open house project

tripp and I are thinking of building an open-house specific project. here is the proposal I've been scheming:

- video camera hooked up somewhere near the door to zml. maybe hooked up actually in the entrance room (where the racks are kept)

- camera tracks movement in two ways -- left to right, and right to left. if the movement detected is right to left, it is assumed someone is leaving the room, if the movement is left to right, then someone is entering the room.

- depending on these actions, software running on a machine in the zml keeps a virtual representation of bodies in the room -- one virtual object for each real person in the room. The camera tracking -- checking if people enter or leave the room, will inform this tally.

- another camera hooked up in zml tracks the movement within a particular space. by interacting with this area, open-house goers can alter the movement of the the avatars around the virtual space (which is projected)

- the sound of the piece will change depending on the number of people in the room

- the camera tracking will be done in softVNS, which will output a binary textfile (0, 1) whenever someone enters or leaves the room (0-leaves, 1-enters). Software then parses that textfile and updates the room avatar number based on the movement. svns also creates a textfile that determines the specific movements in front of the lab camera, which is also read in by the software.

so, this is basically highly ambient / exploratory / simple in nature. but I think it'd be relatively easy to pull off within a few weeks upon getting back.

sound community

started writing this test as an example of what a possible sound community might sound like -- part of my mobile sound communities project. in the project, users would create the yellow rectangles above, but the system would animate them, as this system does. when the shapes run into each other, they play whatever sound is attached to them. as I was writing this, I started think of iterations of this that place the user in a more active position as they are experiencing the sound. my moving an avatar (the red square, or using a tracking device, yourself) throughout the sound community. You physically engage each individual object, pulling sounds from each. In the thing I pulled the above image from, each object is simply a sine wave of a different frequency, but clearly that could be cooler). So in this iteration, the soundscape becomes more personal (almost a performance), and less communially experienced, which I'm not sure I like philosophically, but which I like from a game / toy / entertainment perspective. So I'm still focusing on the community engagement with the system, but this is an interesting strand. [written in p5, with amit pitaru's sonia externals to jSyn.

I would post it, but I don't want to bother anyone with the downloading of jSyn. the code is here: .pde

mobile sound communities

.pdf

.doc

Gelson's Log

check it:

Gelson's Log

if someone could post some comments or something, it would aide my final presentation. thanks.