher of Arduino we had an idea of how we would use the serial of Arduino to talk with Max Msp and send through the voltage values to be used as variables. We found an example in the program that could do exactly what we wanted called 'analogue read.'
After a bit of tinkering and an hour or two of staring blankly at the screen we finally had the variables printing on Max MSP.

Project 4

Today we were asked to do a kind of stop motion exercise similar to the bullet time effect in the matrix. We were asked to experiment with the idea of time and space. We chose to align our laptops in a semi circle to record in real time. I chose for my action a back flip. Because of limited amounts of laptops being available for our use we decided not to do the full circle and instead turn around and try imitate what we had done exactly the same but facing the other direction to give the 360 degree perspective.

I felt as though we could have improved a lot on our technique by using 1 camera to take a lot more photos in smaller increments to give a more matrix-like effect. However it was an interesting day experimenting with camera styles that we don't usually encounter. I wish we had more time to take advantage of the green screen  more as none of us actually got around to putting a background behind our videos.                                    

Project 3 - The Wearable Interface

Upon receiving the project I was very unsure of what I was supposed to do both conceptually and on the programming side. I just couldn’t get my head around how I could relate to the film with a piece of clothing that would be creative but also sensible and user friendly. During the brainstorming process I went through a variety of ideas and ultimately I decided that I definitely did not want to recycle my entire short film as I thought it would lead me down a very boring one way street of retelling the same story and it did not leave me much room to explore and expand upon my ideas. Instead I decided early on that I wanted to convey the same message as the film but from a different perspective. In our short film we had four gangsters as the main characters. We portrayed them as hardcore criminals and in general, just bad men. But the film did not show how they strayed so far from being innocents to becoming murderous tyrants. And this is where my idea was born.

I wanted to show the audience that we all can fall victim to the same path as these men have taken. To do this I decided I would place 2 videos over the top of each other, one video playing a dark scene of crime and drugs and the other playing a video of innocent children. On top of this was played audio with children talking about their aspirations in life of what they wish to accomplish and achieve. The track ‘bad world’ was also played over the top to generate a mood of sadness which is also what our short film tried to convey. With the press of a button on a petal you could browse through different audio tracks and different contrasts of children and crime over the top of each other. In the end I did decide to use a small section of our film that was during the cemetery scene when the gangsters were discarding roses towards the grave of their loved one that was murdered. This was done because just like in the short film, it represents the loss of innocence, each rose discarded shows that the 4 gangsters have given up the last thing that gave them any sense of humanity.

When each petal is pressed on the rose it shows a snap shot of each rose being dropped at the grave. This all relates back to the final video that is displayed when the 5^th petal is pushed. The video show a man in a body bag being zipped up over his head. At the same time, a video is faded over the top of petals that are falling the ground along with a rose that has been stripped of all its petals instead of children playing. This is done to show that the lifestyle they lived has evidently killed them, just like in the short film where the gangster’s lifestyle of crime killed red riding hood, representing the gradual decay of human life. The metaphor of the rose is used throughout the film for the exact same reason as the videos of the children. It contrasts something as horrible as death with something as beautiful as a rose which also relates back to the underlying themes of red riding hood in regards to rebirth and the loss of innocence. I encountered many problems along the way to the completion of my project that I had to overcome. The main problem was with MAX MSP itself. I never had an idea in concrete and because I didn’t have a solid idea to expand on, it was very hard to start programming what I wanted to accomplish. I originally started with a clock, so that when the second hand ticked it would create connections at each second and in turn activate something on MAX MSP. Evidently I didn’t have enough connections to do this and I realized that it wasn’t very interactive or relevant to my short film, so I decided the best idea was to go with the rose as not only did it relate to the film but it was easy to use, straight to the point for first time users, and allowed me to program what I wanted without the constraints of a ridiculously designed item of clothing that had no purpose. From here I started the video side of my presentation using MAX and Jitter. Originally I wanted to run 4 different windows within 1 window using jit.scissors but this used a lot more CPU power and every time I tried to run my program it crashed my laptop so I was forced to simplify it down into one jit.window. Because of this I had to make major changes a day before the presentation but overall I think I managed to convey the idea I wanted to even with one jit.window being used.