RESEARCH PROJECT 2000 - 2001B.A . MULTIMEDIA - RMIT

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Development - Brief Review- 24-06-2001 DOWNLOAD PRESS KIT FOR THE PROJECT (PDF DOCUMENTS, COMPRESSED WITH WINZIP)

Laser Grid

Benefits as an interactive interface

  • Multi dimensional motion tracking
  • Chords on harp

Downfalls as an interactive interface

  • Alignment - sensors small -> solution - > Larger sensor plate Delay time needed - In port sampling to wait for other triggers for an event to be created.
  • Two or more triggers will very rarely occur within .02 milliseconds of each other. More than one person in grid will give unexpected triggers -> solution -> map the motion on the z dimension (up & down), not x & y.

Distance Detection (Theremin) using capacitance - The electric charge generated by life fields (auras).

Benefits as a variable controller

  • Only senses proximity of electric charge

Downfalls as a variable controller

Sensitivity varies with distance. Many devices give out electric charges that can interfere with our own.

Collaboration Between Artists, what we got out of this project:

  • Brendan Shelper - Sound - " Working in collaboration to create a new form of av performance"
  • Olaf Meyer -Video composition, Concept, animation and interactivity design -" Making an interface more physical and working with randomly generated data to drive a structured av composition."
  • Andrew Baxter - "To develop the way we use affordable everyday technology to make it accessible to everyone" Review of the elements of this project.

Sound Composition

Using sound to enhance the environment and add to the image was the hardest part of the project sound can easily create new meaning.

Video Composition

Making images flow to the music or pulse to a rhythm was the most fun. Care was taken to ensure the composition is not too busy. Like the notes chosen in a wind chime, images and sounds were carefully chosen to fit a theme, yet the sequence in which they are triggered is randomly set. When compositing I have aimed to keep the images and sounds in themes, using brightness values to determine the transparency between layers.

Animation

Can always be refined -- previews, previews and more previews. Some of the originally intended animations were not completed. Lightwave 6.5 - many bugs encountered new interface for bone weighting, not practical with hi-res models, even on my machine. -No resources at RMIT to help with LW 6.5. Only found a heap of bitchy emails on internet forums from users that spent allot of money on the software. Newtek has no public list of known bugs. New motion graph interface has limited edit feature compared to previous versions. Volumetric renderer limited my cloud animation, crashed without any apparent cause. Learning Max shows a totally different approach to 3d animation, including animatable texturing and modeling.

Interfacing To The PC

There are many simple circuits available that switch voltage on and off, or give varying voltage or resistance measurements. There is a lot of free information on the internet describing how the PCs LPT ports work. The LPT port is cheap and fast and every PC has at least one. Having software to read and write to the port, makes interfacing to the outside world hassle free.