School is out so I have a bit more time on my hands now. I've been slacking in my own field as my time has been consumed by random mexican studies and other stuff. To make up for that I started experimenting with Equalizer, and today I managed to get a simple OpenGL-thing rolling.

See the video. It's dead simple and currently running on my Asus eee 1000HE (hence the slowness!), but it could easily be running on 4 separate computers connected to projectors (for instance).

Did my first Openframeworks sketch to show something during a 20min speech in Spanish that I gave about Medialab and TaiK in general. Took me around one day to make it and it was fun. Performance is much better than with processing (have done a similar thing w/ it too) and coding in C++ isn't such a big pain.

I've also started working more and more on WELP - the Wellbeing Profile service that is based on the Koulun hyvinvointiprofiili -concept we built years ago. We're currently looking for funding, but the current lack of it won't stop the development process..

Regarding México, I've taken salsa clases (just came back from one), continued other studies (art, history, politics and literature of Mexico ,and fotography). Today I'm off to a rock concert and next week is the 'puente' (=bridge=free days from school) due to the Méxican día de la independencia. We're going to Oaxaca. Can't wait!

I'm just taking the realtime visuals workshop here in TaiK and while playing around with Isadora (the app we're using) I started wondering if there's something for Gstreamer that does the same.

Live Cinema is basically about modifying video clips and effects in real time. A lot of these apps rely on sets of patches (another example would be puredata), which usually are a set of components relying and transforming the data before it ends up on the screen.

Gstreamer does this on the low-level. You can do these "patches" even directly through the command line. These include effects. I figured there has to be a gst app for these things, but there isn't.. the only one I found was Gstreamer Editor).

I think it would be cool to create one. This could also result in a lot of new effects available for gst. Perhaps one could use Clutter for the UI :).

So the Helsinki Medialab demoday came and went. It was great. Again a chance to see loads of mlabbers in one place and a variety of inspiring projects.

This time I had something to show as well. A simple idea based on photo compositions. In short I created scripts that downloaded all the mlabber photos from the net, analyzed them and created copies of them by composing all the images together. Then I created a Processing visualization using some of the OpenGL stuff it provides. Below is my image composed.

I also wanted to play around with electronics. Had a very hard time trying to think of a clever way of using them with this composition project and in the end didn't come up with one. Instead decided to create a simple UI to the visualization.

The end result was the magical milk can. Rotating the can controls the rotation of the images, moving your hand towards the bottom of the can makes the images fly faster. Simple, useless, confusing but a lot of fun to create and use.

Interface Design with Electronics is one of the best workshops Mlab offers. During a five day period students get a very hands-on experience with Basic stamp microcontrollers, various sensors and other electronic stuff. As always the workshop ends with a group project.

We did "Mothman", a strange audio-visual "installation" that reacts to ambient light and distance from viewer. We used Pure data, Processing and Basic Stamp with an ultrasound and light sensors. It was a lot of fun. Now I'm trying to come up with a new project idea that would involve sensors..

Get the code and graphics here. Sound excluded due to big size. For a glimpse see the presentation we held.

Long time since last post.. things have accumulated in such fashion that I'll have to do this one braindump.

First off if someone was wondering the weird Turkish pages that replaced all index-pages on sokkelo, the reason was that our webhosting provider was hacked by some Turkish script-kiddies (damn kids). Apparently they got in via a hole in their software (not a direct attack against sokkelo). Luckily only index-files needed replacing.

Secondly I've posted my first processing experiments here in case someone is interested. The sketch in question takes photos via the webcam and allows you to draw over them with a laser pointer (or mouse, if you can't project the image anywhere). Kinda works like the Graffiti Research Labs Laser Tag system except we don't do perspective correction and they don't do photos. The thing was used in our official MLAB-party that kicks off our studies in HelsinkiMediaLab. Our Flickr MLAB-feed is now cluttered with "art" created by people at the party (we had automatic flickr uploading through a python script).

Here's one work just as an example. Download the sketch here. Let's say it's licensed under GPL.