Josh Shard's Weblog

Final Crit

joshshard — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 16:16:21 +0000

This is the video of my crit, I feel it went well and although I didn’t have enough Infrared light for the tracking to work without the use of lighters I feel that I was able to demonstrate how it was ment to work well. I want to get a better video to show it effectiveness. there are two ways around this I could get an infrared lamp or a nightvision camera. It demonstrates my creature working although the lighting is poor. Check it out:

Final Piece

joshshard — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 20:00:15 +0000

Okay this is my final prototype it’s quite hard to see what’s going on but it will be projected onto the floor and as users enter the space the bug will either be attracted or scared of them depending on there movement, if they are erratic the creature will flee while if they a calm it will come see them. It’s hard to test and see on screen but I will put it up just so you can kind of see whats going on:

http://mediahost.aib.ac.uk/fdashow08/shard/year3/attract-trackingFinal.html

it’s similar to the previous one posted on here, just with the tracking in the corner and webcam removed. This is because I don’t need to project these but they were very handy to see in development of the piece. I am happy with it and hope that it looks good and the crit goes well. everything is set up.

Fingers Crossed!

Infrared Cam

joshshard — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 15:12:53 +0000

So yeah, I thought I might have problems with my camera picking up my creature moving, so I was talking to Ant about it and he said about how a infrared camera won’t pick up a projection and the day light and the lights in the room will produce enough infrared light to light up people interacting with my installation.

I approached this by buying a Logitech Quickcam, to make into my infrared camera, what i needed was:

- My Camera

- Fully Exposed 35mm Colour Film

- Scissors

- Craft Knife

Step 1: Dismantle Camera. This was pretty easy there was a screw on the side, unscrew that than gently pull apart.

Step 2: Take the board and unscrew the lens.

Step 3: Remove the inner lens and the infrared filter, basically we need to remove this filter as it stops the camera picking up infrared light. To get to it we need to remove the lens. I did this with the help of liam using a crafting knife. In the following photo you can see what was removed from the camera we remove the black circle of the left and the small square of glass(4th from the left).

Step 4: We now need to make it filter visible light and pick up infrared light so we take our fully exposed piece of 35mm film and cut a small square out to replace the glass. Placing them in the order they are shown below into the lens.

Step 5: Once this has done you lens will filter out visible light and pick up infrared light so put the camera back together and test it out.

Mine camera worked you can test it by looking at outside when it is light, this is because daylight contains a high amount of infrared.

Nearly Finished Tracking

joshshard — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 15:55:51 +0000

http://mediahost.aib.ac.uk/fdashow08/shard/year3/attract-trackingBlack3.html

Check it out!

Okay so yeah this is my tracking it pretty much is a finished prototype code needs cleaning up a little, and need to get rid of all the stuff on the stage as i don’t need to project that onto the floor. So anyways test it out it is a good example as you can see what it does, it comes to the movement if it is small and gentle and runs away if its erratic. I’m happy with this but like all webcam stuff in depends on lighting and stuff.

So anyways have a look it’s not the final thing but it shows how it will work, and if it works when tracking from about i will be a very very happy man

Webcam Tracking (Infrared)

joshshard — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:56:53 +0000

Okay so I have ordered a webcam because I have fears that if i use a standard webcam it will track my projected creature so to fix this i’m going to take a logitech camera and convert it into a infrared camera, Anthony and me have discussed how to do this and I decided to look for some examples of it and how to do it on the internet I found this site at first: http://www.ufos-aliens.co.uk/infraredwebcam.htm. This just covers what has to be done, I new the model of camera i had ordered it was a Logitech Quickcam so I began to look to see if anyone had written a tutorial on how to do that specific camera and after 10 mins of googling up popped this site that had the exact model i’m expecting to recieve any day. http://www.kailashnadh.name/docs/ir_cam/ir_cam.html

I’m excited about this, i think this will be fun ripping apart a camera and making if IR, lets see how it goes.

Flash Ecosystem

joshshard — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 12:23:43 +0000

Okay so I’m about to go to bed, and my computer bing’s at me… I have new mail and in this mail there is a link…. http://www.neuroproductions.be/experiments/simple-flash-ecosystem/. So i go on this site, and have a look at what it is. I find it very interesting. It is a ecosystem built in flash, the creature have there own AI, and go searching for food and mate with each other to create more creature. So they need to go get food to live, and to breed they need food, and if they don’t get food they die, so these creature are doing what they need to live, which is Artificial Intelligence. It is very good and well programmed this my help with the following project as I might introduce something similar to this I’m unsure yet but this is very good and the man that did it deserves some sort of medal :p

Further Tracking

joshshard — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 22:03:43 +0000

Okay so after the midterm crit Jason Kempshall had shown something similar to what I wanted to do, where he was using tracking to move a movieclip around the stage this was ideal for what I was attempting to do. So i began to revise my tracking and began to combine what I had, and what Jason had taught and shown me and I came up with this new version of tracking:

http://mediahost.aib.ac.uk/fdashow08/shard/year3/testtracking.html

Okay so this was my test it does pretty much exactly what I wanted to do, all that is wrong is that in this test the webcam needs to be flipped so it reacts like a mirror and your right hand will be on the right hand side of the screen. Once this was done the tracking was working apart from a few changes like sensitivity and what was moving towards it and away from it.

More Bugs…

joshshard — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:25:18 +0000

Yeah so I used a book I have had for a while published by Friend of Ed, “Foundation Actionscript Animation: Making Things Move‘ by K Peters. So this book is excellent and has loads of cool stuff about animating but in chapter 13 it shows you how to make a chain of movieclips and this is essential what I have done using my own movieclips and fiddling with the code to layer it the right way and work how I want it to.

This is my final bug although it is simple, this is what I wanted to achieve and although I didn’t intend on using this, I grew to like it and I think it is really effective and works really well. Check it here:

http://mediahost.aib.ac.uk/fdashow08/shard/year3/bugsSkele.html

Tracking First Test

joshshard — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:36:04 +0000

This is my first attempt at tracking it didn’t work, but it is the start of what I needed to do it uses flash’s bitmapAPI to get the difference between the current frame and the previous frames this shows the movement but i was getting any values and it needed developing further.

I learnt how to do the from a very good tutorial that can be found at: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/webcam_motion.html

This is my final result check it here: http://mediahost.aib.ac.uk/fdashow08/shard/year3/webcamtracking2.html

As i stated isn’t 100% what i need but it is a good start.

Bug…

joshshard — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 20:20:56 +0000

Okay this is one of my first concepts for my bug, it’s still kind of static but I have given it a move cycle you can see it moving this will move towards the position of interest, I like this but it is very cartoony and I don’t know if i want it simpler. We will see how things go but this bug is very much subject to change:

http://mediahost.aib.ac.uk/fdashow08/shard/year3/bugs.html