“Digital fabrication (also known as “fabbing”) represents the next step in the digital revolution. After years of virtualization, with machines and atoms being replaced by bits and software, we are coming full circle. Digital technologies like rapid prototyping, laser cutting and CNC milling now produce atoms from bits, eliminating many of the limitations of industrial production processes. Once prohibitively expensive, such technologies are becoming increasingly accessible, pointing to a future where mass customization and manufacturing-on-demand may be real alternatives to mass production.”
The invited artists had some prior experience with fabbing, and from looking at the images from the workshop I wish I could have seen the resulting exhibition at [DAM] Berlin.
When I visited f0am in Brussels in october they were busy constructing a reprap, a DIY rapid prototyping printer, and their ultimate goal is to use it to make food.
I found the title of this post in one of Michael Naimarks essays, I guess it also could have been called augmented reality, projection of a virtual object onto a physical object, projecting a virtual layer ontop of a physical geometry, masking of projections, etc.
I have been researching different ways of projecting on other things than flat surfaces: projections that project on objects, follow the shape of the room, and projections of virtual 3D shapes onto physical 3D shapes.
In my own work I have used projections as advanced light sources, masking as a way to fit flat projections on objects and surfaces, but also to create the illusion of multiple screens from a single source. Some examples here.
My goal has been to create tools which make it easy to start working with a physical space immediately, being able to make changes in realtime. I have mainly done this by using multiple opengl videoplane layers in max/msp jitter, with one of the layers having a drawing mode so you are able to draw the shape of a particular object after you have placed a opengl layer over it. I made a crude 3 layer tool for the workshop I did at KHIO this summer to enable the participants to immediately start relating to the physical space.
The master of multiple opengl videoplanes in Norway is Piotr Pajchel in his work with Verdensteatret.
I have done some experiments with projecting a 3D shape onto physical objects, but still have a long way to go in terms of having a simple setup for this.
Obviously I have been looking at what other people have been doing, but none of systems I have found seems to be available to the public, and few of them seem to have been used beyond the developing-period of the system, which might be a sign of them not being as flexible as wanted, and maybe also quite timeconsuming to prepare.
Most systems uses a method to track the shape/space they want to project onto in combination with custommade software, to be able to map the projected image correctly onto the physical object, which is related to the lens specifications of the projector, the placement of the projector in relation to the objects to be projected on, etc.
The LightTwist system developed at the University of Montreal (not much seems to have happened after 2004) use “a panoramic (catadioptric) camera to get correspondances between each projector pixel with the camera pixel. This camera represents the viewpoint of our futur observers. Then, from what the observer should see, we can build the projector images from their respective mapping.”
The videobjects from Whitevoid design in Germany is a software for realtime distortion of video to fit physical objects, but using predistorted video, and you calibrate it either with a helpgrid or by importing a model of the realworld setup. So you would need to first create the 3D shapes to project onto, and then decide how the video will map onto the 3D objects, and finally doing the calibration to match up the virtual objects with the physical ones.
I think the most spectacular callibration solution so far is the “automatic projector calibration with embedded light sensors” (pdf), a collaboration between people from Carnegie-Mellon, Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab and Stanford. They use fiberoptics and light sensors built into the objects/surfaces to be projected on, and by projecting a series of grey coded binary patterns, a custom-made software is able to adjust the image in less than a second to perfectly fit the projectionsurface, with a much higher resolution than a camerabased solution. Take a look at the impressive video:
The pdf and video seems to be from 2004, but I found some more information here. They are hoping to make the system fast enough for live tracking of moving objects, and also to make the calibration pattern invisible using infrared light.
If you have a big budget you could always invite Circus of Now to do the video for you (”We build skyscrapers of light”).
At Ars Electronica this year I had the pleasure to see Palbo Valbuena´s Augmented Sculpture (image at top of this post) which consists of a physical structure in the corner of the room, with the exact same virtual shape projected onto it using one projector. By then animating the color and lighting of this virtual shape, some very interesting light/shadowplays happen. Valbuena collaborates with some game developers in Spain who constructed the virtual model and animation in a standard 3D software.
This work shows the potential in augmented reality using videoprojection, and I hope to see more of his work soon (He has a big outdoor installation in Madrid at the moment, hopefully there will be some documentation soon.)
update feb 5th 2008: Valbuena has updated his website with documentation of several projects: different versions of the augmented sculpture and the public square installation in Madrid.
This year´s piksel festival is over, with focus on circuit bending and open hardware solutions. I could only stay the first day, but have been following part of the festival through the quite impressive streams archive from the festival.
I got to see the wonderful loud objects live, which I have written about before.
Last night I watched David Cuartielles from the Arduino team give an interesting talk about the beginning of the arduino project, the current status of the arduino development and challenges ahead. They have sold over 20000 boards, and it has become the standard tool for electronics prototyping. As a result of this position there are now clones being made all over the world, for instance a dual core arduino (!!) made by some people in South-Korea.
He talked about how everything with arduino is open, they only reserve the use of the name arduino. There is quite a big difference between open software and open hardware, as hardware needs to be manufactured so you need some initial investment. They have an interesting strategy for funding new development by letting corporations and institutions paying them to work on the arduino project, so for instance Samsung agreed to let Cuartielles make a lot of board designs which will be available for free soon, without Samsung having any rights to the designs. Some of these boards looked very interesting, like a 32 channel output board (which can be daisychained) with transistors to control lights, motors etc, a 64 channel input board, relay boards etc.
The arduino project is being restructured into a foundation, and some money will each year be used to support people and projects who have problems with access to hardware.
I have been very busy preparing and giving a 2 week physical computing workshop at The Academy of Fine Arts in Bergen, “Connect the dots”. It has its own blog, with lots of useful info related to arduino, mice etc. (look for resources category). There are also images available from the workshop.
The aim was to introduce to a mixed group of students the basic concepts of physical computing, and how to to create relations between objects,spaces,actions and people, so it was both a hands on workshop with arduino (analog in/out, digital in/out, serial communication with computer), different sensors, transistors and relays controlling 12 and 220 volt appliances, discussion and presentation of other artists´ work, and the production of a one day exhibition including a listening post, a mouse radio, a paper burning machine, a weather machine and a callstation (where the arduino picks up the phone when you called a specific number ++). Read all about it in the connect the dots blog!
I am doing a series of projects called soundpockets for urban interface oslo, which in different ways tries to create pockets of sound in public space. Some of the versions involve the fm sender- mp3 setup mentioned in the previous post, another one involves a directional speaker mounted on a pan/tilt unit, and this has been my second headache this summer, finding a controllable pan/tilt unit which is reasonably fast, which can handle a load of a few kilos and which is not ridiculously expensive.
Fortunately I have had good help from Soundscape studios. The first ideas was to use a existing movinghead light and refit it with the speaker, but it turned out that the motors wouldnt be able to handle the load. Pan tilt units are usually made for a specific purpose, either light or video, and the few ones which are available for general purpose use and which are controllable are very expensive. The one we have ended up with is quite expensive, but is controlled using serial protocol, is made for outdoor use, and is powerful enough to handle video projectors (for later projects). It is also very fast, up to 300 degrees per second pan, and 60 degrees per second tilt. Hopefully it arrives next week.
The most ambitious plan is to control it using an arduino microcontroller, which will also control a serial-controllable mp3 player, the daisy, so I should be able to place sounds quite accurately in a space, and also create movements with sounds.
If time runs short I will use a macmini with max controlling the sound and pan-tilt unit over the serial port.
I have been testing two different models of directional speakers which uses ultrasound as the carrier signal, I will probably have to go for the smaller one, although I am a bit worried it will disappear in the ambient sound. It is also challenging to find the sounds which works best, and also how to deal with the sounds both coming directly from the narrow beam of the speaker but also the reflections on surfaces in the space.
The inspiration for this projects comes from when I studied in Trondheim in the 90ies, and I heard some stories about how a directional speaker had been used to cause a certain distress on a bridge over the local river: A person walking alone across the bridge suddenly hearing whispering voices. An out of tune clarinet projected into a marching band playing on the 17th of may (Norway´s national holiday).
If these stories are true or not, doesn´t really matter, it is the idea of having a private experience in a public space which intrigued me.
Summer has seen few posts, but not because of lack of activity. I have been busy researching for the upcoming urban interface oslo exhibition. One of my challenges has been to find a setup with a short-range fm sender, a mp3 player and a solarcell/battery solution that would make it possible to place this unit anywhere and leave it running. This has proven a lot harder than I would have imagined.
First, there are now so many fm senders available, and it is really hard to distinguish good from bad (90 % bad), and the reviews out there are not trustworthy. There also seems to be so many factors affecting signal strength so the same sender might appear to have a strong signal one day and a really weak one the next day. Frustrating and time consuming, and I am still checking out different modules.
I guess I should ask Raghav Mahato in India, who claims to have built a radio sender for just over 1 usd.
I knew very little about solar power solutions before this summer, and the options range from build it yourself solutions to “how to survive after a nuclear attack” systems. I looked first at relatively new products advertised as solar chargers for mobile devices like ipods, cellphones and pdas.
Most of these mobile solar chargers combines small solar panels with an internal rechargeble battery with different types of breakout plugs.
Not all of them are able to provide power while charging, which was necessary for my setup. I gave the freeloader a try as it sounded like the perfect companion for a fm sender and mp3 player, it has a 2100 mAh battery, but the results were very disappointing. I guess the current from the solar panels is just too weak to provide enough power to keep the battery charged while in use.
There are not so many other ready-made solutions, either they have a smaller capacity than the freeloader or they are just chargers (so the batteries can´t be used while they are being charged).
I am now looking at more heavy-duty solutions, 6-15W solar panels in combination with a charge controller and a lead battery, but this becomes quite expensive and heavy. And all I need is about 100-150mAh. I am still hoping for the perfect solution to pop up.
This research will also be useful when looking for selfpowered xbee solutions. They seem to have had success with a solar powered xbee system at ITP.
I managed to do a little bit of work with the Xbees a few weeks ago, finally getting the directmode (connect a input of one xbee to the output of another xbee, without using an external microcontroller) to work, and also exploring the sleep options, which means being able to keep the power used to a minimum.
I have discovered lots of interesting alternative energy websites, here are a few of them:
I taught a one week workshop for the director-,choreography-, and scenography students at the National Academy of the Arts in Oslo last week.
My approach was to develop tools in the form of small software applications which made it very easy for the students to immediately start exploring ways of using video in a space.
We also tested out many different projection surfaces, privalite, dmx-controlled shutters, physical masks.
You can see a slideshow of some of the results here.
And even better, you can check out two of the applications I made (built using maxmsp and jitter), for both osX and windows. One is a simple capture program for recording either live stream, animation or recorded footage already on the camera, to your harddrive.
The other is a tool for positioning and scaling 3 planes of video, creating presets of the scenes you create and then make transitions between the scenes.
Google Earth has implemented a new technology called street view, developed by Immersive Media
This could roughly be seen as a mix of very advanced quicktime VR and a film effect from The Matrix movies. Interesting to me as another example of the interrelation between space,time and motion.
From the Google Earth Blog:
“One of the many secrets behind their technology is a patented 11 lens camera system that simultaneously takes photos in 11 directions based on a dodecahedron geometry. They can capture 30 frames a second of high resolution photography. That’s right - we’re talking high resolution video in digital 360. You can stop, start, back up, single-frame, etc”
Five intensive days with the Maxwell City Workshop at Atelier Nord is over, you can get some impressions here, as well as in Sophia´s blog, and a slideshow of images from my flickr site. There will most likely be a 20 minute radio program based on the recorded sounds later.
We mainly used two types of EM sniffers in the workshop, one antennae based, from this kit, and a coil based one, made by Martin Howse.
I have already jumped into another workshop, exploring video for stage, together with the director-, choreography- and scenography students at the National Academy of the Arts in Oslo.
I look at it as a collaboration: I propose several tools I have constructed,we work with them and I modify them according to the feedback from the workshop. This will be made publicly available later.
I have wanted to work more with the Xbee radios, but found out a few weeks ago that the ones I bought had old firmware from 2006 (even though I bought them in late march 2007).
This means that some features are not enabled, like connecting the input of one xbee to another xbee´s output (wireless) without the use of a microcontroller.
To update the Xbee´s firmware you have a few options: the expensive developer boards from maxstream, the DIY hack from Rob Faludi, or the xbee usb dongle from New Micros.
I chose the last option, because I thought it could be useful when including the xbees in a computer network for later projects. This turned out to be a very expensive solution. The dongle itself is only usd 39 which is not too bad. The problem is that New Micros doesnt specify shipping costs when you order, they just add it to your bill when it ships. I specifically asked them to send me a quote of how much the shipping would be, but they didn´t. I chose Fedex economy from the available choices, assuming it would be relatively fast and not too expensive. Well, I was wrong. They charged 71 usd for shipping and handling for a device the size of my thumb. And when I received the package I realized why it was so expensive: They shipped it in a pizza-delivery box filled with styrofoam, where the styrofoam pieces were bigger than the dongle, making it hard to even find it in the box.
Lesson learned: If placing international orders, don´t go for shops which don´t tell you the shipping costs when you place the order. Fedex, I didn´t order a pizza!
Do it the “hard” way: buy a hex inverter and follow Faludi´s tips here.
And, for uploading new firmware you need to do it from a computer with Windows.
Tomorrow I will find out if the dongle does what it is supposed to do.
