View of the room at Literaire Lente

My book was The Lieutenant (= Het Verre Paradijs) by Kate Grenville. It tells the story of Daniel Rooke, who creates his own bubble of math where he can be himself, free from the outside world.

Literary Warroom 09 from Valentijn Kint on Vimeo.

Download Literary Warroom (.mp4 – 57mb)

I hereby thank Corporación Tecnológica Grualia S.L. for their generous donation.
If you also like my work, you can let me know by sending me a message or by pushing the yellow button.

So say hello to http://vknt.be/free/skies

This is the new home for my high-res spherical skies. To celebrate the opening, I added a brand new spherical sky (0036) to the collection. It’s a 10.000px wide equirectangular panorama of a semi-cloudy daylight blue sky. Indeed, it’s not as big as the other ones, but the clouds were moving too fast to make an extra-large one.

If you enjoy my work, close your eyes for a second and send me some love.. Or you could consider making a donation. Thanks!

I made this clip last year for a school assignment called Electrified. We had to create a video for an electroparty in a museum for contempory art.
I recorded a slow-motion series of what we call a Zwiertote – IPA: ‘zwi:rto:tə – Swingface. You basically swing your head from left to right, making sure your mouth and cheeks are loose.

Music by the Belgian beatbastards The Subs (thesubs.be)

View Electrified (.mov – 55mb)

I also added the video to vimeo. Unfortunately because of the downscaling and compression it looks.. kinda bad. Best to watch the link above.

If you plan to use Amazon S3 as media hosting for your Wordpress blog, this article will show you everything you need to setup the hosting, and use a plugin to integrate S3 in Wordpress.

S3 Server Setup

• sign up for Amazon S3
• look up your Access Key ID and Secret Access Key
• use S3Fox or another tool to create a bucket, use all-lowercase e.g. “media.vknt.be” of “turbo.vknt.be” or “s3.vknt.be”
• add a cname record: ALIAS “media” POINTS TO “media.vknt.be.s3.amazonaws.com”
• upload files

If this goes too fast read the detailed setup article, and more on virtual hosting.

Integrate S3 into Wordpress with a plugin.

With TanTan S3 you can upload files just like you normally would. You can use the wp-uploader, the media library and the gallery feature. Just one quirk: it can’t upload directly to s3. This means you still need an “uploads” folder, and you have to delete those files manually. The plugin duplicates the folder structure from your wp-settings, so I changed my upload folder from “wp-content/uploads” to “wp”. (Change this folder in WP Admin > Settings > Miscellaneous) That way my media content looks like this: http://media.vknt.be/wp/2009/02/myfile.jpg.

What’s next?

This setup can be optimized even further by using CloudFront. If you feel your website needs some extra punch, is suggest this introduction to complement your media server with CloudFront.

My online branding will consist of 2 personal websites: vknt.be and valentijnkint.com supported by various social network sites.

vknt.be is a content-focused website. It is the place to drop my thoughts, free stuff, tutorials and more. It has a very basic portfolio section with a selection of work, but mostly leading the way to my dedicated portfolio website (=valentijnkint.com). If I come to the point where I want to start selling digital assets (e.g. equirectangular skies), this will be the place to promote and/or sell it.

valentijnkint.com consists only of work I made and info that describes me as a designer, developer and person. On this domain I want to show my work and skills through a full-flash website. I’m still working on it, but it’s coming soon.

By putting my work on various other sites, I aim for more exposure and a convenient way for people to share.

vimeo.com/vknt is for motion. Vimeo is has an enormous amount of quality-content in a beautifully designed environment. What more can I wish for? I created 2 albums: portfolio and experiments. The ones in experiment will only exist on vimeo, the others will also be available (read downloadable) on valentijnkint.com in high-quality H.264 encoded .mov files. I know registered vimeo users can do that on vimeo as well, but for most people that’s not convenient.

flickr.com/photos/vknt is for pictures. The pictures are organized in 3 sets: photography, graphic and motion (a free account doesn’t allow more). Using tags I can also send people a selection e.g. all my work involving panoramas.

twitter.com/vknt is for microblogging. The latest tweets will be displayed on the homepage of vknt.be. We’ll see where this goes. For now I like expressing a short thought or observation without creating a blog post for it.

linkedin.com is for business networking. It’s not very active at this moment, but it’s there when I’ll need it.

facebook is for my friends.

During the workshop we learned how to program an Arduino. One of the first thing we did was making a LED blink, which is the equivalent of the famous “Hello World!” trace command. This blinking LED evolved to a christmas tree using many LED’s and eventually controller a motor. They didn’t have enough motors, so I ended up controlling a speaker with 2 potentiometers (read knobs) controlling the sound.

Workshop Interactive Media 08 from Valentijn Kint on Vimeo.

Overall it was good fun and after this 3-day workshop I have a much better understanding of the possibilities, but I don’t think I’m ready to tackle a project with big hardware requirements yet..

Hard cuts between the panoramaframes.
I captured my panoramas in the direction I was moving. Because of this the panoramaframes are not aligned. I took the endparameters of the previous panoramaframe as startparameters for the one following. This together with my incorrect use of Gollonets easing library produced all the hard cuts in the beginning. This problem is easily fixed by adjusting the pan parameter so that the panoramas are aligned and getting the calculations right.

Visible movement from one panoramaframe to another.
This is caused by the stopmotion technique. During the sequence in the corridor I’ve interpolated frames in AE but you can still see several interpolation artifacts. So we need to create more frames. One can optimize the time it takes to capture but it remains a tedious process.
So if I were to do a similar project again, I would definitely recreate the space in 3D and render it out. That would be a fair amount of work to get it photorealistic but it’s worth it. First of all I can set out a freeform path even in areas where a camera can’t get (e.g. inside an object or liquid). The movement would be much smoother because I can choose the amount of steps along the path. And I wouldn’t have to retouch the camera or worry about changing lighting conditions.

Little control over the movement.
This is the procedure I followed.

• open up a panorama in pano2vr and search for an interesting view and write it down
• choose an easing type (penner equations) and time
• generate a pano2vr project file with those parameters
• open up pano2vr and make it batch create the sequence for that particular panorama

How to get more control over the movement?
Ideally one would have a timeline with graphical displays similar to those found in After Effects (and soon in Flash CS4). Having bézier curves to set out the parameter change is much more flexible than putting Penner equations one after another. In that same ideal world, one would would also see a real-time preview right next to that timeline. Pixel Bender to the rescue? That name alone makes it sound like an ideal candidate :)

• Pixel Bender is a programming language used to implement image processing algorithms.
• It’s fast.
• It plugs into After Effects, so we can use the AE timeline.
• It’s implemented in Flash Player, so (if the computer can handle it) do LIVE manipulation.

So what’s next? As you can see in the equirectangular clip from my previous post, it’s not simply a matter of cartesian to polar coordinates but also transforming three-dimensional angular coordinates. The good news is that the formulas are available inside the PanoTools library. Thank you Erik Krause for providing me that information on the PanoramaToolsNG board.

[...] most likely this
involves the use of Euler Angles in order to transform three-dimensional
angular coordinates. You find the code to do that in the panotools
library source code, most likely in math.c Get the original panotools
sources from http://www.all-in-one.ee/~dersch/ or the recent ones from
http://panotools.sourceforge.net/

Please respect the GPL if you use panotools code.

I looked it up and indeed in math.c I find transformation matrices to do this. However, I’m a designer and my knowledge stops here. So if there’s anyone out there knowing how to deal with these, and is willing to help, I would be very greatful!

Making the idea into an installation.
If we could get this to work, the idea could be made in an installation where the position of the projected view is equal to the position of a visitor. When a visitor moves, he controls the represented position and the center of the view. Could be nice..

Please share your thoughts on this, and if anything isn’t clear let me know in a comment. I’m now off to bed cause I’m wrestling with a serious cold here :)

In short REZ’ 08 invited 5 students to create and present new work during a two week period of the festival. We got 3 old houses at our disposal where we choose rooms to work in. The goal of the residence program is to to gain experience and meet professional artists. (We had lunch and diner together with all the artists of the festival + all-access to the installations, performances and concerts.)

This is part of my research on movement in space and new ways to represent this. It is essentially a series of 360° panoramas following a path through a space. These spherical images are converted to an angular projection, which introduces a typical distortion. The further you get away from the center, the more distortion. The center of the image is determined by 3 parameters: pan, tilt en roll. I animated these parameters resulting in a sense of movement and deformation of the space.

Following is the clip that was shown during the weekend exhibition. It’s pretty rough cause it’s more a proof of concept than a finished product. There are many things that could improved to increase the effect, so many in fact that I’ll be writing them all down in a separate post (coming soon).

2.5D – Polar Panoramic Video from Valentijn Kint on Vimeo.

2.5D – Polar Panoramic Video (download as .mov file)

A short explanation if you don’t know anything about 360° panoramas.

What you see is an image that shows everything you can see from a certain point in space. So an image that combines everything you see in front of you plus everything behind you. This is achieved by taking multiple photographs at every angle using a tripod and a rotating head. These images are then stitched together and the tripod you see in the resulting image is removed in photoshop.

General rundown of the process involved in the making of the clip.

I started my project with the initial idea to do a better executed rework of the Gods View project. Compared to my Canon S2 I used back then, I used my new Canon 40D + 10-22mm lens. So much less photographs to create a panorama + no freakin’ shutterlag.

During some indoor tests I discovered the shadows at the intersection of the walls gave a nice 3d feel to the polar panoramas.

So I decided to do a short walk through the house. Because the staircase and the hall were so small I had to manually add controlpoints on every panorama. This limited the total panoramas I could make within the two-week timeframe and thus the total duration of the clip.

I used pano2vr to create the angular (= polar or little planet) projection. To make the clip longer and more interesting I animated the center of the frame by varying the pan and tilt parameters.
As the pano2vr project file is essentially .xml, I could use processing to generate a batch file that would generate all the frames for each panorama. To achieve the natural motion I used an implementation of the penner equations by Jezus Gollonet. I had to tweak it cause it didn’t calculate some values correctly. Didn’t really know why so I hacked my way trough it. It was just me who was using it incorrectly. I used it like tweener and gave it an input of start & end while Gollonets library has start & change as input, hence the wrong calculation results.

Update 1

I also did a short test with the same technique on the equirectangular projection.

Equirectangular Panoramic Video (download the .mov file)

Some technical details

• 50 individual panoramas along a path at a 20cm interval or 1 stair
• Stitching using PTGui
• Remapping using pano2vr
• Creating pano2vr project file with processing
• 055 PROB Manfrotto Tripod
• Nodal Ninja 2 Panoramahead
• Canon 40D + Canon 10-22mm
• Compositing using After Effects
• Pinching using AE Bulge effect

Thank you!

Thank you Joost for inviting me to the festival, and Esther from the Audiowerkplaats providing me with lots of feedback during the process.

Poster I made for REZ' 08