Charlotte Alexander

Smart Systems 2011

[charlotteabct]

Playing around with paper, carboard, tape and string to transform the form of different materials.

[theresakendrick]

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theresakendrick:

Mindmaps

These are two mindmaps illustrationg the range of ideas and processes we developed during this project. The conceptual ideas mindmap is a poster in our exhibition, and the process mindmap I used during our presentation.

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Code

Have been continuously opening up my code, trying to test it, check it and see how I can improve it. But there is nothing that I notice that needs improving. I am for once, satisfied. This is the last time I will post about the code. :D

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InsomniaX

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/22211/insomniax Useful App for disabling sleep when the Mac's lid is closed- going to be used for when we use our video glasses. The Mac will sit, closed, beneath the chair and rotate with it.

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Done and done.

The code is done. Complete. Don't need to touch it at all. It is commented and tidied. I am so amazed that this is not me finishing the code last minute at 2am on Wednesday morning. It is only Saturday afternoon, I really told myself this code was going to be harder than it was! Maybe Max MSP isn't as bad as I first thought... Maybe. The final touch was just a matter of getting a gate to open and close in the right moments to change the coordinates being sent to the lineto command, and the moveto command, depending on whether or not the colour was on the screen. The magnificence of the code is only going to be realised when the compass and the glasses are set up and the wearer is immersed. I'm so excited to test it on Monday!!

[charlotteabct]

Another video- yes. Figured out my reset- the lineto object was constantly updating, and this seemed to be stopping me from being able to reset the cylinder, so I needed to put in a switch so these numbers weren't being sent through after I reset, then added in a delay and added the cylinder and turned the lineto back on. Works like a charm, mostly. Sometimes the cylinder doesn't appear for some unknown reason, but if I hit enter again it usually comes right. I've also realised that the bigger the size of the texture being rendered to the cylinder the slower the programme updates so the line goes a bit wonky. Need to make sure the size of my image is acceptable. Also it slowed down when quicktime was screen recording- so hopefully if max is all that is running and nothing else it should be fine.

[charlotteabct]

As you can see I'm really getting there. I just have to tweak it a bit. Some things- like the fact that when i reset it, it resets the whole thing, and then I can't add in a cylinder after I've reset it ( as you can see in the end of the video.) I have to connect the lookat to the render after I have created the cylinder or it just doesn't appear- I'm not sure why exactly. Also it always starts with lines on the screen. And when the light goes out and then returns to the screen it joins the points where it left the screen and where it returned. However, to the most part I am thrilled that I am at this point on Friday night.. I took Sunday off work to work on this and I could in fact be done by tomorrow night with any luck!! I think I'll call it a night and try problem solve in the morning with fresh eyes. I think I've impressed my brother/ electrical engineering student.

[charlotteabct]

THINK I'M ALMOST THERE.

After a long confused day I think I finally have make some progress. I realised that I had to turn the line by adding more degrees. The camera was following the line so that the coordinate the line was moving to was always in the middle. If i moved the line to the left edge of the screen it was telling me that it was moving -0.698 radians... and the other way it was moving +0.698 radians. So the numbers coming from the x I need to scale between -0.698 and +0.698 and then add this number to the radians that the compass is receiving before it goes through the poltocar object so that the x and y are proportional and still on the perimeter of the circle. The y coming from the color track however just needed to be scaled to between -40 and 40 and fed straight through to the pack ready to send to the lineto's z coordinate. (The cylinder is 80 units high) I was about to do some serious maths and try and figure out myself how to scale the numbers, but luckily for me I discovered that there is in fact a Max object that does this for me. Yay for max. Now I just need to figure out where in the code I add this all to...

[charlotteabct]

Progress

Have just sorted out how to get the camera to follow line as it goes in its circle... Now just need to figure out how to change this line with the x,y coordinates I'm getting from the webcam color track. So far I've figured that I need to change the x and z axis by figuring out how far to the left and right the x goes and convert this to radians and add this on top of the compass radians. I then have to figure out to add all these coordinates into the original code- sadly I didn't comment or document the color tracking code too well as I developing it with the lineto, and moveto so now I'm going to have to go back and look at it all a bit again. The y should be straight forward- I need to have the line moving so its feeding in coordinates that place it at the bottom left hand side of the screen so I can add the x, and y coordinates on top of this. I am really bad at explaining this- and still not 100% sure how I'm going to do this, but I've come this far and I have the whole weekend to work on this so I WILL be done by Monday. On another note, I have made my website live- http://creativetechnologies.ac.nz/BCT/2010CLASS/c_alexander/charlottealexander.html Sadly the gallery isn't working properly despite working fine when I test the code from both safari and firefox on Dreamweaver. Will look a bit further into fixing this when I have more time once my Studio coding is complete. But this is the general gist of my website. Enjoy.

[charlotteabct]

Have finally figured out how to smooth the difference between two numbers in max. This was an issue I had in my emerging practices coding when cross fading between two videos, but have figured out how I could have made a complicated and unattractive code so much easier!

[charlotteabct]

To Do-

Now that I have got the camera rotating inside the cylinder (the easy part!) I need to get the line drawing inside the cylinder! The trick here is going to be getting the line coordinates to move with the camera. I have figured out how to place the coordinates in a circle just inside the perimeter of the cylinder. The radius of the cylinder and the Radial Coordinate going into the poltocar object must be the same- or the Radial coordinate must be slightly smaller so that it sits inside the cylinder. However, when the camera moves and the line moves, they move in different places- the line is not moving in front of the camera. I also need to figure out how I'm going to get my x axis- coming in from the color tracking to move. And once I figure this all out I need to scale it all correctly and put it all together! Hoping to be mostly done by tomorrow night, so friday we can put it all together and touch up everything over the weekend. A lot of work!

[charlotteabct]

Have figured out how to get the best quality image- needed to add the dim attributes in order for the image to not be pixelated. Have made a panorama of my back yard and played around with that, but thought it would be cool putting in a cooler panorama so got this one off the internet. The computer, arduino, and compass are sitting on an office chair and I'm swiveling it around. Looks better on screen- I think it is the quality of the screen capture that is jumpy but I will have to smooth the movement out slightly. The sensitivity of the compass also makes it difficult to keep it still. This will also mess with the line and make it jagged if I don't fix it.

[charlotteabct]

Excuse for my constant video and image posting, but I think documenting everything as I go might help the process a bit. If only I had documented a lot of the earlier code- looking at some of the previous code I don't even know what is going on anymore! But anyway- here's the compass moving an object... One issue I have at the moment is that it is somewhat jumpy even when its sitting on the desk, with no movement. I think this might have to do with the fact that it isn't tilt compensated. We will need to make sure that the compass is steady and not at all tilted. I can also change how often the arduino is sending the computer numbers, which might make it slightly less sensitive.

[charlotteabct]

CRACKED IT. I knew the solution was going to be easier than I was making it. And it was incredibly simple- I didn't even have to change the arduino code to accommodate for Max. I simple read the serial straight from the usb port with Max. Hoorah for simple solutions.

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[charlotteabct]

Reading Serial

I have been going the wrong way about this Arduino to Max thing- I have been thinking that I should be getting Max to be reading the pins from Arduino using libraries and such. But really I should just be using the serial port, and reading this from max with the serial object. I have done a quick test, so far I have the number coming in but it only comes in as separate digits so i will have to do a bit more work. But its finally looking bearable!

This is the code from arduino and how the number is being read in the serial port.

This is the Max Patch and how the number is being read in the Max Window.

[charlotteabct]

Here is the Serial Monitor- Monitoring the compass degrees as they are input- I'm trying to figure out how to send these numbers to Max MSP in order to use them to rotate the camera, and also rotate the lineto coordinates so that the line follows the users movement 360 degrees around.