dave’s blog of art and programming

user generated content

My first bit of computer vision code under the GPL:

It’s just a noddy method to try and identify different people, built on top of OpenCV’s face finder. It’s for the lirec project, as a potential way of identifying who is who for the scenarios involving the iCat.

Back on groworld again, smoothing l-system plant growth with some procedural animation. Check out the second time around though – I wasn’t expecting that…

Some pretty dodgy photos from the Terradisco event last night, thanks to Evan for lending me his mac to perform on (the first time I’ve tried one, so getting used to the keyboard was interesting), it was a really friendly and packed event, my photos don’t really capture the vibe. It was serious livecoding practise for me, 2.5 hours of fluxing…

Setting up in the ill fm room.

Down to 28Hz, and quite a lot of it, the rig in the Ill Industries/Disjunkt room.

The same room, further back – the best shot I got of my set… That’s the view that us VJ’s got of the screen!

A better shot of Evan's fluxus set, and his list of scripts :)

I was invited to go and talk about stuff at the SGI yesterday. Fellow presenters were Lakshmi Sastry from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, talking about Big Science and visualisation, and how they are interested in using their parallel processing work with arts and humanities projects. Mark Jones from Advanced Simtech showed us through a simulation of a road traffic accident which was used as evidence to bring a conviction in court. Alex Jevremovic gave some live demos of the detailed architectural modelling he’s been doing around Coventry, including a planned reconstruction of it’s famous cathedral. Soulla Stylianou from Daden Limited gave a talk on all the second life work that they are doing, visualising things like air traffic and astronomy. The talks were also shown in second life too, and you could see your talk being projected “virtually” next to your own projection, which was a little surreal. I also found out about OpenLifeGrid which is a kind of open source second life, I think – which might be a little more interesting than the original.

Sara de Freitas from the SGI introducing the event.

Some of the research partners working on Lirec have a history of working together on an quite unique educational game called FearNot! which attempts to teach children strategies to deal with bullying by allowing them to play with the interactions which happen in social groups, in a safe context.

I’ve been having a play with one of the parts planned on being used on Lirec, the social/emotional AI system, which is called FAtiMA (the Fearnot Affective Mind Architecture). All the code is available on sourceforge, unfortunately the game requires Windows to run.

The controllers took a hammering, but seemed to survive. 45,307 people were recorded visiting the exhibition at the Palace of Charles V, that’s a lot of gamepad livecoders. The numbers on the buttons have completely worn off.

I’ve spent the last few days discussing robotics and artificial companions at foam’s Brussels studio, at the Lirec consortium meeting. I took some pics on the last day, which included an interesting workshop on grounded design led by Lars Erik Holmquist and his colleagues from the Swedish Institute of Computer Science.