Something I’ve been keeping an eye on for a while is Open Frameworks (http:\/\/www.openframeworks.cc\/) which is a C++ platform for creative coding.<\/p>\n
The gallery<\/a> is full of interesting installations such as the mirror\u00a0Audience<\/a>\u00a0 which has dozens of robot mirrors spookily following you around the room, the Body Paint<\/a>\u00a0which looks like a really fun and physical way to paint a virtual mess, and Secret Powers<\/a>\u00a0which looks suspiciously similar to the scene in Doctor Who and The Empty Child where “everyone lives! Just this once!”. I wonder if they used OF for that…? Come to think of it, there’s also the gallery installation where you “mustn’t blink – don’t even blink!”.<\/p>\n The thing that peaked my interest recently was this incredible face tracking demo<\/a> from Kyle McDonald<\/a>\u00a0– it looks like OF is really maturing with a host of amazing extensions. This was build on top of an extremely robust face tracking library from\u00a0Jason Saragih<\/a>\u00a0which has also been used for some other amazing prototypes, including my favourite by Daito Manabe<\/a>\u00a0where he’s actually using the contours of the face as an arena for fluid physics simulations. Just stunning!<\/p>\n There’s a wrapper for\u00a0OpenCV<\/a>– a computer vision library which helps with all the low-level tasks of finding edges, objects, filtering, transforms and all sorts of things which bring memories of extremely late nights at university flooding back to me. I mean, we’re talking dawn chorus in the computer labs just to get a gaussian filter working, but these guys have got instant shape detection in video at 50fps! Where have I been for the last 15 years?<\/p>\n There’s also their friends at the Point Cloud Library<\/a>\u00a0who have an incredible array of techniques for mapping objects in 3D spaces – most of which I barely even begin to understand. But want anyway.<\/p>\n This lead me on to find a new API and standard in “natural interaction” –\u00a0OpenNI<\/a>\u00a0who are trying to bridge the gap between hardware and software to facilitate the development of games, apps, systems which will use cameras and depth-sensors to enable people to interact with systems purely naturally – without a UI<\/em>. Is this the end of the UI? Asus seem to be the only hardware vendor at the moment with a compatible device, but it’s not available in Australia yet…<\/p>\n I have an idea for a collaborative, evolutionary 3D-modelling installation where people can add things to and chop up and virtual sculpture, leaving it behind for the next person to mutate, destroy, defame or enhance purely through a webcam and a projector. I’ve also got another idea for a yellow-snow message writing augmented reality game, but I don’t think I could get it past the iPhone app-store regulations.<\/p>\n I feel like I’ve just opened a pandoras chocolate-box of old AI dreams from my 20’s and it’s truly re-ignited my passion for creative coding again. What else could have kept me up till 2am solving obscure gcc linker problems in XCode?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Something I’ve been keeping an eye on for a while is Open Frameworks (http:\/\/www.openframeworks.cc\/) which is a C++ platform for creative coding. The gallery is full of interesting installations such as the mirror\u00a0Audience\u00a0 which has dozens of robot mirrors spookily … Continue reading