The Rockwell Group

Starting in  November, I worked for 6 weeks with the Interaction Lab at the Rockwell Group.  It was loads of fun, and great to work with such smart guys.  I went to Portugal and Bristol, UK to install a project for Timberland, and worked on a recently launched installation for Cosmopolitan Hotel.  I was kind of a hired gun on both of these projects, brought in at the end to help them meet their deadline, but I’m glad I got a chance to work with them and I hope to work with them in the future.

Flightphase

Back in July, I did some work with Karolina Sobecka (who I met at my Minneapolis Art on Wheels residency) and Jim George for Infinity.  Like Rockwell, I was just a kind of hired gun, but the project turned out really well, I think.  I mostly worked on hacking OpenTSPS (not-so-coincidentally developed by the Rockwell Lab), optimizing the people tracking to make the interaction smoother.  The project was built in openFrameworks.  Another group who I hope to work with again very soon.

The project was commissioned by Hush Studios.  There are some additional photos on Flickr.

Listings Project

Listings Project is a free weekly email of living and workspace for rent, sublet, swap, and sale focused around our arts community.

I signed up for the list a few years ago when I was looking for a place to live, and recently I was put in touch with Stephanie Diamond, who runs the list.  This was one of those situations where a little work on my part could save Stephanie a ton of work, so it just kind of made sense.  I have made the submission process database-driven, and we will continue to work on more improvements in the coming months.

Globes iPhone app

Marshall and Nora , aka Ligorano/Reese, are two great artists who I met while at Eyebeam. One of their projects is a set of snow globes that feature a single word, including all of the seven deadly sins, and a special “Fuck” globe.  I am working on making an iPhone version of the globes using openFrameworks, the Bullet physics engine, and a OBJ loader made by Bill Dudney.  It’s been a bit of a struggle, seeing as how I am still slightly above n00b level with OpenGL and I have never worked with loading OBJ files before — much less with the restrictions of OpenGLES — but I’ve just about got the flakes flying around like real snow inside the globe.  Stay tuned!

FlyingLotus
Almost a year ago, I started working on computer vision project for the musician Flying Lotus.  Originally, I was writing a server-side demon for matching submitted images.  In fact, it’s the same daemon that I used for the POP Magazine app.  But recently, I discovered some pretty amazing work by in-spirit.  Eugene used the Alchemy Project to compile a SURF algorithm into ActionScript, and the Apparat framework to optimize it, resulting in a totally real-time matching algorithm in ActionScript, ASSURF.  Using ASSURF, I was able to write a little Flash app wherein users could hold up albums, cds, and printed artwork, and “lock in” the matches at different angles. When you get the right combination, it triggers a download of a secret track or other special feature. It was supposed to launch in November, but it still hasn’t launched for some reason, so until then, here is a demo that I made for the Warp guys:

Here is a quick little project I did for Dave, who now goes by Fever Creative.

I wasn’t able to go to Miami, where it was used, but Jacob Milam took some videos and pictures.  A video of a runway show floats around the screen, following the users face, while the liquid simulation (thanks Memo! www.memo.tv/ofxmsafluid) in the background reacts to the users silhouette.

I’m now trying to figure out what I should release that would actually be useful for people.  I ended up making a kind of comprehensive ComputerVision class that does

1. smile detection
2. Face detection (using ofxCvHaarTracker)
3. optical flow (using ofxCvOpticalFlowPyrLK)
4. FERN detection
5. blob detection w/background subtraction

It’s all pretty well optimized, and easily configurable.  Of course, it can’t do all of these things at once — too much CV!  Eh – nothing special, but if you want it, it’s yours!

[flickr-gallery mode="photoset" photoset="72157624034029282"]

JSONExample: using json-cpp in openFrameworks. XCode format

NOTE: you will need this updated version of ofxHttpUtils_03 and ofxThread (which comes with the FAT version of oF) to run the example.

All I am doing here is using the HTTP stuff in Poco to download the source of a page (in this case, the Yahoo Finance page for Google), and then doing a regular expression on the result to get the particular bit of code that I am interested in (in this case, the stock price listed on that page). If you are dealing with well-formed XML (like RSS), you could also use the XML library that is part of Poco for more structured parsing — but that’s not what I need here.

Most of this was stolen from the poco distribution:  poco-x.x.x/Net/samples/httpget/src/httpget.cpp

First you have to import the right headers and declare the namespaces.  This should be done in testApp.h

#include "Poco/Net/HTTPClientSession.h"
#include "Poco/Net/HTTPRequest.h"
#include "Poco/Net/HTTPResponse.h"
#include "Poco/StreamCopier.h"
#include "Poco/Path.h"
#include "Poco/URI.h"
#include "Poco/Exception.h"
#include "Poco/RegularExpression.h"

using Poco::Net::HTTPClientSession;
using Poco::Net::HTTPRequest;
using Poco::Net::HTTPResponse;
using Poco::Net::HTTPMessage;
using Poco::StreamCopier;
using Poco::Path;
using Poco::URI;
using Poco::Exception;
using Poco::RegularExpression;

Then you can run this code wherever you need to in your testApp.cpp

try
{
	URI uri("http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=GOOG");
	std::string path(uri.getPathAndQuery());
	if (path.empty()) path = "/";

	HTTPClientSession session(uri.getHost(), uri.getPort());
	HTTPRequest req(HTTPRequest::HTTP_GET, path, HTTPMessage::HTTP_1_1);
	session.sendRequest(req);
	HTTPResponse res;
	istream& rs = session.receiveResponse(res);
	std::cout << res.getStatus() << " " << res.getReason() << std::endl;

	string result;
	StreamCopier::copyToString(rs, result);

	RegularExpression re("<li class="price">([0-9\\.]+)</li>");
	RegularExpression::MatchVec matches;
	re.match(result, 0, matches);

	// result.substr(matches[0].offset, matches[0].length)  -- contains the entire matched <li>
	// result.substr(matches[1].offset, matches[1].length) -- contains the subpattern inside the ()
	cout << result.substr(matches[1].offset, matches[1].length) << endl;
}
catch (Exception& exc)
{
	std::cerr << exc.displayText() << std::endl;
	exit();
}

The regular expression matcher returns a vector of Match objects, which just contain the offset and length of each match.  If you aren’t familiar with regular expressions, this probably doesn’t make much sense.  But, as it says in the code, you now have 2 matches that you can use as you please.
result.substr(matches[0].offset, matches[0].length)  contains the entire matched <li>
result.substr(matches[1].offset, matches[1].length)   contains the subpattern inside the ()

Weeknotes are “about reflecting on your work, your achievements, and what’s on deck.“   Simple.

It has been 145 weeks since I started as a fellow at Eyebeam – arguably the beginning of my professional career.  So, what happened on this 145th week?

This Week

This week marked the beginning of the end of the Eyebeam Fellowship process, which started way back in November. On Monday, several applicants Skyped in and gave presentations about their applications.  Due to a confluence of factors, just this week we made our final recommendations to Amanda, the director of Eyebeam.  Surprisingly, it was a relatively easy process.  The applications were fairly strong, but the decisions just seemed to come easily for the committee.

After work I prepared for my second Code for Art class at Parsons.  We are currently in the “c++ crash course” section of the class.  I was over-ambitious in thinking that I could get through nested loops, casting, arrays, structs, “scope” and pointers all in one class.  I think we just barely made it through Arrays. So everything else will have to wait until this Tuesday.  It seems like I’ve got a good bunch of students this semester, although I think I might have scared some of them away with my first class, in which I assumed that they were all completely comfortable with Java/Processing.  I scaled back the class considerably, so hopefully I won’t lose any more students.

The gang at TV of Tomorrow asked for a schematic for the World Series of ‘Tubing, so I put together this little drawing.  You may not be able to tell by looking at it, but I spent way too much time on it.  Emma is still working on negotiations with the people at Vuzix to possibly get us some augmented reality goggles.

I made some minor improvements on the POP magazine server application to prepare for upcoming projects that will use the same types of techniques. In addition to doing SURF marker recognition, which only uses shapes, I will be implementing some color matching features.  The POP application was finally approved by Apple and launched, with is exciting.

On Wednesday, we had the first meeting about the upcoming Eyebeam Mixer.  In attendance was the video art group Cheryl, a representative from NYC Resistor, Kyle Lapidus of LoVid, Erik Fabian, Bennett Williamson, and Paul Amatai – the creator of the Mixer.  We had a great talk about some of the aspects of the Mixer, the theme of which is “Olympiad”.  Aaron and I were put in charge of spearheading the Torch Relay project, which is top secret for right now, but won’t be for very long.

Cass and I bought a shitload of American Apparrel shirts for an (another) upcoming top-secret project.  Stay tuned for more info.

On Thursday there were more Fellowship presentations, including a bunch of friends of mine: Aaron Meyers, Jon Cohrs, and Hans-Christoph Steiner.  Instead of having the regular first-Thursday-of-the-month Project Blackbird meeting this week, we decided to go to the Reggie Watts/Tommy Smith Radioplay on the 18th.  Should be great.  That evening I had a few beers with Aaron to celebrate him getting through his Fellowship presentation.  I also bit the bullet and bought a legit copy of Ableton Live with which to make new mixes.

On Friday I met with Roland Gebhardt about potentially doing a new website for him.  I suggested he use indexhibit. After that, we had the final fellowship review meetings, and then I met with Stephanie to discuss what we will be presenting at CAA.

On Saturday, I worked on getting a matrix transformation from SURF descriptors in openFrameworks.  This will be useful in many upcoming projects, but it is proving to be difficult.

Finally, just today I met with Aaron to discuss a meeting tomorrow at Warp Records.  We will be doing some work for them at some point.  I also discovered MinimumNoise – a crowdsourcing platform for audio work.  I set up a job to crowdsource the editing of the first episode of my Crowded radio show.

On Deck

Tomorrow is the meeting at Warp Records. In the afternoon, I will be e-working with intern/collaborator extraordinaire Michael on some final additions to the Laborers of Love project. We want to have the project in a presentable because on Thursday I fly out to Chicago to meet Stephanie so that we can present it at the CAA New Media Caucus.

On the 18th, Aaron and I will be going to Materials for the Arts, a magical place in Long Island City where groups donate all kinds of wonderful things that you can just go and take.  Aaron and I went there previously to get materials for Praying@Home.  I had to write some long-overdue thank-you notes to the people and groups who donated the materials that we took last time.  This is one of the conditions for coming back.

Monday evening I will be prepping for Code for Art on Tuesday.  Whenever I find time, I will be trying to conquer the problem of getting a matrix transformation from SURF descriptors, and trying to find time to work on the new World Series of ‘Tubing site.  I was working pretty hard on the site two weeks ago, but couldn’t find time this week.  Despite many attempts, I couldn’t get my head around CakePHP, so instead I made my own MCV framework using the Smarty template engine, PHPActiveRecord, BlueprintCSS, JQuery, and JQueryUI.  And then the Zend GData extension is int there too for YouTube data API access.

It’s application season!  Coming up: FileLux, HarvestWorks, Ars, Future Generation, and Megapolis

Art Fag City critic and series participant Paddy Johnson calls it, “The most challenging IRL Internet competition of the decade.”

“Blurring distinctions between performer, audience, and participant, this work exposes and makes fun of network culture.”
- Brian McCormick on “World Series of ‘Tubing”

The World Series of ‘Tubing is a conceptual augmented reality game played in front of a live audience, combining the intensity of a high-stakes poker tournament with the world of sensational online video. The competition consists of two players trying to out-do each other by presenting a series of YouTube videos (rendered as an augmented reality layer on top of a real card) to an audience in a series of fast-paced rounds. The competitors can manipulate the playback of the video in a number of ways by tilting or gesturing with their card. The crowd decides which video/card wins by shooting a target on stage with a laser, and the process repeats until a player wins three rounds. During the game, commentators provide a running commentary on the game much like during a football or World Series of Poker game.

The World Series of ‘Tubing brings televised competitive sport and game show aesthetics into the realm of participatory theater, complete with live commentators and stellar motion graphics. The everyday action of “favoriting” online media is expanded into a participatory game show. By blurring the distinctions between performer, audience, and participant, it work builds upon the inherent qualities of shared culture as it exists online.

[flickr-gallery mode="photoset" photoset="72157619922589590"]
[flickr-gallery mode="photoset" photoset="72157622956742348"]
[flickr-gallery mode="photoset" photoset="72157622857521080"]

For the past year, we have been developing the Ecosystem Engine in openFrameworks, although I am once again looking at Ogre3D and a few other engines as a good foundation for Ecosystem.

Another team of volunteers (again, recruited from the communities mentioned above) would write documentation about the process of creating animations for the Ecosystem Engine and creating a website where it will be available for download for all major platforms.  Our hope is that we can eventually attract animators to use Ecosystem and showcase other artists’ projects on the site.

Tune in as the most talented fingers from all over the world come together to compete in events ranging from sprinting to javelin to pole-vaulting, and ultimately celebrate what it means to be a finger, and a citizen of Earth.

The Finger Olympics started out as an idea tossed around at Eyebeam between Friedrich Kirschner and Zach Lieberman, and eventually turned into a playable computer vision project.

For more information, go to fingerolympics.com

I ended helping Andrew Mahon with his project, “Digitally Fit”.  You can read more about it on Andrew’s site.

For more pictures from the installation, check out the page on the Digital Situations site.