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.
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