Blog
Posted by Cefn on 25 January 2006 | 0 Comments
Looks like there might be an opportunity to bring this one back to life.
The idea was to have a box in which a creature appears to be stirring, making mewing noises and moving the box about.
It links to the ‘curiosity killed the cat’ idea, and also Schrodinger’s cat, possibly using the Peppers ghost illusion to switch between states of being alive or being dead.
It looks as if an upcoming Ip Art public invitation may be presented for anyone who can submit an art piece which fits in a shoebox.
Posted in:
Miscellaneous
Posted by Cefn on 19 January 2006 | 0 Comments
Alex Healing has pointed me to this amazing video of an easter egg in HP Scanjet scanners.
[I thought this was rather cool to perhaps try out on the ol’ HP scanner hanging about. I noticed that the PC with the SCSI card got taken away recently though, any ideas? ; ) Alex]
We have one of these in work. I wonder if this might be a possible presentation as part of the upcoming exhibition if Alex is keen to get it to work, and somebody has an old PC with SCSI support.
More documentation of of scanjet music can be found here.
Lots of good work last night, especially some of the new project ideas. It’s on its way.
Posted in:
Miscellaneous
Posted by Cefn on 13 January 2006 | 0 Comments
These are just some notes about how I managed to get Pd to build, with the Gem library, and demonstrate two realtime video streams as described by Vade on the pd mailing list.
I am documenting this because there are many confusing resources in support of pd.
All of the efforts I’ve encountered on the web are valuable. These various initiatives maintain versions of pd for different OS, create additional pd libraries for extra capabilities, and pre-bundle distributions with built-in libraries. However, this creates a thicket for newbies.
The Final Answer
The wellspring for pd, the guy in charge of the pd core, is Miller Puckette. The latest releases of pd code can be found at the less than memorable URL http://www.crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/software.html.
This is where I picked up the source for pd v0.39-2. Version 0.39 or above was required for compatibility with my version of Mac OS X (10.4 Tiger). The pd-extended releases were too old and didn’t help.
Pd depends on TclTk for windowing, which is available for the Mac from the TclTkAqua sourceforge site. Version 8.4.9 was the last version which is verified to work with pd. I didn’t try the more recent one.
Building Miller Puckette’s pd v0.39-2 then gave me a minimal installation of pd.
To execute pd, I had to cd into the /bin directory of the pd distribution, because otherwise it can’t find the pd.tk file. So finally I ran
./pd
and it worked, but complained that gem and pmpd weren’t there (because they are not by default part of pd).
N.B. This minimal installation doesn’t have all the libraries built into it that exist in the pd-extended distribution. You have to get them yourself.
The Minimal Extras Required For Video Playback
Gem v0.90 was acquired from the gem sourceforge site. It provides additional capabilities to wire in video and 3d visuals to the pd programming model.
To use Gem, you must drop the pre-built libraries for your platform (mine was called Gem.pd_darwin) into the /extra/ directory inside the pd distribution.
Vade kindly created a demo pd program which would enable dual head rendering of two videos (assuming your video card supports video acceleration on its external video port - they don’t all do this).
The side-roads.
In addition to Miller Puckette’s site, there are also important (and uncoupled?) initiatives to document, bundle and promote pd at http://pd.iem.at/ http://puredata.info/ http://pure-data.sourceforge.net/ http://at.or.at/hans/pd and many more.
A webring has been forged to bind them all http://pd.klingt.org/webring/ but this doesn’t really help to overcome the complexity.
Take a simple example. When following the pd-extended thread of this web, from http://puredata.info/downloads/ I found myself at this page, which seems to suggest (at time of writing) that the latest version is 0.38-0test4HCS4.
The full list of sourceforge downloads for the pure-data sourceforge project is more useful, but also suggests that pd (pure-data) is at version 0.38.1
However, when contacting the pd-list, it turns out that pd itself is well beyond release version 0.39-2, and even pd-extended has tagged cvs branches running beyond 0.39 in cvs .
Attempts to build any versions lower than 0.39 turned out to be fruitless on my OS version, so this was critical information.
Posted in:
Miscellaneous
Posted by Cefn on 13 January 2006 | 0 Comments
Although this isn’t a restriction of our work, a lot of the pieces under development are interactive systems, which incorporate sensing, multimedia, and actuators. Some of the technologies behind these systems are listed below.
Pd (notes) - a realtime multimedia system allowing live and recorded input to be manipulated and transformed, the open source version of Max/MSP.
Gem - 3d and video facilities for Pd
Processing - a java based easy editing and deployment environment for multimedia work
JSyn - a java library which allows java manipulation of sound devices and sound streams (the basis for the Sonia Processing library)
Parallax Basic Stamp
and Microchip Pic - microprocessors suitable for sensing and automation
Posted in:
Miscellaneous
Posted by Dave on 11 January 2006 | 3 Comments
enlarge |
Hi Everyone,
OK this is my first twisted map. I’ve taken the driving times from Ipswich to coastal towns in the UK and morphed the map accordingly.
There are a bunch of things I need to fix, but I’d realy like to hear what you think.
Cheers,
Dave
|
Posted in:
Miscellaneous
Posted by Dave on 08 January 2006 | 0 Comments
Virtualised puppets controlled by accelerometers. Click on image above to see a movie of the first prototype.
see ongoing blog entries about this piece
Posted in:
Miscellaneous
Posted by Cefn on 07 January 2006 | 1 Comments
It looks to me as if, (in principle), we could have the following pieces in place for upcoming exhibition dates.
echo
handcar
swollenballs
fridgemagnets
pipedreams
Please let me know if there are others which could credibly be constructed in the remaining time (around 3 to 4 months). I think puppet, springthing and twistedmap are in the balance - progress has been made, but not sure if the final execution of these pieces has been decided.
Initially, a preview exhibition may be requested from contributors to the Ipswich Artists group, as a kind of proof of concept for the use of St. Mary’s as an artist-run space. That might be within the coming 3 to 4 months.
This won’t require so many exhibits as the full blown Curiosity exhibition, which should come around March-April time. However we’ll need to commit to doing both of these round about now.
Please add comments to this post or email me by reply with your views.
Posted in:
Curiosity Shows
Posted by Cefn on 07 January 2006 | 1 Comments
While I’m about buying electronics components I’m picking up bits and pieces to implement a basic version of Dave’s Huberman Sphere of Fear.
Basically I reckon the most flexible configuration needs a moderately powerful stepper motor, an array of transistors to handle the higher voltages to drive the motor, and (yet another) ultrasonic detector, with a microcontroller to control the behaviour.
If the detection ranges are small enough (< 2 metres), it might be possible to use a cheaper analog distance sensor, and a simpler circuit to control it. While this will be cheaper (the analogue Infrared distance detectors are £6 instead of £15 plus for the ultrasonic ones, microcontrollers costs around £25 plus), it involves a lot more mental effort. So I’m going to pick up the components for the more expensive approach. We can re-use these elements easily for some other fun project if they are surplus.
I gather that the physical rigging of the huberman sphere (to stop it jamming) still requires a bit of extra engineering though. Probably a good idea (if the sphere is big enough) to suspend it so that it’s out of reach when it retracts, to stop people messing about. Might be a nice effect anyway to have it untouchable.
Are you still buying the huge one from Hamleys, Dave?
Posted in:
Miscellaneous
Posted by Cefn on 07 January 2006 | 1 Comments
It strikes me that with Dave’s new idea, and a few more sonar devices, we could run the handcar piece off a Basic stamp.
Katya was using a Basic Stamp and a Sonar device to control the light in her Echo piece - people approaching would activate the light sequence and you could see it echoing through the multiple layers of video feedback picture.
For the handcar, we could just have two sonar devices detecting the height of the two people (they would have to stand on footprints to position themselves correctly) and then use this to detect their up and down oscillations (acting out the handcar). Plug the stamp, running appropriate code, into a digital potentiometer and then you can control the speed of the projector!
Posted in:
Miscellaneous
Posted by Cefn on 07 January 2006 | 1 Comments
From the soup of chips and accessories I’ve been looking at for the Basic Stamp from Parallax, I wonder if these accelerometers might give you the system you need to be able to control a puppet or similar without leaving a mac powerbook in the hands of the great british public.
There’s a bunch of modules you can use to extend the stamp, like these.
Also got a PIC from microchip on its way as an alternative platform for experimentation.
Posted in:
Miscellaneous
