I just got back from the Decode exhibition at The V&A, and what a fantastic collection of engaging, thought provoking, fun digital art. The exhibition is a joint verture between The V&A and onedotzero. It is split into 3 sections; Code, Interactivity and Network and features work from most of the major players in the world of digital art, and many of the most recogniseable pieces. There was so much impressive work and I could write at length about most of it but here are a few that particularly stood out for me.

Body Paint by Mehmet Akten

Being a keen follower of Akten’s work, and having seen the video footage of this artwork a few months ago, I was looking forward to interacting with it. Body Paint is an interactive installation which allows the participants to use their gestures to seemingly fling paint across the wall. This is achieved by tracking the audience using an infrared camera and converting the movements into brush strokes. This was definitely the most immersive piece in the show and I found myself spending a lot of time getting lost in it.

Body Paint by Mehmet Akten

Venetian Mirror by Fabrica

This is quite a haunting interactive piece which demands a degree of patience. Sitting in front of this curious mirror doesn’t provide an instant response, the participant must be still in order to see their image slowly appear, much in the same way as a developing photograph. This delayed feedback sets the piece aside from the other interactive work at the exhibition as it responds to stillness rather than motion. This allows for time to relax and contemplate the experience rather than reflexively interact.

Venetian Mirror by Fabrica

Solar by Robert Hodgin AKA Flght404

I’ve been a regular visitor to flight404.com so it was great to play with an interactive version of one of Hodgin’s best visualisations; Solar with Lyrics. This piece reacts to audio input in real-time. I spent a fair amount of time whistling, shouting, hissing and tapping whist having fun with this one.

House of Cards: Interactive version by James Frost

This is an interactive touchscreen version of Radiohead’s stunning House of Cards music video. Frost employed two technologies to capture 3D images in real-time. These were geometric informatics and velodyne LIDAR. This was not only one of the best digital artworks of last year but also one of the best music videos. It was a pleasure to have the opportunity to interact with it

VideoGrid by Ross Phillips

VideoGrid is a playful installation which allows the visitors to record short video clips of themselves performing. These clips are then looped and arranged into a hilarious grid. This is definitely the most entertaining piece at Decode.

VideoGrid by Ross Phillips

Audience by rAndom International and Chris O’Shea

This is a peculiar piece in which a collection of small mirrors appear to adopt human characteristics. They curiously look around the room and interact with one another in a chaotic manner. When a participant enters the space, the mirrors all sharply turn to stare at him. This provides the unnerving feeling of not only suddenly being the centre of attention, but also seeing your face reflected by each member of your surreal new audience.

Audience by rAndom International

Weave Mirror by Daniel Rozin

Rozin is known for building elaborate abstract mirrors from a variety of materials. Weave is one of the newest pieces in his collection. A camera scans the viewer and recreates their image using 768 motorized planes that vary in tone, producing a smokey representation.

In addition to the exhibition there are several other initiatives taking place. Karsten Schmidt AKA Toxi was commissioned to create a generative marketing identity for the exhibition. Schmidt used Processing to create an ever changing abstract 3D logo. The application is open source and visitors are encouraged to download and alter it with a chance to see their version on the London Underground. The artwork can be edited using the built in control panels, or by downloading and playing with the code. You can download the source here and view the submissions at the Recode gallery.

There are also a great deal of talks, labs, workshops and networking events that run from January to March. I’ll be attending several of the talks and the openFrameworks and Arduino workshops. See the full list here.

On a final note, it’s great to see such a respected museum such as The V&A taking digital art so seriously. Hopefully this will inspire those at other high profile institutions to follow suit.

I just presented an introduction to FLAR at the London Flash Platform Users Group (LFPUG). Definitely my best talk so far.

As promised here are the resources and examples mentioned in the talk, along with the source code and slideshow (Keynote and PDF):

Libraries:
FLARToolkit
FLARToolkit – Alchemy branch
FLARManager
Flare – Natural Feature Tracking
FlashSURF – natural feature tracking
Studierstube
HiSlope – Face Tracking

Examples:
IQ Toyota AR Tech
Ray Bans Virtual Mirror
GE Smart Grid by North Kingdom
Red Bulletin magazine – Print 2.0
Julian Perretta’s Ride My Star AR music Video by ZeroFractal
Seb Lee-Delisle’s Wormhole
5Gum Mixer by Exposure
Virtual Box Simulator by AKQA
Virtual Dressing Room by Zugara
New Year Greetings Card by AID-DC and Katamari

Resources:
Flartoolkit docs
FLARToolkit userz group
FLARManager video tutorial

Licensing:
ARToolworks

Tools:
Online Marker Generator
Blender
Blender AS3 Export Plugin

Source:
Source code
Marker

Slideshow:
Slideshow (Keynote)
Slideshow (PDF)

Here I’ve combined 2 reoccurring themes that run throughout my work – Augmented Reality and ribbons. It is an evolution of the particle trails code from AR Particle Beam. Initially I wanted to create a flocking effect for the ribbons, but didn’t quite get that far and ended up cheating. This will be the next step.

Check back soon to interact with the application. And I should also be releasing the source for this at some stage in the near future.

So I’ve got a pretty hectic schedule at the moment, including preparing a few presentations. Here are my upcoming speaking engagements:

Augmented Planet London Meetup – 11/11/09

This will be a short talk on AR in FLash that will include a discussion on FLARToolkit with demos, and a brief dip into how easy it is to develop an AR application using FLARManager. Other speakers include digital artist Chis O’Shea, Mobile applications specialist, John Wyer and Myles Peyton from T-Immersion.

It’s a free event but space is limited so reserve you place now. Go to augmentedplanet.eventbrite.com to register.

LFPUG – 26/11/09

This is an extended, more developer centric version of the Augmented Planet session. There will also be a session on the Red5 server by Trevor Burton that night.

Fractal ‘10 – 22/04/10 – 24/11/10

This is a Columbian conference that will be focussing on how art, science and technology are reinventing the world. I will be doing a session how AR is being used to reinvent the world. I will also creating a couple of art installations (including a new version of Virtual Ribbons) and an AR application to publicise the event.

I’m proud to say that I was featured in 2 articles this month. One on Augmented reality for Brazillian magazine, Image, and a cover feature titled “Self-Marketing 3.0″ for German mag, Page.

Huge thanks to Rafael Bucco and Verena Dauerer.

After the success of my Augmented Reality business card application I was fortunate enough to be invited to Adobe MAX 2009 in LA by the O’Reilly guys, to talk about my experiences with AR. Here are my impressions of the conference.

The keynote kicked the conference off with a real bang. These initial talks are renowned for being fairly dull affairs but Adobe pulled out all the stops to make this one something to behold. It started with an incredible dance performance by one of Adobe’s charitable endeavours, the Peapod academy. A discussion on the developments of the Flash platform followed. This included discussions of the new features built into AIR, a sneak look into the the latest developments in the openscreen project and a discussion of ColdFusion and LiveCycle with a look at some extraordinary enterprise projects. The climax was the announcement (after a hilarious Apple slanging Myth-Busters take off) that Apple was now accepting Flash applications into the App store. Now this isn’t exactly Flash in the iPhone browser but it’s certainly a positive step forward.

But by far the most awe-inspiring spectacle was the extended screener of James Cameron’s Avatar. A pair of 3D glasses, a 6th row seat and a massive 50ft screen heightened the experience to the point where I literally shivered in my seat. The producer John Landau passionately introduced each scene and discussed the extent to which Adobe software was used in the making of the movie.

Although there was a vast amount of sessions, as an interactive artist and non-Flex using Actionscript developer, I initially struggled to fill my schedule. There was a whole host of top flight Flash developers such as Ralph Hauwert and Andre Michell (regulars on the Flash conference circuit) missing from the list. However, the day before the conference started, I learned that Influxis had flown a bunch of them over to talk at the FITC Unconference sessions. For me, this development filled several gaps and led to my schedule being significantly reshuffled.

My main highlights included:

Joshua Davis was as inspirational and entertaining as ever in his Space talk. His latest experiments and influences were explained with a great deal of energy and enthusiasm, impressive for a 9am slot. I enjoyed watching the developments of each project from initial idea through to the finished product. His investigation into bezier curves was fantastic, as was his installation and iPhone work. This will be Joshua’s last speaking engagement for 2 years as he plans to have a well deserved rest.

Being an Augmented Reality monkey, I was inevitably going to end up attending Tomohiko Koyama AKA Saqoosha and Yoshihiro Shindo’s talk on FLARToolkit and the Japanese open source Flash community the Spark Project. It was great to hear about the history of the project and the inner workings of the AR library from the guy who wrote it. Almost as impressive was the huge tea-cosy like bear hat that he wore throughout the talk and for the rest of the day. I had a chat with Saqoosha afterwards and gushed like a schoolgirl whist droning on about how much I loved using his code library. He didn’t seem to mind. Nice guy.

A few great FITC Unconference sessions followed. Seb-Lee Delisle wowed us all with his playful work. Highlights of the talk included a look at his 5kb 3D Lunar Lander game, a walk through his fantastic 3D Big and Small website and participating in a 3D version of Pong with the rest of the audience. Ralph Hauwert was up next. Ralph is one of, if not the top 3D Flash developer on the planet. By the end we were all stunned by his experiments with fluidic, dynamically lit, interactive geometric shapes. And all this in Flash, and at a very high frame rate. Koen de Weggheleire was up next with a talk on some of the latest features in Flash Player 10. He deserves a special mention for dancing around like a crazed baboon to cheesy house music whilst demonstrating the TriangleMesh feature. Sheer entertainment.

The Adobe MAX awards ceremony followed with special guest Mark Hamill. An inspired choice considering the crowd, Hamill was highly entertaining throughout. We left before the sneak peaks to get ready for the evening but I was later reliably informed that one of the Adobe guys did some live coding dressed in a Chewbacca costume. Wild.

The MAX Bash followed and was an impressive affair. Adobe had taken over almost every establishment in the L.A. Live park. In addition to a Star Wars themed area, complete with Chubacca and Darth Vadar exhibits, Mark Hamill joined the party and was predictably mobbed the moment he arrived. Later that night we met up with some great guys from Sapient and had a ball at the Latin club.

The following morning was my talk, Augmented Reality in the Flash Player with Jesse Freeman. Both halves went very well, we got an above average rating and there were plenty of questions and positive feedback afterwards. Jesse introduced the FLARToolkit library and discussed some of his own work with limitations and the future of FLAR. My half was a discussion of my experiences with FLAR and a discussion of promotion in the field My advice for anyone planning a presentation – make sure you have lots of comical images in your slide show. There’s nothing like a few cheap gags to get the audience on your side. A bit of research is also useful.

I’m pleased to say that we had an above average rating for the talk and had a great write up on digitalarts.co.uk.

Breathing a huge sigh of relief after, I ventured out to see a few of the other MAX talks. The best of the day was A Deep Dive into 10 Innovative Projects for Flash by Thibault Imbert and Michaël Chaize. Some of the better projects were Tomek Augustyn’s face tracking library, HiSlope, due for release soon, and the WiiFlash server which allows Flash developers to use WiiMotes, Nunchuks and Wii Boards as input devices. Another great talk included Kevin Hoyt’s Integrating Flash and Hardware. In a nutshell this session explained how to use a variety of different sensors in Flash using electronics equipment. A must for any aspiring installation artist.

Although initially it was a struggle to find relevant sessions, I was consistently impressed with the scale and quality of the event, the welcoming and informative staff and (in the end) the range of talks on Flash. My fiance Juliet Lall accompanied me, and found the talks on After Effects and Illustrator to be very helpful. I would definitely recommend Adobe MAX to the typical user of Adobe’s range of software. And if Influxis continue to invite the top Flash guys I would recommend it to the atypical rest.

****EDIT****

You can see the AR presentation I did with Jesse here.

The presentation slideshow is available here. It uses Jesse’s Bum engine. It may take a while to load as it was made to run locally. Press F to fullscreen it.

As promised, here are the resources and source code from the Augmented Reality Unconference session I shared with Jesse Freeman.

You can download the source files here. One of the projects uses the native FP10 3D capabilities. The other uses Papervision with a 3D model exported from Blender as a Papervision class that extends TriangleMesh. Thanks to Lee Daley for the model. Both are FDT projects that make use of FLARManager.

Resouces.

FLARManager – Wrapper library by Eric Socolofsky.
Marker generator – Print out your marker and use this application to create the .pat file.
Blender – Free open source 3D software
Blender AS3 exporter plugin – This plugin allows you to export 3D models as AS3 classes. This works with Papervision, Sandy and Away.

I’m on the train home from 2 solid days of being inspired, amazed and baffled at Flash on the Beach in Brighton. I was very impressed with the quality of the talks and the organisation of the event. So here’s a rundown of my favourite talks.

DAY 1

Visualising Voice: Using the Flash Microphone for Advanced Interaction – Chuck freedman

Good start to the conference. Chuck discussed his quest to persuade Adobe to extend the microphone feature in Flash. One of his main demands is for the ability to record audio in stereo. Sign the petition and find out more at getmicrophone.com. He showed some great examples of what people are doing in this area alongside his current research which can be seen on his blog.

Cybernetic Art Revisited – Dr Woohoo!

I’m a great admirer of Dr Woohoo’s work and was looking forward to his presentation. He didn’t disappoint. Some of the work this guy is doing is truly remarkable. In addition to taking us through some of his inspirations he stunned us all with his ribbon generator which makes use of face tracking, his experiments with the ZCam (the 3D webcam used in Microsoft’s Project Natal) and much more. I don’t know where he finds the time.

Epiphany – Joel Gethin Lewis

This was right up my street. Joel introduced us to his impressive body of installation work. This included the Massive Attack sound reactive light shows, the world’s first interactive Christmas lights on Regent St and the breathtaking interactive multi-screen floor, Contact.

Joel talked about his passion for working with computer vision and his experiences using openCV in openFrameworks. I took a great deal from this this talk and it was one of my highlights of the conference.

DAY 2

Quick as a Flash – Grant Skinner

I struggle daily to squeeze as much fps out of Flash as I can so this talk was priceless. Not only did Grant supply a huge list of tips to optimise AS3, he has also written a class called PerformanceTest.as which makes comparing the speed of different code a simple affair.

Leaving the Sandbox – Joa Ebert

I had heard about Joa’s legendary sessions and was aware of his Actionscript prowess so I knew I was in for another great session on optimisation. I don’t think anyone in the audience was quite prepared for what he had to show us.

The guy is working on some truly intense frameworks including a plugin for eclipse that checks code for any possible optimisation and a library to manipulate and optimise ActionScript Bytecode. He also showed us his AS3 decompiler which automatically generates UML diagrams and class hierarchies. He finished off by compiling a swf from C# and then another from Java! He nonchalantly mentioned that he knocked it up in his room the day before. Wild. He was rightfully given a standing ovation.

Hacking the newsroom – Jeremy Thorp

This was a great talk on a subject that I love. Data Visualisation. Jeremy guided us through his experiments that came from toying with the New York Times API and Processing. His work was both beautiful and informative. I found it fascinating how his his visualisations would reveal trends of public thought in relation to events and periods of time.

This is very exciting stuff for me.

Contrast – Unconventional Web Applications

These guys don’t use Flash but their talk was a brilliant discussion on the importance of designing unconventional web experiences. It was an inspirational story of a new company who dared to be different.

Craig Swan – Choose your own adventure

This was just the most awe-enspiring talk and one of the best of the conference (tied with Joel). Craig took us on a personal journey explaining his philosophy and the main turning points in his life that lead him to where he is today. During this history he would discuss his research, most of which utterly blew me away.

We were introduced to the phenomena that is Cymatics, the formation of fractals and patterns from sound waves vibrating a substance.

One of the most fascinating topics he discussed was the power of intention. He played a clip from The Secret Lives of Plants that astounded me. It appeared that positive or negative thoughts were having an influence on the plants (I’m remaining fairly sceptical about this but it’s an awsome concept).

His multi-directional speaker was a truly strange experience. This is a very creepy device from which he was playing a haunting chanting sound. It seems to project this sound to wherever it was pointing. As he rotated it across the room the sound would appear to move to the different corners. He then ran it across the front row where I was sitting and the feeling of the sound travelling past us all like that sent shivers through me. Chilling stuff.

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This is only my second Flash conference, the first was FITC Amsterdam last year. FITC was very well put together but from my perspective FOTB was far better both in terms of the quality of the talks and the professionalism of the setup. John Davey (the organiser) has a lot to be proud of.

I think it’s worth saying that although it can be an expensive endeavour to send away a team of actionscripters/designers to conferences such as this, it really does pay for itself in the long run. In my experience the whole team always comes back full of ideas and inspired to learn and create. As a vehicle for developing not only the team but also the business, these events should be taken very seriously indeed.