Description

Tourbillion is an experimental game that combines traditional object intercept/collection game loops with a 3D orbital mechanic.

Credits

Music and sound effects were authored by the amazing Ben Carignan (aka Space Boyfriend). The initial version of Tourbillion was completed as final project for the Digital Spaces class at ITP, taught by Aaron Meyers and Tabor Robak.

Description

Three Stories About One Thing is a collection of simple, animated comics about some personal experiences with heartbreak. It was largely an experiment with creating digital comics instead of starting on paper and scanning for clean-up and color as I’ve done in the past.

Thanks

Thanks to Maré Odomo, both for being a comics hero and for looking after me when things were especially awful.

Description

Tri Me is a browser experiment that explores the application of computer vision techniques to a user’s webcam. In this case, Delaunay Triangulation is performed on the points returned by one of three methods of 2D feature detection. The colors of the resulting triangles then can be manipulated for unusual visual effects.

Take it for a spin.

Technologies

Tri Me relies on new WebRTC features in modern browsers to access the webcam without the use of plugins. It also uses the HTML5 video and canvas tags for capturing and manipulating the video.

Thanks

Tri Me is made possible by Eugene Zatepyakin‘s excellent JSFeat library. Triangulation is performed using J. T. L.’s extremely fast delaunay.js.

This project was completed as a sketch for James George‘s Emerging Processes in Video Art at ITP.

Description

Gems is sketch that takes colors from your webcam and maps them to vertex colors on a gem-shaped 3D mesh. It uses WebRTC, so Chrome is your best bet.

Take it for a spin.

Description

This is a video demo of an OpenFrameworks app called “When the Crocus Blooms”. It’s my take on a video haiku for James George’s Emerging Processes in Video Art class at ITP.

The music is “La Lune” from the Contre Jour soundtrack, composed by David Ari Leon.

Description

Heart On Your Sleeve is a wearable device that attaches to a user’s sleeve and displays their current heart rate.

Materials

The heart itself is a sheet of Endlighten, which is a transparent material embedded with colorless, light-diffusing particles. When a light source is applied to its side, the whole panel appears to illuminate.

I cut the material to size using a laser cutter, including small divots for surface mount LEDs to provide the light. Traces for the circuitry were laid by hand using copper tape with conductive adhesive, which is becoming one of my favorite materials to work with.

Electronics

At the center of the circuitry is an ATTiny85, which I programmed using an Arduino after reading a tutorial from the High-Low Tech group at MIT. Input is read from a small reflective photo sensor on the wearer’s finger and processed by the chip using code adapted from Charles Martin. When a heart beat is detected, the chip triggers the SMD LEDs (with similarly sized 100 OHM resistors) surrounding the Endlighten. The whole circuit is powered by a tiny, 3.7v Polymer Lithium Ion Battery from Sparkfun.

Stills

Thanks

This project was completed as my final in Catarina Mota‘s Tech Crafts at ITP. Many thanks to Catarina for the excellent course.

Description

BeetBox is a simple instrument that allows users to play drum beats by touching actual beets. It is powered by a Raspberry Pi with a capacitive touch sensor and an audio amplifier in a handmade wooden enclosure.

Concept

BeetBox is primarily an exploration of perspective and expectations. I’m particularly interested in creating complex technical interactions in which the technology is invisible—both in the sense that the interaction is extremely simple and in the literal sense that no electronic components can be seen.

Enclosure

The enclosure was created from .5″x8″ poplar boards, which I cut to size and finished using various hand and power tools. I used a router for both the edge details and for grooves in which to conceal the wires, and a drill press to create the speaker grill and to bore holes for the beets with a hole saw. I then stained the wood and, after assembly with wood glue and a nail gun, sealed the enclosure with polyurethane.

Internals

Touch sensing is handled by an MPR121 Capacitive Touch Sensor from SparkFun, for which I ported existing Arduino code to Python. This board communicates with a Python script on a Raspberry Pi via I2C. The script watches for new touches and triggers drum samples using pygame. Audio from the Pi’s line out is run through a small amplifier I built using an LM386, which is based on a circuit straight from the data sheet. The amp is connected to a salvaged speaker mounted under the holes in the lid.

Source code for the BeetBox is viewable on GitHub.

Images

Thanks

Many thanks to the performers in the video, each of whom I dragged away from their final projects to touch vegetables on camera: Patricia Zablah, DD Jiang, Merche Blasco, Andy Sigler, Zhenzhen Qi and Robbie Tilton.

This piece served both as a project for Catarina Mota‘s Tech Crafts, for which I was experimenting with edible circuits, and as a final for Peter Menderson’s Materials and Building Strategies, for which I wanted to craft a nice hardwood enclosure. Many thanks to both instructors for excellent classes.

Description

Kluster is a visual experiment and technology demo that uses k-means clustering to create a 3D star system using the pixels of an image.

You can try it here. You’ll have the best luck with Chrome, and clicking the autopilot button once you generate a star system is highly recommended.

Video

Background

For my final in Makematics, I wanted to explore the possibility of using a machine learning system to generate artwork. My view of the whole process was admittedly naive, and I was frustrated by the level of oversight required to both train and get output from something like an SVM. I began looking for methods to have a computer organize data on its own, and became interested in k-means clustering. When I saw some palette generation examples by Mohit Muthanna, I was sold.

Concept

Kluster is a browser-based application that can take any user-submitted image and break it into a three dimensional star system—something along the lines of the globular cluster photos from the Hubble that I had seen as a kid. The image pixels are broken into a twelve-color palette using k-means, and then the centroids are distributed in space based on their position in the LAB colorspace. Individual pixels orbit around these centroids, with their distance dictated by their similarity to the centroid color and their size based on their luminosity.

Stills

Technologies

Kluster uses a number of brand-new web technologies—most prominently WebGL, powered by the excellent three.js, as well as the File API, Web Workers and WebRTC.

All source code and assets for Kluster are available on GitHub.

Description

Me and My Arrow is an interactive animation experiment that uses Principal Component Analysis to determine the orientation of paper arrows and animates them automatically in realtime. It was created for Greg Borenstein’s Makematics class at ITP.

Software

Built in Processing, the sketch first saves a snapshot of the blank paper on key press. Once the paper arrows are in place, a subsequent key press then alters the image using OpenCV to create a black and white matte. Blob detection is run on the matte to locate individual arrows, which are extracted from the main image and sent through a Java-based PCA library to determine their orientation. Based on this information, the arrows are masked out of the image using the same black and white matte and animated over the original blank scene.

Behind the Scenes

Description

This is a simple modular table built from blue insulation foam that I created for Peter Menderson’s Materials and Building Strategies class at ITP.

I essentially jumped right in without much of a plan, drawing the design directly on the foam and experimenting with various tools that I didn’t have much experience with. The table was completed in New York City, New York on 2012-09-22.