IxD Lab 2_Dreamstop documentation

Yeah, I worked all the night with a computer close to the crash, but hey I did it (even if quite in late). Now let’s get a big break before restarting to work for other projects: I feel a bit dizzy. You know, staying operative in front of a pc for 24 hours (almost continuously) is not so healty.

Sound excerpt from My red hot car by Squarepusher.

IxD Lab 2_Building Final prototype

This is the video that shows how we bult the final prototype of “Dreamstop”.

IxD Lab 2_Projections attempts

Heres some projection attempts that, me and my team (Dreamstop), did last week, to set up an early prototype of our installation.

Processing Code_Brightness Threshold

The code captures a video from a camera (in this case it’s the webcam), posterizes it in black and white giving to white pixels the highest transparency. Then copies every frame on an array which overalys (acting as a mask) a pre-recorded video. There’s also a version with a selectable threshold.
Durrell Bishop re-wrote completely the Processing code for us. Thank you so much Durrell!
Me and my team weren’t able to find what was going wrong with our initial version of the code. Durrell fixed up everything.

Durrell Bishop and Tom Hulbert are from Luckybite

[This post will be updated soon]

Introduction to Arduino by Tom Hulbert

Here are uploaded the earlier four videos of the first day of workshop by Tom Hulbert about Arduino. He made a little introduction, to the students of the Interactive artefacts prototyping studio course in IUAV, about physical computing with this board and providing general technical informations.

Introducing Arduino:

IxD Lab 2_Camera Tracking

A few attempts we did to determine the camera angle for tracking.

Projection on glass

During last days, at Laboratori Ligabue, while testing frontal and retro-projection on a plexiglass surface, me and my teammates have found many interesting things:

1. You can’t get a good projection on pure glass because its low reflecting coefficient and high refractive index just make the incoming light beams deviate and not coming back. So you must use some kind of translucent layer to fix an image on the surface, that’s why we tested it on glossy paper and on vynil acetate to see where we had the best result;
2. Glossy paper is good, has slightly more brightness and it’s far more available and economic than acetate;
3. Glossy paper gives a frosty-glass look, and its a bit less bright than glossy paper, but it’s far more resistant.

Collaboration

I’m searching for design, interaction and visual communication students to exchange informations about workshops and exhibitions which take place in their universities. That’s a project related to the editorial unit of Weme, the blog of the Visual and multimedia communications programme (clasVEM) at the University of architecture of Venice (IUAV).