Processing Blogs

It’s not everyday that you find yourself sitting alone at night in a cloud of smoke on an abandoned military airbase in the middle of nowhere writing Python code, but that is exactly where i found myself last night while setting up for the project that I am doing with my friend Stephen Spyropoulos and his brother Theodore for the Faster Than Sound festival outside of London. The project they’ve come up with is quite amazing and I was happy to lend a hand.

“Smoke Signals is based on one of the oldest forms of communication in recorded history dating back over 5,000 years. The project works as a hybrid system that explores the dynamic and spatial capacities of smoke and light in relation to contemporary mobile SMS technologies of messaging today.The project examines a dynamic real-time interaction that writes space. Smoke and light setup the condition for developing a typographic ambient / responsive environment.”

http://www.minimaforms.com/smokesignals/

Cheers!

Woo, boy, it’s been over 3 months since i posted anything here, due mostly to my fulltime gig, which after months of development, i am happy to say, is finally entering its final phases of beta and is now up for everyone to see. It’s not Processing realated, but hey, at least it’s not my cat (i don’t even have a cat). Anyway, check it out below, I wrote the flash video player and all the automatic serverside video conversion tools and scripts (mostly python), as well as the video widget on the profile page. It’s still in invite-only beta, so if you wanna check it out in more detail, just drop me an email and ill gladly hook you up.

http://www.myheavy.com

Yay.

just to prove this UDP thing works…
One computer playing UT is sending info to my computer. (this processing script is printing everything the computer is recieving)

The thing is this all wont work on one computer… if I run unreal and processing on the same computer it dosnt work?
I think it has something to do with UDP and having to travel over a network, and not working locally…

p.s. It look like Im going to be doing a workshop in Manchester for the Futuresonic festival. The workshop is about game modding (and in theory will be using this whole UDP thing). Handily I wont be doing it alone, it will be a joint thing with Tom Betts.
Out of interest it will be a 3 day thing,
1st day – UnrealEditor, and creating your own maps
2nd day – Getting game data out of Unreal and to PD (maby processing too)
3rd day – Making something with it (something noisy)

Even though I’ve just released a library using Sun’s JMF hours ago, I didn’t actually explain too well the fact of it being a fairly dead technology, last updated in 2004. On the other hand JMF did have huge potential as framework, especially for streaming, mixing and (re)encoding timebased media.

The whole situation reminds me of Macrodobe Director. There’s a great product with huge potential being killed off slowly, slowly, very slowly due to corporate internal politics. To their defence, at least Director still is receiving updates, with doubtful new features, though, instead of improving keyfeatures like the 3D engine, which hasn’t been updated since sometime around 2001(?). Both products still have quite an active development community. Unlike in Lingoland, some members in the JMF camp started taking things into their own hands and started re-implementing JMF from scratch as opensource initiative. Their project is called Freedom for Media in Java (FMJ) and its first release has just been announced.

Quoting from Ken Larson’s announcement this morning, this looks very promising:

1. Video capture on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux
2. Audio and Video playback on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. DirectShow and Quicktime are wrapped used by FMJ on Windows and Mac OS X, respectively. Linux video playback currently requires JMF for demux/codec.

Audio Formats supported:
WAV, AU, AIFF, MP3, OGG. Some WAV formats may not work yet, as WAV is a container format with many internal formats.

Video Formats supported:
On Windows and Mac OS X: any format supported by the native system (DirectShow/Quicktime).

Way to go! I’ll testdrive if I can get my stuff to work with this asap…

Trying to keep up with promises given, I’ve just uploaded the 1st public release of my shamefully basic video capture and computer vision library. All info, examples, docs and source are over there for your perusal.

I especially would like to encourage mac and linux users to give it a spin, since I have no way of testing the code on these platforms.

Also, let me say right here that I don’t intend to actively develop or maintain this library (unless I require some things personally). There’re still a bunch of filters waiting for release, which could be quite helpful in this context, but most likely will remain independent from this library.

Having said that, the stuff is released under the LGPL. So I encourage anyone interested to build upon this basic framework and see if it can be(come) a viable alternative to the QT4Java approach of Processing’s built-in video capture library.

nicer… less painterly.
A few people and myself felt that there needed to be obvious computer involvement, the other piccy looked way too human-made.