Avols » Design

Location graphics

Arve Voldsund — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 23:13:16 +0000

This week I had two days putting graphics on buildings and things in Oslo, for a new NRK documentary series. We had a trolley with our own mini petrol power plant, a projector and everything else needed for such a happening.

For the animations and statements I made software that allowed us to zoom, position, rotate, scale and flip through the animation with shortcuts on the computer keyboard. The live tags are created with video analysis/transformation software made by me. We did particles steered by a flocking algorithm as well, but I have no photos of it. The software was made with a combination of Xcode with openFrameworks and Max/MSP/Jitter.

The animations comes from NRK.

Here are some mediocre photos taken on an iPhone 3g… Sorry about that, but you’ll get the point.

Live tagging of people passing by. The white (human) body tags are projected on the wall.

The projector trolley! It is quite nice to have a power plant at hand.

Statements on a tunnel wall.

Flowers on buildings in Rosenkrantzgate

Flowers on trees. Very poor photo of a beautiful projection.

More flowers on trees, and a slightly better photo.

Real Time Graphics

Arve Voldsund — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 22:20:18 +0000

At Norsk Teknisk Museum during the final concert of the elektrOpus sound competition I served a tiny portion of live graphics. It was kept simple, doing pixelation, blur, blending and a few other tricks and treats. I think it came out as a beauty, and Drivhuset ordered more graphic software for image manipulation for their Minnepinne-project.

So to make this story shorter than it could have been: I want to give a preview of how this came out, because it will be developed further and sneak on to stage with Goldwasser. Eventually. The images below are screenshots taken during testing of the software that I made for Drivhuset.

Source material are two videos: One of my son looking at fish at the aquarium and one video of a Norwegian coast guard ship going out from a dock in the local harbour. A Wiimote interfaces the manipulation presets too any kind of hands.

Cheers
Arve

Contact microphones

Arve Voldsund — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:38:40 +0000

Sensors are often a requisite for a successful end product when making a new interface for human-machine interaction. Contact microphones are one of my favourite sensors, and now we have a new batch of them in the workshop.

Contact mics are designed to pick up sound transmitted through hard materials: A contact mic glued to a table will pick up sounds that are made when things hit the table, but not what those around the table talk about.

Glue it on your floor, and make your computer aware of feet, toys, parts hitting your floor. By using a grid of contact mics you can even get a rough approximation on the position of things that are moving around!

Contact mic on my MacBook touch plate

Cheers
Arve.

Soundscapes in everyday life

Arve Voldsund — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:10:44 +0000

I have started working on sonification in human machine interaction, and yesterday a video was published over at Ted’s place.

I like this short and informative video, as it succeeds in showing the impact sound can have in an environment.

For me, who is researching how sound can be used as part of a user interface, it is very useful to be reminded about how sound pollution affects us.

Cheers
Arve.