v3ga

If only my college lessons had looked like this !

Some of my interactive works will be exposed in the concert hall named Florida in Agen, the town where I live and work. This will be part of a global installation focused on the use of free and open-source softwares for creating music, animations, films, …

Among other, Banjamin Cadon from Labomedia will talk about Pure Data, and my friend SevenFive will play live. All is free and opened to public so if you happen to be in the area, just come and stop by.

I just released a new website for BlobDetection lib (for Processing / Java). Sources code were released after a bit of cleaning and a page featuring various interactive projects using it was added. I’ve been recently working with Philip Worthington to enhance the library core functionnalities and fix some sneaky issues, it will be put online very soon.

Lately I’ve been quite busy with refactoring and redesigning the core application of Vision Factory. I’ve come up with several ideas that would have been dirty patches rather than clean implementations in the actual environement… So, at some point, I decided to rebuild the whole stuff from scratch. I’ve been studying design patterns which have been a great help for seeing things “out of the box”. I plan to release a beta version of the application for the beginning of next year, which will ideally come out with a SDK (Win+Mac) and an API documentation.

At the moment, I’m pretty excited to put all of this together and see where it goes. Time will tell.

JExcelAPI is a very useful java library allowing to ” read, write, and modifiy Excel spreadsheets dynamically “. Today at work, I had to feed a sqlite-driven database with datas embedded in several excel spreadsheets. Library was easily imported in Processing within the sketch code folder, all was ready to parse these documents and generate adequate sqlite statements.

Despite a real slowdown of Vision Factory’s development since the beginning of the summer, I’ve taken the time to integrate ARToolkitPlus, built upon ARToolkit. Basically it is a computer vision library allowing the tracking of physical patterns with one single camera in real time. Plug a camera, print markers on papers, let the lib get their position and orientation and you’re all set to draw 3D objects on your image feed. This is nearly software plug’n'play ! I made some videos, which were directly exported from Vision Factory application itself :

• Fontain (~1.7 Mo, .mov)
• Fire (~800 Ko, .mov)
• Metaballs (~1.1 Mo, .mov)

Besides, I’ve also come up with a complete redesign of the application network architecture. Now every protocol distributing tasks for each computers through osc comes as a completely independent dynamic library for Vision Factory, whose instances can load them as simple plugins. Plug’n'play again!

Last week I animated my first Processing workshop as a teacher. I was relatively anxious about it , but it all went extremely well. Most of the students have had a previous experience with programming through Actionscript & Lingo. All of them were very enthusiastic about learning Processing/Java language, and more generally structured codeing.
What I liked the most is the creativity some of them showed instantly by reusing or hacking some code snippets we had just typed, sometimes by mixing them with ones found on the web. Processing is really great for that.
Here are the lecture notes (in french) containing covered subjects + code snippets :

• Notes

Some students’ website/projects worth watching:

• SphereAleas by Gregory Lasserre.
• Ez3kiel, which is a french band playing very good music.

As a final note, I would like to thank all the lovely people@Medias-cité for having hosted the workshop. Cheers !

Jazzmutant was kind enough to lend me a Lemur device for the Processing workshop I will be animating next week in Bordeaux (12-14 June).
Lemur is a responsive touchscreen which can be interfaced with computers on a network by sending and receiving osc (and now also midi) messages. I’ve been using it for a couple of days and I’ve been quite amazed by its ease of use. A provided software allows you to inject interfaces in the device with predefined controllers you choose from a library. Then, it’s possible to script all the controllers’ properties, thus allowing the creation of complex behaviours and functions.
Anyway, images speaking louder than words (sometimes), here is a short video of some demonstrations we (Mike and I@2roqs) realized with Processing, both showing bidirectionnal communication between Lemur and Processing :
Video Link (.mov, ~4Mo), with music by SevenFive.

Sourcecodes of the projects are available here :
Sourcecodes, using the excellent oscP5 library by Andreas Schlegel.

I also interfaced it with VisionFactory, more videos are about to come soon !

Edit : added the .jzml file (lemur interface description file) in the sourcescode archive.

The live visual show on Saturday was a nice event, I was relatively happy since VisionFactory worked pretty well in its networked configuration. Though, controlling several parameters with only a mouse and a keyboard at the same time was quite painful and not really that intuitive. I really missed a midi input controller here. Hopefully, I had plugged some music responsive scenes and a webcam focusing of my friend Sevenfive performing live, so that the whole thing was enough reactive to the sound and to the context.
Here are three videos shot during the show :

• Webcam 3D Pixels+Grid effect (.mov, ~6Mo)
• ‘Somebody is watching me’ remix (.mov, ~6Mo)
• Barbican Tree + RGB effect (.mov, ~12Mo)

VisionFactory software is about to undergo several major updates. Adding input devices handling (midi / joystick / …) with easy binding to scene properties is on the top of the todo list. The last past few weeks, I worked on integrating Python scripting in this framework. It’s in its early stage of development, but the first tests were quite positive, and being able to script scenes at runtime sounds pretty exciting! Hmmm, I also have to re-work the UI layer since my controls panels are a bit … disordered.

I will be animating a Processing workshop during three days of June in the city of Bordeaux, France. It will be hosted by Medias-cités, a french organization promoting cultural and educative initiatives in their local area.
Two weeks before (27th of May), I will make live visuals for the music show of my friend SevenFive, again in Bordeaux at Café Pompier. I will use VisionFactory, I have been already working on some new animations which will be specially shown for this event.

I spent the previous weekend in the shiny city of Barcelona, attending Urban Funke festival where I was invited thanks to my involvement in street-art website ekosystem.org. I had good times meeting some really nice people over there, my best regards are flying to Lolo, Above and Jesus. Unfortunately, I had to come back quickly in France for urgent work on Monday, I would have really liked to stay a few more days to go to OFFF festival. Too bad.