Adventures in Electrostatic

Last week for NIME I completed my first fully working prototype of the yet-to-be-named plate spinning instrument. My sensing strategy for both the individual plate IDs and rotation has changed greatly since their initial inception. At first I had planned on using computer vision to get the rotational and ‘fingerprint’ data from the individual plates, but after trying several different algorithms, the frame rate proved too slow for the fine grained data I wanted… So next I leapt into the hardware world. In the very beginning I assumed I would be using hardware for data collection, but decided to try the CV stuff because it would allow me to divorce the sensing from the physical stick setup… Read more »

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So I think I have my idea for the GLArt final… 3D WEBPAGES…
Rendering, and somewhat exploding webpages dynamically into a 3D space, links still working, images 3D’d and everything. I am especially excited about 3D typography. Read more »

HERE is the app… it takes some time to load… and it runs slow in the browser.

Last week’s Visualizing Data was all about the grub, or ‘larvae’. As mentioned earlier in my Larvae! post, this week is the first time we are working with a large, structured, data set (xml). The first thing I had to do before I could get to the visualizing part was get all the data into my app nicely organized. Luckily enough I scraped together a few simple routines to make that happen. HERE is a link to a processing sketch that simply gets the data from the HUGE (>5bm) xml files and quickly draws the paths and gradients to the screen.

After that, twas all about making a tool to explore the boring old xml data. Read more »

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Last week in GL ART the topic was textures… you know those images that wrap themselves around 3D models and video games… neato-keen.

There is much more to textures than I expected, and that mostly has to do with performance issues, i.e. allocating memory for the textures on the the GPU. So, because I really wanted to understand that aspect of openGL, I figured I would try making a texture from live video, since I would have to change the memory out often and such. Read more »

I am excited about the assignment in Visualizing Data for the next two weeks because it is working with ‘real’ data; that is, data that someone (a scientist) worked really hard to capture, and cares about. There is something really nice about displaying data for someone where your work could actually help them see their work in a new light. Read more »

Presentation