Where’s my head at?
Phew. I’ve been kept away from blogging for two months now, working on several projects for the company I run with my friend Mike.
We were involved in the creation of an interactive application for a Finnish phone manufacturer which is organizing a promotion tour across Europe this spring and summer. Their whole visuals being based on lavalamp-like shaded bubbles, our challenge was to program a real-time animation based on the flowing of the stretched wax being periodically heat and cooled.
It appeared that the metaballs technique was a good model to start playing with, we weren’t exactly in the dark as we had previously done some experiments with that algorithm. We were able to quickly assemble a prototype to see if the idea could work (it did :-) ) an then worked on a physic model which approximated best the bubbles flowing. We read some papers about the subject, but honest the maths were a bit beyond us so we stuck to a simpler model involving some real physics behaviour nevertheless. Of course, we had to fake it a bit but hey in the end, it works pretty well.
Besides, another point was to integrate cellphones’photos in the animation, through bluetooth communication protocol. The photos had to be automatically uploaded to the target computer for feeding the animation live in a pseudo random way. At the moment, we are thinking of a way to directly send MMS messages to the application, by using some server remote scripts for receiving / saving datas. More to come soon.
Technically speaking, we used Vision Factory for coding the whole thing. At the end, the application hosts some different technologies which integrated well together, from the use of cg shaders for the rendering to sqlite database for photos saving/retrieving. Another super handy feature was the use of Javascript which saved us from that ‘recompile and hit run’ madness. Very cool.
We teamed up this time with Rob&Yunus of London-based studio Imperial Leisure for developing this application. I had the chance to fly last week to Vilnius,Lithuania to install it. We made it run on a resolution of 2048×768 on two big screens though it was planned to run at 3072×768 / 3 screens in the first place. Ah, we ran into some last-minutes-dont-panic hardware problems… Which hopefully will be fixed for the next gig in Paris.
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