So was the second and last week over with processing in the skill sections of the intense CIID year. Second week was pretty interesting with much more focus on individual work than last week. I decided that for my final project to continue working with particle systems and develop what I did last week. It always interesting too see how an idea develop during the time you are working with it. I had some initial idea about a children’s game where you could draw your playing field on a whiteboard and then play with it. The end result is as far away from that as possible, will explain the idea further down. That is what I like with processing and the open ended process you can have. It goes so fast to try out different possibilities that it doesn’t really matter. That is also kind of the drawback if you can call it that. It is so easy to get stuck in trying out different possibilities that you sometimes forget to focus down and actually produce stuff… I feel that this is kind of my problem in many projects, to just sit down and finish this last things to make them look nice and portfolio worthy.
The above statement leads me to my next topic. I have finally found an portfolio layout I kind of like. It is a CMS system called Core which is really clean and nice looking. Thx to Mayo I was able to host it at his dreamhost account and set it up for free. Take a look at www.davidsjunnesson.com and say what you think. I will fill it up with stuff as the year pass by and hopefully have something nice to show at the end of the year of CIID. Im thinking of putting 12 different projects on the site and keep it at that so just sort one out when I have done something better. So far there is 5 projects, TableTalk, Lumilos, ColorMyStock, general workshops and THUTO. The page is built to have mostly pictures and very little text which is both kind of good and bad. If you dont know what the projects is about it is some times hard to understand them fully with just a couple of lines and 3 pics but I hope the message will come through…
And so finally a short description of last week end result. It ended with a piece that lays in the borderland between game, art, ambient and musical instrument and is called Fragmented Sounds. You control an orb in a field of small sound fragments bouncing around. By slowly moving your head in front of the screen you move the orb and collects the sounds which starts playing as soon as you collect them creating an unique soundpicture each time you play it. After you have collected a couple of fragments you can start playing with them with things such as panning the sound back and forth by gently moving the particles inside the orb back and forth. There is many different of this smaller interactions to keep the user interested and investigating deeper down in the interaction. I always like projects which you can just dive into without any pre knowledge (like in the case of Fragmented Sounds to just stand in front of the screen and let sound fragments come to you) and still get something satisfying out of it. But it shouldn’t stop there I think. There must be something for the pro user which devotes time playing with it and trying to discover the secret “language” used in the code. In the case if Fragmented sounds it is that the user discovers all this extra controls and tools to manipulate the sounds and thus get better control of the music and a richer experience out of it. The piece was exhibited at DKDS and I received some really nice feedback and positive encouragements to take it further. Also many so similarities to the DS game Electro Plankton which I need to investigate further.
This week it has been the first of two weeks with working with processing together with Patrick from The Product. The week started with a bit to much basic stuff for my taste but it was very good for the ones in the class that was complete beginners to the whole programming world. Always hard to put a level where everyone feels to be challenged. I know this personally from my time at Malmo University and the students I had there.
Well personally it has been really interesting to learn about particle systems and how to build them from scratch. It is so much easier to understand a sketch when you can see it being built up from scratch than just get it delivered to you and then try to decipher whats happening. I feel I have a OK understanding of creating an particle system and how vectors affect each. The whole thing with working with vectors and adding and multiplying them is a really nice way to work I feel.
The end result from this week is two small sketches one with some computer vision (which was the theme of the week) and is really just a funny experiment to play with the particles I crreate. I call it particle shower and it is basically a stream of “water” which is put over the head and bounces of it and down. Maybe not the most useful but quite fun to play with. Interesting to see that with pretty simple mechanics you can create an interesting playful sketch.
Yes it is me getting an shower...
The second sketch I did was to play more with repellers In particle systems so I created a first draft of a simple game. The goal is to get the stream into the goal using repellers to control the movement of the particles. It turned out to be a pretty adictive game and it is really fun to play in its crude form. Might be worth putting some more time into and build it a bit more.
So much better playing with it than just this static picture.
During the weekend I have to decide on something to do for next week final assignment in the processing module. The output can either be an interactive piece or an print. Im thinking of trying to do a print with the laser to just see how it goes. Havnt played with processing and laser yet and Im thinking an evolution of an curve with just starting very simple and then by showing a lot of iterations evolve the curve to more complex structurs but still building it up with just the curveVertex function. Will see what I decide on.The good thing is that I have really gotten the happy feeling back with working with processing and java. Sometime all you need is some time to sit down and really work with an idea for 5-6 hour in a stretch so that you can see some result and be happy.
The sketches will be linked in as soon as I can find a nice space to host it. apparently openprocessing.org doesn’t support opengl apps so cant put them there…
Find a window that is as close to 1,2m wide and 2 m high.
Attach a piece of blue tape to the lower right corner of the window as close to the bottom as possible and cross the window horizontally and attach the tape to the left bottom corner.
Move 1 cm upwards on the window and attach a new tape horizontally cross the window.
Iterate through step 3 increasing the movement upwards with 1 cm each time until you have reached half the window height.
When you reach the half window height repeat the same procedure but decrease the distance by 1 cm each tape row until you reach the top of the window.
Attach a piece of tape at the bottom right corner and then attach it to the top right corner.
Attach a new piece of tape 1 cm to the left of the last tape.
Repeat step 7 with 1 cm increase in distance each iteration until you reach half width of the window.
At half width decrease the distance between tape columns until you have reached the left corner of the window.
Okay so I have joined the CIID class of 09/10. It is busy days now but it feels like it is really rewarding to. I will start posting some random ideas about the courses Im taking and it will probably slip in some quick notes and so on.
I have created a new circuit which is in production and for sale right now called The Dawm
The Dawm is a breakout board for the TLC5940 chip. This chip has the possibility to pwm (pulse width modulation) 16 different ports over serial communication from example an arduino microcontroller or similar. (This means in ordinary language that you can for example dim 16 LEDs up and down individually)
One nice feature of the TLC5940 is that it is daisy chainable, which means that one chip can be connected to the next one and so on for plenty (500+) of pwm ports. Each one of the ports is individually controllable from only using 5 pins from the microcontroller. This creates great possibilities like creating low resolution screens or light patterns which is fully customizable and so on. Also control of motors and other outputs is possible.
So now have the work started for preparing for the upcoming course physical prototyping 2 advanced. Will do a theme in the course with interactive architecture reconnecting back to my time at Aup and also because it feels like it is in the time right now. More and more buildings get hooked up and start to be “intelligent”. This will be my first course which I will be primarily responsible which feels really nice. Of course I will heavily rely on my colleges here in the lab to help me out and without them everything would collapse… Will be a fun autumn to see what can be built at the end.
Here is some of the information and examples I will probably show. If anyone else have anything please send a note. Will be a lot of stuff from Usman Haque which I think is a really interesting artist and creator. Will also hopefully be using his pachube to do some experiments.
The last 7 weeks I have been in London working together with the Arup Foresight team with one of their projects called Faraday. The project is about how Science can be taught in the British schools in key stage 3-4 and the end product is a building proposal for two new Brittish schools that is being built this year. Together we have developed concepts and end product specification in six different categories ranging from how robotics can be used in educations and what and where to buy the products to how to display the history of the school and use that information in education. A very broad range of interactives which we in the end managed to break down in deliverable format for a constructor to use.
The last seven weeks have also given me a good insight at how interaction design can be used and are being used currently at top projects like the Water cube for the 2008 Olympics and in 3d simulation for visualizing projects.
Now it is time to play catch up until all the workshops which we are going to be organizing. Really looking forward to both the Malmö festivalen things for kids and the evening Lighthouse and the professional workshops to teach arduino and other physcial prototyping tools.
Yesterday was the final examination show at K3 Malmo University. I had my project Lumilos for show and it went well. Many people coming by and talking about it and it felt good. The Lumilos project ended pretty nice if I can say it self. The wall as seen below is nicely covered in light and the Poweruino circuit performed flawlessly during the whole show. So now is the circuit tested for running for 3 days straight and not a single problem. It responds directly on commands sent to it and is running smoothly. Using i2c was perfect for this project and really easy to work with. Will be interesting to start using Poweruino in some other projects. I have already some plans and will blogg about them as they come up.
Another nice thing seems to be on the move right now. I might go to London and ARUP during the summer as an internship. Really excited about going and sees it as a great opportunity. Hope everything falls in place now soon…
So have received my circuit now and have built it togheter and tested it and it works flawlessly. was a nice relief when I turned on the power for the first time and it came alive. Here is a picture of how the circuit looks like assembled. Will now this week incorporate it into my project which is in display on Monday at Malmö Högskola between 16-19 if anyone is interested.
Will be a lot of stuff from Usman Haque which I think is a really interesting artist and creator. Will also hopefully be using his pachube to do some experiments.
