This little application is a beautiful visualization of noise/ PPG data. PPG stands for Photoplethysmograph, which is a device that provides data about the volume of blood pulsing into tissue or an organ. The data is used to distort various vertexes of a sphere. The entire thing is smoothed and rendered beautifully apparently with some help from stuff on this site: http://machinesdontcare.wordpress.com/, which is super awesome. In addition, the user interface allows for the manipulation of the shaders and how quickly and at what magnitude the sphere distorts. I find this project interesting for two reasons: 1) it is a visualization of data (or noise as a test) that is not necessarily informative in a quantitative sense, but is still interesting aesthetically, and perhaps could be useful in a more qualitative fashion. 2) its making some beautiful blobs. I don’t know anything about this method of rendering, but it looks interesting and I want to learn.
This is an experiment using the Projector Camera Toolkit, an add on for openFrameworks. This library allows precise projector calibration. Shadow play involves two projectors, precisely aligned, and displaying inverse images. The result is a white screen that only displays something interesting in the shadow cast by blocking light from one of the projectors. Thus an animation, image, or whatever, is sort of encased in the shadow. I can imagine kids enjoying this. Especially if the setup detected what sort of shadow was being cast and updated the image accordingly.
All The Universe is Full of the Lives of Perfect Creatures
All the Universe is Full of the Lives of Perfect Creatures is a screen based piece where a 3-d model of an animal head is overlaid on the reflection of a persons face. I suspect this is done using a lcd screen and a two-way mirror. Using faceOSC, the animal head mirrors the motion and expression of a person. Apparently the animal sometimes makes its own expressions. The animals are supposed to range from the highly domesticated, like a dog, to the extremely feral, like a wolf. I am not entirely sure what the universe being full of the lives of perfect creatures has to do with overlaying those creatures on a persons face, but I think this an interesting project because the interaction seems entertaining and well-mapped and it is an elegant way of fiddling with the idea of identity and species. It would be awesome to do this with bizarre monsters, or animals like nematodes and naked mole rats, or even other people’s faces.