So, some of you may have heard about the project I’m just finishing off today.
Moving Brands hired me to work on implementing a permanent interactive installation for the new Fiat Flagship Showroom in London. I’ve been working with their team for the past two months, and I think we’ve managed to create something very special.
It’s a 9 screen interactive video wall which lives in the showroom. It lets you browse images from Fiat’s history and present, create your own statement by arranging movable word blocks, and create an abstract masterpiece by painting with light and gestures.
It’s a massive high res display, comprising of a massive 4080 x 2304 pixels in total, driven by five dual xeon PCs, all running the custom application we created in processing, and synching via a UDP network client written by Toxi.
It has been a massive technical accomplishment to get the thing working, and I think it’s probably the most interesting project I’ve ever worked on.
I’m going to be doing some installation stuff next month, as part of the Flame & Flesh event at Corsica Studios in South London.
It’s a group show with the Experiment1 art collective. I’ll be doing some work to go with the Gas Organ project.
“Constructed from freely available plumbing, electrical and laboratory components, the Gas Organ is a fusion of art, science and engineering, beautiful in its clinical appearance and mesmerising in its auditory effect. Witnesses will have their credulity challenged as they view the ephemeral chaotic turbulence of a flame producing such incredible range and depth of sound . . . How can a laboratory experiment evoke such an emotional response? I am seeing and hearing this, but I don’t believe it . . “
So, here we go - Alias makes good on the bezier typograpy threats. This is a 2.5d typographic experiment, and I hope it’ll work OK with your hardware setup.
Having said that, it will probably look best viewed in IE on a machine which supports OpenGL in hardware… sorry about that. (I am such a hardware accelleration sellout)
Anyway, check it out… for those of you without shiny graphics cards, there’s a video…
As a footnote,for the past ten years, I have been trying, with little success, to impress my father with my various computer graphic efforts. This is the first thng which has actually impressed him. This has to stand for something.
So I’ve been porting some of my flash code over to processing. One of the things which I’m interested in specifically is bezier interpolation. It’s not a lot of work to port stuff over, and I’ll probably work on porting over some more stuff soon.
This is a random walk with bezier curves. This does all the bezier stuff seperately to the processing core - the advantage being that I can get any point on a bezier by providing it with a parameter t, which is very useful for animation purposes. In order to test out this code, I’ve created these stills of bezier random walks.
I’ve left on the control points, and drawn boxes along the curve. The curve itself is randomly generated by a random walk.
So, this is my aforementioned first stab at a simple particle system in processing. Simple bubble particles, rising and re-spawning when they go offscreen. All very simple stuff, but pretty all the same.
Funnily enough, processing seems to run slightly faster in IE…
This is also true in the flash world - I believe it’s to do with the outdated netscape plugin API being a bit lame… hopefully that will change soon though.
I’m actually quite dumbfounded by the sheer power that processing has at its disposal. This simulation was able to take over 5,000 particles before it started to chug. This one here only has 600, as it started to look a bit cluttered, and I don’t want to induce premature browser-death.
