Two weeks ago we@2Roqs inaugurated our new studio in Bordeaux (read my previous post). Invitations were sent to guests by e-mail that linked to the stop-motion video above. It was shot during some rainy days of April, and the idea was to create something non-digital that would show our new place and at the same time some of our past and present references, while displaying infos about the party itself. You may have recognized the green screen and the pixelized bee of that good ol’ Atari-St. The music was specially created by Arnaud, the man behind Bordeaux-based Splank Studio.
The party itself went super well, most of the people we had invited showed up to say hi (and drink a bit too ;-). For this occasion, we had re-worked one of the first interactive application (called RoqsTree) Mike and I started to develop back in 2004. The concept is quite simple, people can register to the application by taking a photo, and then their avatar is shown as a kind of fruit on a tree grown in a 3D model of the place hosting the event. Some interactions can occur too between the participants. More details soon !
I spent an intense week-end in Paris where I perfomed a coding session with Processing (see my previous post). I had the pleasure to be associated with Simon Geilfus for the whole Sunday afternoon and we just had six hours to produce a program around the theme “Playable”, knowing that our production would be shown during the final ceremony on the evening (pressure, pressure!). Fortunately we met the day before around a beer so that we had time to plan things a bit and talked on how we could possibly interpret that theme. We quickly agreed on the fact that it would be a good opportunity to let the audience participate and play with our application in some way. We ended up re-using and re-mixing some code we had taken with us, and produced an animation which rendered 30000 black and white audio-reactive particles. Simon did a great job on this, by using a special technique with a pixel shader for individual particle drawing (cheers for showing me that :-). People were then able to send SMS messages, and words were then dynamically assembled by picking up some of the particles and coloring them. All of their movements were controlled by some flocking behaviour. That was awesome, and I think people really liked it as we received almost 50 messages in 2 minutes…! We had very positive feedback, though a last-minute-we-didnot-let-run-the-application-enough-time bug prevented the application to display the whole set of received messages.
