Tangible interactive artwork
Inspired by this guy, I just got a fresh batch of business cards from moo.com. There’s not really enough space on a business card to explain yourself in any detail so I thought I’d extend it using augmented reality. I recorded a short video bio and created a 3D grid of coloured planes. These colours are updated with the those from the video. The planes are extruded depending on the level of brightness.
***EDIT***
This is now online for all to enjoy. First print out this. Then go here.
So I thought it was about time I jumped on the augmented reality bandwagon. Rather than the obligitory 3D model I decided to make something a little different. I’ve used 3D lighting techniques and physics here to create this beam of light surrounded by strange celestial light particles.
If you would like to interact with it, first download and print out the marker here then go here for a live demo.
Big thanks to a few people. First and foremost Saqoosha, the clever chap who created the FLARToolkit library, a port of the C++ library ARToolkit. Mikko Haapoja for providing a fantastic introduction to using FLARToolkit. Eric Socolofsky for building the framework FLARManager which makes working with FLARToolkit a sinch.
Incidentaly while making this, John Lindquist started an augmented reality competition on the Papervision forum. I’ve decided to enter it (hence the Papervision Logo on my marker – rules of the comp, not sucking up) so please feel free to vote for me on the forum. 
For those of you who are interested, you can download the source code here. It’s an FDT project but it shouldn’t be too difficult to convert it over to your favourite development environment.
I was recently asked for some help from someone having problems using 2 PING Ultrasonic range sensors. I promised to send some pictures of the setup as I hadn’t provided information on this in my previous post. So just in case anyone else is having problems, here they are. Hope they can help.
This installation is an AIR application that was built using Flash. It is intended to be placed in the reception area of my workplace, Skive. It was actually completed a few months ago but I just recently managed to put some video documentation together.
The piece uses a webcam to track any form of movement to displace particles. The letters of the Skive logo are broken up and forced to the edges of the participant’s silhouette. This creates a chaotic outline as the pieces attempt to rush back into their original places to reform the letters. The springiness of the particles brings a fluidic motion which encourages play.
Click here to see the video on Vimeo
I’ve worked with webcams several times before and found that differences in light and surroundings can cause the application to behave in different ways. This can be very frustrating as it means recompiling using different values. This time, I decided to do something about it and created a control panel which would allow me to alter and save values such as springiness, threshold and pixelation on the fly. This saved a lot of time, effort and stress.
I’ve been playing around with the Arduino microcontroller recently and this is my first experiment. It’s a prototype for a future artwork that essentially acts as a primitive touchscreen device. I’ve used 2 PING))) Ultrasonic Range Sensors positioned at the top of my monitor. These measure the distance of any object placed in front of them. The Arduino board collects this data and passes it on to Flash via SerProxy.
Click here to see the video on Vimeo
Click here to see the video on YouTube
For this project I used a modified version of David Cuartielles’ Arduino sketch and SerProxy as a Serial-to-Network Proxy Server. Here is my serproxy.cfg code.
# Config file for serproxy
# See serproxy's README file for documentation
# Transform newlines coming from the serial port into nils
# true (e.g. if using Flash) or false
newlines_to_nils=true
# Comm ports used
comm_ports=3
# Default settings
comm_baud=9600
comm_databits=8
comm_stopbits=1
comm_parity=none
# Idle time out in seconds
timeout=300
# Port 3 settings (ttyS2)
net_port3=5333
I spent quite a lot of time trying to use Firmata, and AS3Glue but found that Firmata didn’t work with the PING Range Sensor. I’m fairly sure that AS3Glue requires the Board to be running Firmata so, as mentioned above, I settled for Arduino code from David Cuartielles. I wrote my own Actionscript to deal with the incoming data using the Socket and ByteArray classes. You can find an early rough version of this code here.
UPDATE:
Images of the setup can now be seen here.
This is my first experiment using the open source framework WiiFlash. It is an AIR application built using Flash in which the user can generate a Cubist self portrait by pointing a Wiimote at an Infrared light. Webcam footage is masked and layered using a variety of shapes and lines, the propeties of which can be altered using the Wiimote controls.
Click here to see the video on Vimeo
Click here to see the video on YouTube
The controls are as follows:
B adds shapes to the stage
A gives the pseudo random positioning effect
+ increases the scale of the shapes
- decreases the scale of the shapes
up/right increases the alpha of the lines
down/left decreases the alpha of the lines
The AIR app and source code will be available to download soon. You will however need a Wiimote, a bluetooth dongle, the WiiFlash server installed, a webcam and an Infrared light to use it.
