Geeks, nukes and Barry White

Gemma spent last weekend geeking about with the brilliant Tom Burton and Ben Ede. I looked in on Sunday and found them surrounded by a mass of wires, sensors and newly programmed computer codes.

We ran a number of experiments. Everything worked bar the speech recognition.

Highlights of the weekend include Gemma pretending to be Barry White – uncanny!

Ben and Tom also revived a retro computer game and renamed it pitch pong:

This clip shows me triggering a nuclear explosion: Fortunately no one died during this experiment. Ben and Tom set this up by attaching a vibration sensor (piezo sensor) to a plastic bottle to measure vibrations when it hit the floor, triggering a video clip.

The physical sensors (vibration, flex) were used gesturally, incorporated into the performance (hands on hips, squeeze of hand to a fist). These might be incorporated into props as an integral, naturalistic part of the performance. Check out the glove trigger demo here:

Ben and Tom tried developing a programmed set of animations for text but this didn’t really allow much creative expression. But there is scope to develop some simple things for an application that might one day be used by all.

We used a pitch sensor to measure the pitch of live audio from a mic in order to trigger different images appearing and live feedback to alter font size. A volume sensor measured the amplitude of live audio from a mic, and we used this to trigger colour changes in text and to give live feedback altering the size of a piece of text. We used a button as a simple trigger for an action/animation on a piece of text

Watch the results here:

We also used a flex sensor to measure movement through the bending of the sensor, this gave us gave real time feedback to squeeze the size of words using your hand.

Ben and Tom also demonstrated Augmented Reality which places an image, text, 3d models within a live scene being fed from a camera and a marker indicates where something should be placed in the scene.

Gemma and I are back at mac in Birmingham for two weeks from 16th. We’ll be meeting local deaf people, running workshops and drumming up interest for our sharings on 25 and 26 August.

We’ve also got a PhD student onboard to help with programming over the next two months, which is fantastic news.