Digital Puppetry — Now on Display at Eyebeam

Digital Puppetry, a project I collaborated on with artist Tine Papendick and all-around digital genius Rory Solomon on, is now on display at Eyebeam Atelier, in Chelsea through August 9 as part of the Interactivos exhibition.

The project uses Computer Vision with OpenCV to allow viewers to attach digital accessories to their images in real-time.

Some more images, video and flickr links after the jump

Phlock

Phlock is an interactive installation that allows viewers to sequence sounds and create music using the emergent behavior of digital creatures.

Phlock is on display at the Chelsea Art Museum until June 8, 2008

more images after the jump…

Forward Kinematics for Animating Hand-Drawn Art.

Built an applet for testing out the character art for the Augmented Dart Game project. This allows the cells to morph and move around specified joints and armatures, while retaining their hand-drawn aesthetic.

Beautiful Accident: Ghosts

I was coding in a tail made out of circles from 2 to 0.1 radius (was trying to make them look like sperm since I think the new game name will be Fertile Ground), when all of a sudden, the boids came out looking like ghosts. Having two body segments that have connective tissue looks extremely expressive, and pulls the feeling away from single-celled organisms. Trying to figure out a game narrative that takes a critical look at conception. Something to do with intelligent design?

The offending chunk of code after the jump:

The trick: I used

5.0f

instead of

TRAIL_LENGTH

(which is defined as 15)…

	for(int i=TAIL_LENGTH-1;i>=0;i--){
		glPushMatrix();
			glTranslatef(tail[i].x,tail[i].y,0);
				ofCircle(0,0,2.1f-(float)i/5.0f*2);
		glPopMatrix();
	}

Dart Game Prototype

The current Dart Game software in openframeworks.

list of features and outstanding things after the jump.

Features

  • Gravitational Emergent Behavior (based on Steadman Particle Drawing Tool)
  • Infrared Computer Vision Detection (from live & recorded video)
  • Quad Warping of incoming video for camera/projection alignment
  • Vector Field levels generated from Grayscale Images
  • Win-state detection

Outstanding things to do include:

  • Integration of Motion History Dart detection
  • Two-way serial communication with the dartbox prototype.
  • Weighting of Motion History Detection with Piezo Vibration Sensor
  • Integration of Craig Reynolds-style flocking algorithm (ofw demo)
  • A million other things I can’t think of at the moment

Vector Field example up and running…

Managed to get Theo Watson’s Vector Field example up and running…

This is important as it will allow the digital creatures in my thesis game to stay within level boundaries that I define. The dart throws will modify the vector field, coaxing them to move out of bounds, which kills their asses.

Vector Fields…

Vector fields are how I can get the little digital creatures in my game to avoid walls and darts more intelligently. While the gravitational algorithms I’m using are great, they are somewhat limited in terms of how I can get creatures to avoid complex objects.

Enter vector fields:


Here we have an expired patent for a video game that uses vector fields to simulate intelligence in digital opponents. Found it on this awesome blog by Christer Ericson, Director of Tools and Technology at Sony Santa Monica (the God of War team).

–via [realtimecollisiondetection.net – the blog]

Vector fields in Openframeworks [wiki.openframeworks.cc]

top image from higgs2007 via [flickr]