Interactive Arts Display

In the past few weeks I have worked on writing software for an interactive arts display. The main concept is that a video camera monitors the visitors of the arts display, which is a projection of a video film showing the artist Lee Gascoyne creating an artwork (see his blog at http://artists-water.blogspot.com/. The replay of this video is influenced by the motion of the visitors, which is captured by the camera: only of the audience does not move, the video recording will be played properly.

The technical principle of this system is as follows: The video capture software captures a reference image and computes the "difference" of each subsequent video image, pixel by pixel, in RGB. Based on this difference the video replay is being disturbed, and the video jumps ahead or backward. The implementation of this interaction has been done controlling the video player Winamp: this player can be controlled from another software by sending Windows messages. In order to be able to place the video replay on a different PC than the video capture, a socket connection between these two programs has been implemented: the camera capture software runs a server, which is sending out the pixel change value to each client after connection.

In our tests today at the Barnsley University Campus of Huddersfield University (where Lee is a BA Hons student), Senior Computing Officer Alistair Reid-Pearson (who is a Leeds Met Alumni from Innovation North) set up a PC for running all the software components. There were some issues regarding downloading the .NET framework 3.5, but the system ran flawlessly on another PC which had a different image of the OS installation.

The art installation will be shown at the exhibition of "The Dearne Project" which will be opened on 5.February by Councillor Newman at the Emergency Pod 1, 14-16 Mayday Green, Barnsley, at 6:30pm. This exhibition is a part of The Rivers Movement.

European FP-7 - 6th Call

In November the European Commission has published their 6th call in the 7th Framework Programme (FP-7). This call has a variety of topics, ranging from robotics to cultural heritage digitisation: see the CORDIS web site with the details of the call.

I have posted three profiles on the CORDIS partner search site (related to Heritage Digitisation, Artificial Creativity, and general expertise) and I encourage anyone interested in joining a consortium to have a look there. For searching, no registration is required. For posting a profile and for replying to existing profiles you need to register on that site.

Interview by Times Educational Supplement

Today around noon I received a phone call from Dave Matthews from the Times Educational Supplement (TES). At first I thought I would be asked about Leeds Met and the changes it had gone through the past year, and I was not really prepared to talk about that. But fortunately, the topic of conversation was "Augmented Reality (AR)". The interviewer wants to write a column in the TES in the next days or so. I was asked about the history of AR, and I mentioned the AR work of Boeing in the early 1990s. Furthermore, I could recall that the first prototypes of mobile AR applications were presented at ISMAR sometime in 2002 or 2003; I remember seeing one of those handheld Compaq iPAQs with a camera and a graphical overlay of kitchen furniture. I was not sure when the first AR app on the iPhone came out... but AR has only made it into the mainstream awareness during the past year.

I will keep my eyes open for the article in the TES.