Inspiration that has lead me to my idea so far

At the beginning of the course I was advised to attend workshops during the Tweak festival in Limerick and it was from here my inspiration first began. I attended two workshops, which were the Arduino workshop and the OpenFrameworks workshop. I found them very interesting and from the minute I stepped in the door ideas began flowing. These two workshops were my initial inspiration for my project, a discription of each can be found below.

The Arduino workshop

Arduino is an embedded system platform based on a simple open hardware design for a single-board microcontroller, with embedded I/O support and a standard programming language. (1) The first half of the Arduino workshop entailed an introduction to the microcontroller, which included example projects paying particular attention to physical computing and how humans express themselves physically. We looked at the integration of sensors, actuars and microcontrollers, and the possibilities of combining it with software such as Quartz composer a visual programming language which is part of the mac environment for processing and rendering graphical data, Processing which is free software used to program images animation and interactions and PureData a graphical programming language mainly used for the creation of music but also used for multimedia. The second part of the workshop entailed hands on work, where we programmed and implemented basic sensors and led lights and also looked at additional components from Spark Fun Electronics. The Arduino language is based on C/C++ and although I had not studied this language I implemented it with ease, due to my knowledge of Java which is also an object orientated programming language. The goal of the Arduino project is to make tools available that are accessible, low-cost, low capital investment, flexible and easy-to-use for artists and hobbyists, particularly those who might not otherwise have access to more sophisticated controllers that require more complicated tools.(2) For this reason I was intrigued as to how I could make use of the Arduino in future projects and I began researching current implementations in the area of Interactive Media, of which I will explain more further on.

The OpenFrameworks workshop

We began the workshop by being introduced to OpenFrameworks which is an open source C++ toolkit for creative coding. We looked at how and why it was developed and we were shown example projects, which have been undertaken using OpenFrameworks. I will look into a selection of these projects later in this report. We then downloaded code from the OF website and implemented it. This allowed us to see the ease of use of OF as an open source software and also tested my ability to adapt the code to our needs. I found myself running ahead of the brief, trying out new and interesting implementations. The second part of the workshop involved tracking the motion of a user using the imbedded camera on a mac book. We discussed the advances in the area of motion tracking / blob tracking and flow motion tracking and also the current limitations such as passing objects, etc. After the work shop we discussed possible projects and what we would like to try using OF.

Semester One Modules

Much of the software I had heard mentioned at the above workshops began to creep into the material I was reading and also began being implemented in class. For this reason, I gained the ability to expand my ideas across many domains, with the implementation and interaction of various software.

MAX/MSP and PureData

I took an elective in MIDI programming in semester one where we were introduced to MAX/MSP. Here we learnt the basics of the software and towards the end of the year undertook a project which allowed a more advanced learning of its possible use. For this project I choose to add additional features so as to gain experience with the program. I connected a Java patch to the patch which read in information which was used to adjust the display of the Quartz file. By integrating software I gained a better understanding of MAX/MSP. As of yet I have not used PD to a great extent, however, due to its similarity to MAX/MSP and the fact that it is open source I plan to use it to a greater extent in future work.

Quartz

I had heard Quartz mentioned during the workshops and also in the projects I had researched, however, had not worked with it myself. During the year for our assignment for MIDI and Programming we got the opportunity to work with Quartz. The assignment had not requested that we change the Quartz file but in order to understand the possibilities of the program I decided to adjust the patch for this assignment. I only touched on the functions of Quartz, but was inspired by what it was capable of doing.