Fri, 06 Jun 2008

Mac Screensavers

I've re-added the "fruit" of my 2004 screensaver writing binge to the software page, for what it's worth. I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who has ever used these.

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Tue, 27 May 2008

Virtual marker by colour capture.

I've written some stuff in processing that lets you draw realtime marker graffiti via webcam, by clicking on something and then using it to draw in the air. It uses colour matching, and it's pretty gross and simplistic.

Yeah, I guess it's a totally ghetto and horrible version of Ethan Roth's graffiti analysis capture idea.

Here's a fifteen second clip:
 Youtube.  Quicktime.

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Thu, 10 Apr 2008

2001 Stargate effect with Quartz Composer

For reference, this is the scene from 2001 I'm talking about, but the music is obviously different from the original ( there used to be a version with Acid Rain from Liquid Tension Experiment 2, which I thought was a much better match, but... eh ) Space Oddessey/Oddity.

That out of the way, the effect is quite famous now, and the method for producing it ( grossly slow and expensive slit-scan multiple exposure photography ) can now be replaced with a camera moving between two stretched out textures.

I decided to try something different, scrolling the textures on fixed planes, and it worked pretty well. If you're browsing in Safari/Shiira, you should be able to see the results below:

( qtz file )

Pretty neat, huh! The results vary a lot with the kind of images you feed in, and this seems to have been borne out by the comments of the VFX crew on the original film.

The structure of the program is pretty simple, and if you have a Mac with Quartz Composer installed ( it's in the Developers Tools ), I encourage you to download the qtz file and look inside. To put it simply, two images are fed into a macro, which is then light bloomed and displayed. The macro does an affine repeat to make each image an infinitely tiled field of itself, and then uses a moving cropping window - like the view out the window on a moving train. The resulting slices of image are painted onto two angled polygons.

Quartz composer is great technology, and I think it has real potential for visual programming by people who consider themselves "non programmers". My only gripe with it is that it doesn't allow me to load strings from urls. :(

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