Kaleidoscope & Object Score Notation, the Next Generation
The shiny floor of the CCA and a very ancient desire of Lot to be able to divide the space in tracked and non tracked zones, inspired Simon to create the object vidmask.
Vismask works by installing an overlay with a black image in which the tracked zones are made transparant (size of the screen).
BEFORE – TESTING – AFTER
Organising loops, timing the machinal actions by using the metronome function (‘time’), playing with variables through the selection objects (‘composition’), and having data moved by bodies (‘agency’) were the main ‘machinal’ specs we forces ourselves to look into.
The improvisation exercises we did in the mornings pointed out some more parameters. We divided them into:
– ‘live’ parameters, such as: force, body volume and texture
– ‘software’ parameters such as: body area, dominant, continuous and static tracking
– ‘visual’ parameters (on the projection screen) such as: texture, position
And there are parameters that belong to various fields.
The scheme has to be completed & reorganised 🙂
We had fun trying out the Kinect in the Constant’s office, Rue du Fortstraat and De Pianofabriek. In the end we decided to stick with our classical surveillance camera for this project !CoLAPseKode. Read the rest of this post
The latest experience in De Pianofabriek made us dream about capturing a videostream and play it back on the spot in a transparancy mode, something that would require a very powerful processor. Toonloop, a tool that has been very much appreciated at Constant lately (since OSP brought it back from LGM Montreal), offered the methodology for the grab and anim object.
First we grabbed manually using Alt+g and ran this script to make the grabs transparant and show them with anim-object. You need to add a transparant image in the folder where you run the script (tran.png) and indicate the prefix it has to match [-m], the degree of transparancy [-p] and the output mentioned in the load message of the anim object [-o]:
$ tranimages.py -t tran.png -m prefix_ -p 50 -o letter_
… the time Simon finished creating the grab-object! Then we forgot about it 🙂
Both objects can be combined with a metronome function. Just one click and the machine films the scene & plays it back!
What a joy!
Other objects Simon added in the Brussels’ residency were route & body_route to guide information from one precise body to different objects and osc_in.
In Poitiers we work with the most recent version of the software:
http://www.objscrs.org/downloads/objscrs034g.tgz
This new version of objscrs fixes the problems with the video cameras and allows messages for defining the locations of text and image objects to be connected directly.
(PS: little bug: the ‘ctrlkey’ object does not accept the letter ‘b’, this is because the letter ‘b’ is normally treated a bang when given as an argument on an object)
The camera connects through a canopus, which means a communication through dv4l and vloopback. You find the full explanation for installation & running here by Simon: apx_dvinput_install
And a start-up script by Pierre here:
run_camera_objscrs