Animation Test: Scope from Pehr Hovey on Vimeo.

Animation Test: Composite from Pehr Hovey on Vimeo.

Animation Test: Circles from Pehr Hovey on Vimeo.

Animation Test: Random from Pehr Hovey on Vimeo.
My firsts tests at rendering each frame of the animation to a full-resolution PNG file and assembling them into a video. While the animation runs at 30-60 frames per second on my new computer, saving each frame to disk drops the framerate down to less than 10. It is thus harder to get a concept for how long the finished animation will be which is an issue since making these is a live performance and not a static rendering of pre-conceived content. I have added debugging printouts for each second (30 frames) of animation to help in timing.

I am currently using Sony Vegas 7 to do the assembling and rendering and am experimenting with compression settings to get a video that is not too large but not too affected by compression artifacts.

Many of the Codecs are optimized for real-world video that has many shades of color in it. Because my animations are mostly solid colors these Codecs tend to add extra noise and artifacts that take away from the final product.

More videos to come…

Today we had our final presentations for the Multimedia Sensors class. The final sensor setup I used was my 4 sliding potentiometers and 8 push buttons (4 on/off and 4 momentary). The buttons are from old Nintendo game consoles and were really cheap at the electronics thrift store.

I statically mapped each sensor to a set of actions / parameters to control but I intend to make a run-time assignment system so I can change what each sensor does on the fly.

I plan to work on this in future quarters to add many new features including audio-reaction and webcam integration.

The current program is about 1,600 lines of Java code between the main animation program (1,200) and the separate Sensor-reading thread (400).

Below are some pictures from the final animation as well as more construction pictures. An online-applet version will be forthcoming.

Today I started constructing the physical sensors that will control these visualizations. I so far have some sliding potentiometers to control continuous parameters (speeds, quantities, etc) and push buttons to control boolean flags that enable or disable various modes and extra features for the animations.

I will be adding rotary knobs as well as a distance sensor to react to proximity. Time-allowing I will also integrate my webcam to have the colors in the animation influenced by the colors of the environment or what the user is wearing.

The sensors are attached to my Arduino which reads the values and sends them over Serial via USB to my laptop. My animation program reads and reports these values. I programmed the sensor code to run in a separate thread to avoid slowing down the animation window while reading and reacting to the sensors.

Below are pics of the sliders as well as more recent screenshots of the animations.

Click each image twice to see the full resolution.

The following are some screenshots of visualizations I have been making in processing as part of my MAT594O Sensors class.

I am creating animations for the screen that will be controlled using physical real-world sensors. I am structuring it as a set of discrete visualizations that will be faded between. Sensors (and keyboard) will control which visualization is shown as well as intrinsic system parameters that will change how each visualization looks.

I am using Processing.org for the visualization part of this project.