First off, I'd like to say thank you to everyone who came out to support art, music and technology in Cleveland. I feel very proud to have been part of such an event. Not only was the public curious and interested in everything that was going on, even the fellow artists, musicians and technologists were eager to enjoy the whole festival.
But now, down to it.
36 View of a Bridge
The main question everyone had when I got back to work on Monday was, “how did it go?”
It went Awesomely.
Sure, there were a few kinks to work out at first. Two of the videos were still being converted to h.246 compressed videos so they could be played by flash in HD. And the voting on the table had a few bugs because of the missing videos. But Alex and Andy got them wrapped up ASAP and in they went.
Smoooooth sailing from then on, right? Well, not exactly.
The multi-touch table was wrapped in a cloth for appearance sake, and I didn't realize how much heat it would trap in. Within 2 hours, the mirror I was using to reflect the projector slowly started to melt off of the frame that was holding it! Oh boy, quickly I got a block of wood to secure the bottom section and grabbed the duct tape (duct tape is my personal hero in times like this). Mirror is back on track and luckily I never nudged the camera so the calibration was only off by what looked like 1/4 inch—not horrible. And aside from that, only the Flash on the multi-touch table got a little overwhelmed a few times over the course of the weekend.
Saturday morning. Got the iPhone voting functioning—that was yet another highlight of day. People were capable of voting for videos outside of the exhibit if they felt so inclined. And it was cool to see the playlist randomly change order at any given time the table.
On Sunday the entire setup ran error-free for 5 hours and 59 minutes! Not bad for a first time art/tech exhibitor, in my opinion. Read the rest of this entry »
Here's the long and the short of it. I've been collaborating with Alexander Boxerbaum for an upcoming event in downtown Cleveland Ohio called Ingenuity Fest. Alex's project is called 36 Views of a Bridge, take a look at the previews, I think it looks amazing.
The plan is, the audience should be able to vote on which video(s) they like the most to change the order of the final playlist of all the videos. So the initial options are, vote online, vote with mobile devices and vote at a computer interface at the event. But with the event being focused on ingenuity, there needs to be something a little more than just computer and mouse... but what?... wait for it... Multi-touch Table and multi-touch Flash interface.
So here is the rundown:
One computer runs the multi-touch table and the voting
Each vote is sent to a web server via PHP to a MySQL database
the same PHP script can also collect votes from webpages and mobile devices
A seperate computer reads the votes from the database to reorder the video playlist every time the full playlist has completed
And there is the base functionality, in addition to that. There is a multi-touch magnifying glass feature built into the stage. Touch on the map and get a viewport of 3X magnification of the map. Just a little bit of spice added into the app.
There is still much to do to get the app finalized for the event. So I'll be working hard to get it ready in time to get the proper videos in and any design revisions to the app. I'm also trying to get a new table prototype ready in time.
I've been working with the Touchlib library of multi-touch apps using Actionscript 3.0 to develop some of my own apps. This driving force behind what I've been doing is to get a general idea of how to start thinking about the code, and try to discern what works well and what does not. I began with making a simple interface to select an app to be dynamically loaded into the main flash movie. The buttons and information is built dynamically and after an app is selected a trigger is placed in the bottom right corner the user will need to hold down to being back the menu. I've used that menu to build a small collections of apps i have been experimenting with:
Rings, which works by extending RotatableScalable
Grey Lines, which uses TouchEvent.MOUSE_DOWN and TouchEvent.MOUSE_UP to read any blobs which appear on the stage
Squeegee, build an array of circles, then uses any blob information to rescale those circles based on their proximity to the blob, then uses the circles to mask an image which is revealed after you begin touching the screen
Cats Cradle, loops through all the blobs on the screen and draws a line in order of how the array of blobs is constructed. Good for studying how blobs are added an removed from the array
Physics, Flash Physics + Multi-touch -- a continued from the previous post
At the end of the video, I just wanted to give my thanks to NUIGroup, everyone there help me tremendously with getting my multi-touch hardware up and running. I hope to offer value by doing these experiments and letting the community use them as needed.
Here are some thoughts I normally have when coming up with experiments like this. How can this be different than just something you can do with just a mouse? It's one thing to get one touch point working and build an application around that. But how does it change when you can pretend there are 2 mouse cursors you can work with? Then 3? Then 4? What is the best way to optimize the code for these applications? How can I take this and build something useful for a business? Is a gaming environment the best option for thinking of commercialization opportunities?
I feel this technology has opened some interesting windows of opportunity.
And once again, I'd like to offer all my source code for the video above to anyone who'd like to dissect it.
First off, I'd like to say thank you to everyone who came out to support art, music and technology in Cleveland. I feel very proud to have been part of such an event. Not only was the public curious and interested in everything that was going on, even the fellow artists, musicians and technologists were eager to enjoy the whole festival.
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