Over the past couple weeks, I and my classmates have been working on a new media performance project which involves actors, a huge object, audio playback and visual projections (some of which are live generated either using preset algorithm or using electronic sensors placed on the site). We already figured out the concept on how we’re going to implement the technologies quite some time ago; The past couple weeks were just the planning process. My role in the project is basically to tie things together such as how we’re going to project the visuals onto the big object, how all the sensors are going to communicate with the audio and visual workstations. I’m also involved with the conceptualization of some of the visuals though that’s not my principal focus in the team.
Here’s how our object is going to look like without projections:
and these are with projections (These are my visualizations which are animated and generated using Processing, a Java-based programming language):
Today, I also did some rough projection tests on scaled-down version of the object (without the tower). I also used Processing for this to adjust the vertices of image. It came out pretty good, but could be better.
Scaled-down version of the object (without the tower)
The mini projectors are put on the top and bottom-corner of the object in this image to be able to fully project the image onto the surface of the object. However, you can see that there are stretched parts of the image. This is because it’s a 2D quad image which you can only adjust the X and Y axis of the vertices. If the circumstances allowed, I’d have liked to create a 3D projection program using OpenGL and C++ to solve the distortion problems.
With projections
I also had a side-project which is a lamp that’s made of balsa wood, which I’ve already finished a week ago. It’s a pretty straightforward object, except the shape takes the form of a camera.
My cute little camera
My camera when it's angry!
A peek of the internal parts
The cost of building this object is quite cheap. The components are only composed of :
- wires
- sea-blue acrylic (for the squarish “lens”)
- the actual lens (the black and round thingy)
- 22 ohm/5W resistor
- 3W LED
- push-button
- 9V battery and its holder.
The circuit itself is very simple: (power > +led) and (-led > resistor > button > ground). Easy peasy!
Now that’s not all I’ve been doing for this couple of weeks. For the programming part, I’ve also been experimenting with modern OpenGL and GLSL. Tutorials on that? Hopefully 
Awesome! Hope i can try to make the camera as same with yours! *tee-hee
Don’t make it the same. Make it better!
Oh all right. *tee-hee*