Dance and video... uh there's music in it, it's kinda ontopic...

[stryd_one]

I just saw this guy interviewed on TV here, on http://www.abc.net.au/tv/sundayarts/  You can download the ep if you like (hooray for teh interw3bz)

His name is Gideon Obarzanek, and he's a choreographer among other things apparently. having just done a bit of a search for him, I've actually heard of some of his work, seems he's getting the deserved cred, so dance fans will probably be reading this saying "sheesh, stryd, get with the times" ;)

Anyway aside from the glitchy music, the reason I think his work will interest a lot of you is the tech used. Fricken aaawesome stuff. Cop a couple of videos:

This the 'what it is'

Yeh, I told ya awesome.... Realtime and all.... and hey if that don't get ya, you're a poor excuse for a geek, but watch it anyway, cause dancers are hot to death. (joking! no flames, please!(they are though!)) Here's a bit more viewing minus the overdub;

He's far from a one-trick pony though, so if you like your dance, give him a google!

Edit sorry, fixed link!

[SLP]

That's really some awesome stuff.

I usually find such dancing (/ballet?) stuff boring as hell, but the lights give it all some really nice "organic" touch.

I'd like to see it working with more than one dancer and It would surely be cool to see the movements controll the music.

Thanks for posting, stryd

[cimo]

Broken link?

[cimo]

mmmm

dig this:

[JMS]

that kinda stuff should be pretty easy to throw together with Pure Data or any of the like programs... i myself experimented with a reactable setup.. but i never had a decent projector.  BUT! i just recently found a PERFECTLY WORKING!! sony vph-1252 RGB projector sitting out by the trash in front of someones house down the road! of course i dragged it home and set it up!  which means i gotta start playing with the reactable stuff again ;)

[TheAncientOne]

Electronic music and modern dance have a long common history: Alvin Nikolais was the first purchaser of a Moog synthesiser. I think seeing  TV program about his work was one of the other reasons for my interest in the subject.

[Therezin]

i myself experimented with a reactable setup..

Do you have a link for how you got the software set up? I found a ton of literature online about how they did the hardware side of things, but the actual "This is what you need" stuff i couldn't find anywhere...

[cimo]

no link but

-infrared camera

-high definition camera

-infrared led array, probably you need around 10W or more

-high definition projector

-movement tracking patch (you can find one in the pure data s example), this will use the IR camera to track the movement of the bodies

-with the gem object you can create shapes and manipulate them, as well as capture images from the camera and manipulate them

-pretty danish dancers (optional, you can throw in your cat)

[cimo]

Well i was digging a bit more in depth cause me and a friend are going to work on similar project.

A wiimote will do a nice job for object tracking at 100Hz, and the capacity of tracking up to 4 blobs simultaneously will give you the possibility of tracking the rotation of a body/object for example you could track hands and feet.

With a couple of these

http://cgi.ebay.de/3W-Infrared-IR-LED-Bulb-for-Torch-Sony-Nightshot-NEW_W0QQitemZ360131496892QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_77?hash=item360131496892&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=72%3A1229|66%3A2|65%3A12|39%3A1|240%3A1318

you would have enough for a room

Since we get rid of the tracking via normal camera, a rather cheap camera could be used to get images of the bodies to be reproduced and manipulated, i wonder now what could happen because of the feedback loop created by the camera and the projector, i guess that the manipulation of the image should be enough to avoid unwanted artifacts.Any idea?

Simone

[JMS]

Do you have a link for how you got the software set up? I found a ton of literature online about how they did the hardware side of things, but the actual "This is what you need" stuff i couldn't find anywhere...

cimo was right on with his post.. but this is what i used to get my experiments going...

-- cheap-a$$ dumspter dive find webcam pointed at the top of my desk from the ceiling

-- reactivision

-- printed the fiducials on paper and taped them to the top of c batteries.

-- Pure Data - with gem libraries installed

-- write your own patches  for PD...  maybe start with the "OSC Recieve" example patches...

i couldn't find any ready made patches when i was messing around with it, there may be some and better softwares to do it with nowadays.  Since then i had a serious HD crash and lost my patches before i could get them all up on the PureData wiki.  it was nothing hardcore though about programming it.. just a lot of steps and if you don't have a second computer to do the audio generation then you may experience some hardcore lagging.

performance with the cheapo webcam is not so good, best framerate you can get is 30 fps (or 29.97)

;)

[cimo]

yep i ve used the reactivision setup with Pure Data. There is a theremin patch somewhere inside the source code.

I don t think that a normal camera is the way to go as long as you don t want to spend hundreds of euro in a pro-camera.

The wiimote camera has an in-built hardware blob tracker (up to 4 blobs) refreshing at 100Hz, what i can t really understand is how to deal with camera/projector, i think i need to dig some GEM patches