Thursday, December 14, 2006

final final


It all came together in the end, and I am quite happy with the outcome. People who had a chance to play with the portal seemed to enjoy it and had fun.

The way the portal works is that you stand above it, and slowly move your hand in. The sensor picks up your hand's location and activates one of the scenes. If you hold your hand steady, the scene will loop. If you move your hand lower, you will part the clouds, and the next scene will play. If you move your hand up, the previous scene will play. It takes a little getting used to, but it does work.

The one problem was that almost everyone rushed to the bottom, missing out on the middle scenes. I think that using computer vision rather than the IR sensor might have made it easier for me to buffer that and slow it down.

Part of the interactivity was discovering how to control the action in the scenes, and it seemed that with practice, most folks got it. People also learned from observing each other.

A link to the movie here:

MOVIE


and if you want to see the Max/msp jitter patch its here:

PATCH

Test takes


Powers of Ten.


I have settled on the "Strata" concept to use for the portal. I am going to honor Charles & Ray Eames' film, "Powers of Ten," by creating stop-motion animations of a location seen from above. I will use illustration rather than photos or live action. And it will be black and white. I will use a MAX patch to control my DV camera to capture the images and write them directly into a movie file.



The Setup.

Here is a test stop motion technique I will be using for the final. It's a lot easier than I had thought it would be, but I fear that the real deal will be a lot more time consuming.

TEST MOVIE

Here goes.