Processing Blogs

A lamppost covered in about 150 CD packaging stickers, outside the Best Buy location in Fairview Heights, Illinois. A wide variety of musical genres and time periods were present, and no other post in the lot had a CD sticker.

“Stigmergy is a method of communication in emergent systems in which the individual parts of the system communicate with one another by modifying their local environment. [...] ‘Stimulation of workers by the performance they have achieved.’”

I remember a ride at Six Flags when I was a kid that started with a boat going into a cave. Where the ceiling dropped into reach, there was a huge neon splotch where countless bits of chewing gum had been stuck together. One solid plate of gum, beginning with a single piece and accelerating outward.

I’ve got an imminent deadline for a prototype of my 1st serious camera tracking project and I just can’t seem get QT4Java to play nicely (make that “consistently”) on my dev machine. Sometimes it works. More than often it does not…

Yesterday I wasted almost a full day with (un/re)installing various versions of QT and WinVDIG, reading and hacking – then decided to throw in the towel and try my luck with the Java Media Framework to get a camera feed into my app…

Another 12 hours later, after wading through Sun’s JMF docs and various failed experiments, writing and merging little demos scavenged from across the web, I’ve got it working: Me waving back at myself in B&W on screen as JMF captured (and processable) video with Processing.

Disclaimers (and hence the “teaser” subtitle):

• So far only working under Eclipse
• JMF only exists for Windows and Linux (no OSX, sorry Robert!)

I’ve done some preliminary speed tests with a 640×480 window size and my Philips ToUCam Pro capturing at 320×240 @ 15fps:

P2D (default renderer) 44fps average
P3D 52fps average
(*both fps counts over 1 minute) – I’m not sure if/how much this is faster than the default QT4Java solution…

Next steps are obviously to wrap this up in a library, but this probably won’t be anytime until end of May since I want to do it properly. I might publish the existing code earlier, but it’s currently using an Java interface mechanism for callbacks and so will only work outside the P5 IDE (e.g. in Eclipse)… watch this space!

The end has come… pictures of my bit of the show are here. At some point Iman will put up pictures of all the other parts of the exhibition.

Generator.x has a sneak preview of SodaPlay 2.0. PlayForge, the new construction and simulation environment, will include a public API allowing users the add and share new features.