20071023

ergonomics and digital photography

this week's assignment was ergonomics. The human experience is described by perceiving and evaluating change. Relationships, differences between one sensory perception and the next. I have been interested in playing with the idea of building a space where change is incorporated into the process of making. A more human, ergonomic approach to innovation, maybe... The core of this idea came from a past ICM project. I became interested in the relationship between the viewer and and the screen. And how and why you could take a static 2d image, and by extending lines from it into space (locked to your mouse)...you could create a focal point. Just this slight amount of extra information, you could perceive an entire 180degree perspective on a 2d plane I then started to think about what other information would you need to give a 2d object 360degrees of dimension. From there I built a cylinder that would read in a 2d image, and map the pixels to the surface of the cylinder. my 2d image input was video. Then I made the object on screen dynamic according to the light that was coming in from the video camera. So the video image would not only map to the 3d cylinder but from there onto some other position in space. At this point though, the image was still a video of me, my hands and what ever was present in front of the camera at that moment. This was cool for a second, because I had achieved my initial programming goal. However, it got boring really quickly, and I got really sad that I had made something very uninteresting. I spoke to my classmate...(and krony) Alex about my work. He pretty much affirmed that nothing about this was ergonomic, and that making an image of yourself more 3d on screen is not interesting, but he encouraged me not to get frustrated and to keep plugging away. So I kept at it, and thought about what I was doing, and what I liked and disliked about it. I played around with my code, experimented a bit and started to realize that the most interesting part about this was the aliveness of the object on screen as something that responded, adapted form immediately to my physical environment. I began to ignore the projected video, and focus on the form. From here I went back to the theme of ergonomics. I became interested in the idea of how the physical environment could interact something inside a computer. How the image on screen could respond to light, so immediately that by moving my hands in front of the camera, I could virtually sculpt what was on my screen. The object on screen suddenly felt very alive. I decided to instead map something else onto the form, instead of the video image, I decided used first, plain colour bitmaps, and then I started to project my digital photos onto the cylinder body. I continued to read in video, using those reads to transmit sensory information about my physical environment but only as a means to transform a digital image. I realized at this point that I was playing, sculpting, morphing my digital photos on screen. This started to become really fun. I played around with the code some more, played with the sensitivity to light, immediacy of response. I began to look through my digital photos on my computer, and choosing ones to put into my project. I would let them spin around the cylinder, interact with the camera, light...and once I had them in a position I found interesting I would take a screen shot. My favourites were the ones of faces. More specifically there was something cool about taking some of my pictures of people in rural china and sculpting them into this system. I am interested in playing more with this. figuring out how to export vector formats and maybe printing them. Here are some stills of the project. Here is source code...still needs to be commented...sorry...link

2 comments:

Elim said...

This is super 酷!

Taylor Levy said...

谢谢你呵呵!

 
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