In retrospect

I might try and move Detail to the digital picture frame sooner than expected. Below are some good DIY solutions for creating multi purpose digital picture frames.

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2006/05/cheap_n_easy_digital_picture_f.html

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2006/08/digital_picture_frame_1.html

http://www.flickr.com/photos/007ben/243259139/in/pool-make

Detail

Instead of showing KS progress I decided I would make something else using Max/MSP and Jitter. I haven't had any experience with it before so I figured I would give it a try. I titled the work Detail. I used an IR distance measuring sensor to pixelate a digital image the closer a viewer gets to it. My goal was to install the sensor on a small 5x7 digital picture frame with an Arduino board attached to the back. Monetary difficulties have stopped me from pursuing the picture frame aspect of this project, but I have the patch working. Nothing crazy....simple, but functional. It was based on the jit.plur patch.









I am posting a screen shot of the patch. The image size and resolution is set up for a 5x7 digital picture frame.

Kinetic Sculpture on hold for the moment

So Kinetic Sculpture is on hold for the moment. My OS on my home computer crashed and I am having difficulty booting up, thus making it difficult to retrieve files. I believe I should have this fixed over the weekend. I was planning on showing the progress of the sculpture for Friday's crit, but shit happens.

On the other hand KS was coming along nicely. I found a bunch of good sites that discuss motion tracking via webcams using AS. With the advent of flash player 9 and AS3 the need for computer processing power is minimal. It is such a light language. The following links are to some motion tracking sites:

http://www.actionscript.org/resources/articles/613/1/Camera-motion-controlled-ball/Page1.html

http://blog.ericksouza.com/en/experiments-with-motion-detection-in-the-flash/

http://www.urdalen.com/blog/?p=214

http://blog.rackdoll.nl/?p=63

http://drawlogic.com/2007/10/17/motion-detection-in-flash-as2-and-as3-and-c/

I also have been playing around with Papervision3D a lot. I think I am going to use that to render my real time 3d graphics as opposed to jitter or openGL. I don't have any .swfs to post yet, but I will soon. I have been playing with the stepper motor that came with my make controller kit and I believe it will work perfectly for KS. Also I found an AS physics engine that is just nothing more than cool, so I will post a link to that too!

http://box2dflash.sourceforge.net/

Flash Server

Here is a link to a flash server that will allow you to communicate flash programs with max/msp and jitter. It would make for some interesting possibilities, as well as allow for more efficient processing on certain tasks due to the faster speed of the flash player.

http://www.nullmedium.de/dev/flashserver/