I’m happy to announce that New Zealand based artist Rita Godlevskis has integrated graphics from my Neon Splines sound visualization into her installation Connections: Music and Mind at the Do You Mind? exhibition in Auckland.
The video is from the actual exhibition and also shows Rita’s piece.
More pictures and information after the break.
It’s been an incredibly long time since my last post and there’s been a reason for that: I finished my last semester at school! Aside from going through a lot of fun final exams and lectures, I wrote a thesis on audio visualization in Flash which involved the development of a prototype AIR application.
More information on the prototype and the thesis after the break.
I’ve been playing around a lot with gravity and repulsion for force based layouts recently. I guess it’s no surprise that I eventually had to turn it in to another sound visualization. Here’s the result:
Open Visualization as Layer - Open Visualization in a New Window
(Click the fullscreen icon in the options menu for optimal performance.)
There are three emitters, one for each frequency range: lows, mids and highs. Every emitter either has an attractive or repulsive force which depends on the volume of the emitter’s frequency range. If for example the base is strong, that emitter will act as a repulsive field and force all particles away. If at the same time another frequency range is weak it will attract all particles surrounding it, basically sucking them up.
In addition to a force, each emitter has its own color which influences all particles surrounding it. The closer a particle gets to an emitter the more it will take its color. To keep the particles from being randomly scattered around the stage there is an invisible fourth emitter which acts as a counter-weight to all the other emitters. If the sum of all emitters’ repulsive forces is high, the fourth emitter will attract particles so that they aren’t just blown off the stage.
I recently had some time to experiment with Papervision at Big Spaceship and try out a new visualization. You can read my BSS Labs Post “Spectracular Music” to learn more about the making of.
Click the image below to see the visualization:
If the fps seem low you can try to turn off the backfaces, go fullscreen or reduce the overall size with the size slider in the options panel.
It’s been quite a while since my last webcam tracking post but some magic has happened behind the curtains and two projects emerged during the last weeks which I don’t want to leave unmentioned.
The guys at Neue Digitale did a pretty sweet job with their Audi Quattro Urban Curving Online Special which offers a game that lets you steer your way down steep roads by tilting your head left and right with the help of my tracking code.
Mariusz Kreft and Matthias Gomille from argonautenG2 used my code for an awesome banner prototype as an entry for the Young Lions Award in Cannes. Let’s hope they rock the contest.
Here’s their Home Sweet Home Cinema website:
I’ve got a small update for my tracking code in the pipe which both of these projects are using. It’s basically a little cleaner than the current public version and I will probably release it in a few weeks. I’m also looking into Haar tracking algortihms which allow face recognition, but I couldn’t decide wether I want to implement a C++ Eninge (maybe OpenCV?) via alchemy or try it in AS3. I’ll look into that when I have some spare time after work at Big Spaceship, so stay tuned.
It’s nice when you’re able to apply the stuff you experiment with during freetime in real live projects. Just that was the case with the Coke X-Mas banners I made for argonautenG2. I combined my spline and particle engines to be rendered through a shared interface which produced these light-trails:
This is basically writing with my Neon Strings. Maybe I’ll combine that with some song lyrics someday - just couldn’t find any inspiring music that could do the job. Any suggestions? Anyways, here goes: Typo Splines with random lyrics.
Just the good old drawing API combined with music-synchronisation, filters and a couple of minutes of free time.
…with some more partying particles, fresh out of the oven:
Inspired by vektorfarm’s marvelous In An Absolut World Clip, some of my Permutation Particles joined the fun and started a little particle party of their own. Put on your dancing shoes and swing your hips after clicking the screens below.
I just uploaded a little demo video of my Flash webcam motion tracking project for all you guys out there without a webam, just to give you an idea of how it works.
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Lay back and watch the demo video or set up your webcam and play a session of Webcam-Pong yourself.
Update: Volkswagen 2028 was awarded the FWA Site Of The Day award for August 8, 2008… yay!
After over a year of development, a constantly changing team and uncountable concept and design phases, “Volkswagen 2028″ has finally launched today.
About 10 months ago I was given the task to develop the 360° showcase view of each car. Making the media-hotspots and comment-tag-clouds to synchronously float in space around the cars was one part of my contribution. The comment forms and lots of other gui elements (especially all the bouncy stuff) also have my signature written on them.
Just visit www.volkswagen2028.com to check it out yourself.
(for argonauten G2)
Fanta.de has just been relaunched and my particle engine found its way into the homepage animation as an interactive alternative to prerendered video. Here is the dummy I created:
The final animation can be seen at www.fanta.de
(for argonauten G2)
Some blurring combined with a few thousand particles makes up the following little plasma animation. Different particle types and settings generate some quite interesting result, so give it a shot and create your own little plasma cloud.
I just added yet another particle behaviour with the permutation algorithm. This makes it more flexible and enables decoupled usage of its position data, like drawing directly into a bitmap, which drastically boosts the performance.
I’ve just been experimenting a little more with my particle engine, adding spring and vector based behaviour. As expected, drawing each particle via BitmapData extremely boosts the performance: I got up to 30.000 standard eased particles on my 2Ghz Core2Duo. No ground breaking news but still worth a small post I guess.
I just finished phase 2 of Jan Pautsch’s online portfolio start page. In this version the main visual is split up in to its cyan, magenta and yellow channels and set to multiply. A little animation and interaction was added to boost the effect.
Due to numerous requests I have decided to publish the source code of my little tracking project. Unfortunately I haven’t had the time to complete the documentation and feature set yet. Nonetheless, here it is:
I’ve recently been continuing work on my webcam tracking project and just implemented a lightweight version of the Pong game I created for Sony HD-Test by vektorfarm.
Just track an object with your custom settings and press any key to release the pong ball.
I recently implemented a slightly modified version of my AS2 permutation engine for the header of Jan Pautsch’s (Creative Director Art Interactive at argonauten G2) online portfolio:
