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“Roy can’t communicate his obsession through conventional language and is forced into non-verbal communication. He has to make what he is thinking in order to express it.” A post looking at the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind and what it has to say about the value of making. Via Matt Jones.
Month: November 2009
A landscape generated from silence
So a few weeks ago, before he went surfing in Morocco, m’colleague Alper reported in an elaborate fashion on the project he and I did for the artist Sarah van Sonsbeeck. If you’re into data visualization and information design and you haven’t read it already, I encourage you to do so right now. I thought I’d post some additions and comments to Alper’s post here, going into some details related to working with 3D graphics in Processing, aesthetic considerations, and some other bits.
Dealing with 3D in Processing
As Alper writes, part of what we were doing involved generating a 3D landscape from the sound volume and location data Sarah had gathered. What I found was that working with 3D in Processing can be cumbersome, especially with regards to camera controls. I had a hard time getting a sense of the 3D model we were generating, since the camera controls I had at my disposal were limited and a hassle to use. I can imagine that if you do this kind of work a lot, you have a kind of container Processing sketch that has all the camera controls in place. I didn’t, so ultimately I decided to go to a tool that had all the camera controls already: Google SketchUp. I could have gone to a more professional tool such as 3ds Max or Maya, but SketchUp is freely available and suited me fine. Using Marius Watz’s unlekkerLib, I exported the geometry of our landscape to a DXF file and imported it to SketchUp and that was that.
Rendering
SketchUp is fine for manipulating and exploring a 3D model, but its rendering left something to be desired. It had been a while since I dabbled in 3D graphics (back in art school, making games) but I did recall that global illumination rendering yields pretty pictures. Sarah had told us from the outset that above everything else, it was important for the output of our exercise to be aesthetically pleasing. According to her, in the art world, beauty is paramount. So I did some Googling (as one does) and bumped into Sunflow. Karsten Schmidt had experimented with using Sunflow as a renderer directly from Processing, but this library turned out to be outdated for the current version of Processing. There is however, a Sunflow exporter for Sketchup. So I used Sketchup to set up the basics of the scene I wanted to render (camera angle and such) exported and then manually edited the resulting Sunflow file. The Sunflow wiki was a great help for understanding the anatomy of the Sunflow file format. In addition, this page, which shows examples of many shader settings, was very helpful when it came to figuring out the materials we ended up using. A snow-like material with a “sun sky” light, which makes the whole thing look like Antarctica, seemed like a good fit for the subject; silence.
Aesthetics
Alper rightly points out neither of us is a graphic designer. But this does not mean certain aesthetic considerations came into play during this project. For instance, towards the end, we had renderings of the landscape floating above an infinite plane, as if it’s an object of sorts. I felt this did not do justice to the concept we were pursuing, so we eventually decided to merge the mesh with the underlying plane. We achieved this by simply adding a band of average noise level around the datascape and regenerating it. Optically, thanks to the nice illumination in Sunflow, there is no border between the landscape and the plane that recedes to the horizon.
There’s more to be said about this project but I feel like wrapping up. A few final words with regards to the utility of this piece as data visualization then. I think from this perspective it is practically useless. As a piece of graphic art that provides a visceral sense of the data gathered by Sarah during her walks however, I think it is quite successful. Keep in mind she’s used this as part of another publication, where a set of annotations is overlaid on it.
I would also love to do an interactive version of this, allowing for free movement through the 3D space, as well as additional information layers with annotations by the artist and geographic context. Who knows, we might come around to this some time.
But for now, this is it: a picture of a landscape, generated from silence.
links for 2009-11-23
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A good example of artists creating a context for citizens to participate in the planning of urban space. In 2008, the Parfyme collective ran a ‘laboratory’ in Copenhagen harbor where people could come in and experiment with new uses for the area.
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James Bridle showed this as an example of awesomeness during his Playful ’09 talk. Being a big fan of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, this blew me away. 760 illustrations, one for each page in the book. Awesome indeed.
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“Fabel designs and produces participatory contexts for learning that are intended for change of attitude and behaviours. […] Fabel call these methods “wind tunnels”, environments to challenge the perception of the target group.” I was impressed with the talk Molly Ränge gave at Playful ’09. She showed many examples of projects done in Scandinavia that employ physical games to create a context for learning. A space I am very much interested in exploring further with Hubbub.
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Having worked on a silence level data visualization, this iPhone app that collects audio measurements from around the world and aggregates them is of some interest to me. It could be interesting to plug their data into our Processing sketch…
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1993 iPhones, 119717 throws, 48317.04 seconds of “hangtime”, and counting! Possibly the best game I have seen for the iPhone yet; one that requires players to be very brave (or have spare iPhones lying around). Picked this up at Playful ’09.
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“You should see what I see.” Indeed! I cannot begin to imagine what goes on inside Gondry’s head as he plans the whole video for the Chemical Brothers’ track ‘Star Guitar’ out on paper. The prototype clip made with shoes, oranges and cans is a wonderful example of fast and cheap iteration that I plan on using with students the next time we talk about the role of sketching in design. (Another Design by Fire 2009 left over, from Matt Jones’ talk.)
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Another snippet left over from DxF 2009. It is one thing to dream about a tree that can be suspended from a tree, but to make one is something completely else.
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This was still lying around in my notes from Design by Fire 2009. James and Cennyd showed this clip as part of their presentation on the parallels between interaction design and music. It just blew me away. Apparently there’s something universally human about this pentatonic scale.
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I can relate to the tweet from Tom Coates that Russel blogs about here. It’s (part of) the reason I’ve been having trouble getting back into blogging. I should just start throwing out fragments there again, I guess.
links for 2009-11-21
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A brief report of the fourth This happened – Utrecht (in Dutch) on the Rhinofly blog, who were also this event’s sponsor.
links for 2009-11-19
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A diary kept by Jordan Mechner while he was working on the original Prince of Persia. Fascinating stuff.
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Tinker.it’s Nick Weldin has wrote a book on Arduino. Having had the pleasure of being in a workshop lead by Nick I can say he’s a great teacher so I’m sure this book is worth your while. It looks real nice, too.
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Chris Heathcote’s opened his shop. He says: “I’m interested in how new technology changes people’s lives: mobiles, GPS, RFID, physical computing, and recently urban screens and interactive environments; and how this changes the way people interact with each other.” Check him out.
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An interesting interview that discusses Robinson’s latest book (about Galileo) ends with the following quote, which reminds me of William Gibson’s recent stance on science fiction: “If the world is a science fiction novel then what do you read? What can the literature do for you?”
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M’colleague Ianus Keller invited an old student of his (who happened to be the lead designer on Windows 7) for a Q&A session with design for interaction students at Delft University of Technology. This report (in Dutch) is a nice account of the kinds of questions students ask, and the way Stephan Hoefnagels thinks about user experience.
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A lot of tilt shift photography goodness. Via Mathijs.
links for 2009-11-18
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Another marketing driven flash mob. The polish on the Barcelona video makes me wonder how much of it’s “real”.
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“The Hidden Park is an iPhone adventure game created especially for young families. The application uses all the features of the iPhone to lead children into a fantasy world of trolls, fairies and tree genies — right in their local park!” One of the most imaginative uses of AR I’ve seen in a long time. The idea of being able to make your local park into a magical place is appealing.
links for 2009-11-12
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“Slave City is an up-to-date concentration camp made out of the latest technology and with the newest management insights. The highly profitable Slave City (7 billion euro net profit per year) is provided with all necessary facilities to make sure that the inhabitants (called “participants”) are as efficient as possible.” Ah, the joys of modeling. An interesting example of a model that has an agenda, as opposed to the sterile examples from the model railway community.
links for 2009-11-11
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Notes and slides of the talk that (for me at least) was the undisputed high point of Playful 2009. James restores the meaning of the term “awesome” to the rightful realm of the huge, the complex and ultimately, the unattainable.
links for 2009-11-06
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I’m not a huge fan of Tale of Tales’ work (I think the focus on artistic graphics, story and immersion are red herrings), but I commend them for providing a podium to Frank Lantz, whose ideas on the nature of games are in some ways completely opposite to theirs: “Immersive environments and real-time 3D are spectacular and revolutionary new ingredients, but I don’t see them taking over and replacing everything else. Because the everything else is also pretty spectacular: the beauty of non-linear dynamic systems, stylized social interaction, the alchemical transformation of violent impulse into articulate complexity, collaborative exploration of possibility spaces, madness and randomness dancing with logic and structure, these are the things that I love most about video games and they’re also at the heart of games in general.”
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The poster James and the guys at BUROPONY have created as part of the Dutch open government data initiative is now available for download. Content and presentation are both spot on.
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Kevin’s AR ghost hunting game has hit the App Store. Go check it out.
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Very interesting piece of kit.
links for 2009-11-05
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A Dutch company that develops tangible interactive toys for educational purposes. Their first product is TagTiles, a tablet that responds to play pieces.