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Reading

The first article focus on an interesting question “what are we producing”, different needs, and how to deal with the differentiation between the process of production and usage of material. The second one is a representative idea of “little change save the world”, just change the google’s background to black would save lots of power, amazing! The third article related to the topic “materialism” and let me come up with some interesting examples too, but still need some time to get familiar with this part.

And as a quick development of the streetlight (unnoticed thing) if I get some solar devices and needn’t worry about the power, I come up with to install some pray wheel on the body of streetlight (to make the streetlight’s body part don’t totally disappear because the bulb draws too much attention).

The pray wheel on the streetlight needn’t use hand to make it move, but it could detect you and start to run automatically. When it is shinning in the sunshine, how beautiful they would be? Especially there lots of streetlights.

Sky message board

When we are looking at the sky upon this city through our mobile phone’s camera, what could we would we like to see? I asked some people “If you could write a short sentence in the sky and everyone living in newcastle could see it, what will you write? what the colour was it?” (Thanks Jamie and Michael’s advice, I’ve tried michael’s advice like Red Building, actually that part is really interesting, but I’m still suspect if I could do that – because I’m not sure the speed of the cellphone could deal with it and the control part, like how to build it also puzzled me , but thank you very much!)

Then what I got are:
1. Hello world! (Several answer like this came from a programer group…)
2. I wish XXX love me forever! (Pink)
3. I could defeat everything! (Golden)
4. I wish everyone seen this word could find their happiness. (Red, Big Smill)
5. Be humorous and relax, you could win~ (Red)
6. I love Newcastle!
7. Keep your head in the clouds. (Purple)
8. Keep calm and carry on. (Yellow)
9. Have a lovely day ! (Yellow)
10. I will be a star! (Orange)
11. Stay positive (Pink)
12. Peace! (White)
13. Olive! (White)
14. Love (Red)
15. Happy Mothers Day~ (Pink)
16. Love and Peace (Purple)
17. Love and Peace (Pink)
18. I wish it as sunny and warm today. (Yellow)
19. We are all under the same sky. (White)
20. The sky is beautiful every time. It doesn’t mattered is sunshine or rain. It’s something what I like. The Sky always makes me happy. I don’t think about my troubles, problems. When I am looking on the sky, I feel free and full relaxed.
21. I’m leaving you (Depends on the light)

Then I think the sky message board could have 2 function, the second one is based on the first one.

1. Send message for special people.
Scene:
One day, Marry received a message from her boyfriend, “Look at the sky over the city centre!”(it could be also the location of the sender)  She ran the app “Magic city”, used the camera of the phone to look at the sky, and found the big “I love you” made by the clouds floating on the sky, like this:

(The same with the original idea)

Also, their some pictures of skywriter, the effect would be similar.

(http://fiveprime.org/hivemind/Tags/skywriting/Interesting)

2. For everyone (Optional)
Scene:
One day, Pengfei is taking photo for him self alone, like this:

Isn’t it a little silly?
Now, we could do this:
1. The cellphone would judge if you are angry or smile (or just input the keywords, like “smile”, “angry”, or maybe “food”)
2. Based on the sky message board online data, we could get a photo like this~

Is it great?
This idea is similar to the danmaku video like this:
and the poster like this:

(To make it here: http://www.wordle.net/)

Also I got a interest point, it is likely when you are taking photos outside of a restaurant, the word cloud would be “Delicious!”"Swallow my tongue!” or “Peaceful”. From commercial point, it could also be developed.

Everything needed are a mobile phone and net access, I’m still working on how could the software system work, like:

1. Import the Google earth map (Use the 2D model or 3D model like what streetview use?)

2. Calibration (make the map and the view calibrated)

3. Send and Receive message. (based on Twitter or?)

4. (Optional) Use wordnet to adapt a simple classification method to make every message sorted by “happy” and “unhappy”, based on the facial expression recognized by cellphone (if possible) or the keywords imputed “smile” to the cellphone.

5. (Optional) How to deal with the color of the sentence, changed time by time based on the sunlight? still? simple animation? Transparent?

I have got 3 ways to use Kinect, 1 is based on libfreenect, 2 are based on OpenNI.

Libfreenect

Shiffman’s library:

http://www.shiffman.net/2010/11/14/kinect-and-processing/

OpenNI

1. Use processing wrapper

http://code.google.com/p/simple-openni/

2. Via OSC in processing (Max&MSP) to read the data produced by OpenNI

http://tohmjudson.com/?p=30

This method could makes OpenNI applied in many platform because OSC (Open Sound Control) is widely supported now.

Recently, some friends on the forum always ask questions about how to build the environment to use Kinect, so here I want to conclude some points.

Windows

As for windows, although there are lots of articles to describe it, there are still three points easily to be ignored but lots of problem caused them.

1.     OpenNI could only work well in 32-bit system until now.

2.     The sequence is important, first, OpenNI, second, KinectSensor (Driver), last, NITE. The versions must be matched.

3.     Don’t edit XML file using wordpad, it could arouse some problems related to the Unicode and UTF-8.

Most questions left could be tackled by reading the Guide in the folder “Documentation”.

Mac

http://kinecthesis.bakedmac.com/2011/01/11/installing-openni-kinect-drivers-and-nite-on-mac-os-x-10-6/

This article would guide you get the target step by step, The readme file of KinectSensor also introduced lots.

Problem maybe happened when we are installing Macports, after we complete the install work, we should also selfupdate it first, or it may notice you:

“Warning: No index(es) found! Have you synced your source indexes?

And the command “sudo port install libtool” could not run, this problem are aroused by the firewall (maybe belongs to the school), and we couldn’t use svn to do the update work. We could tackle it in this way:

https://trac.macports.org/wiki/howto/SyncingWithSVN

In the last step, we should edit the source.conf, I’m new in Mac, so I’m not sure is there any tools other than “vi” in Terminal could do it. Don’t worry, “vi” is complex (and great), but for our task, it’s quite easy. First, enter the “insert mode”(vi start in “control mode”, press S to enter “insert mode”), second, edit, last, Save and quit(press esc to quit insert mode and enter control mode, input “:wq” to save and quit, input “:q!” to quit without saving).

Last, as for me, the samples could not run just by clicking their icon, but input ”./filename” in Terminal to run.

Good Luck!

PS: In Terminal, when you input password, nothing would show you, even “*”, but don’t stop, just input and press enter.

Be careful when you rename your file or folder, because if there is a space followed the name, when you input the name (without the last space), the machine would never found it.

From this day, I would select some examples which I thought important and comment them.

1. Random and Color

I thought for most freshman as me, processing means use a lot of object to make the output as magnificent as possible, which means we should use some function to build them, to manage them and make them different. So let’s begin at “random” and “color”

P206 Processing – Shiffman Example 13-3: Probabilities

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCxfBMuG_hk[/youtube]

http://bluethen.com/wordpress/index.php/category/processing-app/page/2/

This blog give several very different examples to show us how to use the knowledge on math and physics to create something really gorgeous. I plan to learning what’s the thinking method in processing, what do I want? How could I get it? How to make the big project into small steps and how to structure it?

ASSIGN EX6A: Make a public spectacle, amplifying an unnoticed or overlooked aspect of urbanity. This can be brief, subtle or prolonged and brash, but must be documented in some way, and presented at our class. Do not break any known laws in fulfilling this assignment, or put yourself in physical danger of any kind.

As for this assignment, I’m interesting at the street light, it is not always unnoticed, but when will we notice it?

1. When the light is on in the night, and what we noticed is the light, but where is the lampstandard?

2. When we are nearly hit it.

3. In the night, all the lights are treated as a unity.

There are lots things like street light, because they are everywhere, it dismissed in our brain.

How could the style of the streetlight affect us?

What’s the meaning of the color of it?

If we give a different color of every 4 streetlights, what would happen?

Youngblood_ExpandedCinema_PartSix

“Shall we… use the new art as a vehicle for a new message and express the human longing which light has always symbolized, a longing for greater reality, a cosmic consciousness, a balance between the human entity and the great common denominator, the universal rhythmic flow?“
I like the way to describe art in the beginning of the article, “a balance between the human entity and the great common denominator”, it treat art as an “action” but not “something”, and it’s a direction to chase some secretes hint in a whole things’ two parts: individual (human entity) and the mass (great common denominator).

“Moreover, we find that all the arts and sciences have moved along an evolutionary path whose milestones are Form, Structure, and Place.” This sentence is a clue of this article – 3 keywords: “Form”, “Structure” and “Place” (did we have read this three words before? in the thinking class? Mirror?)

The followed paragraph tries to describe the relationship between science and the philosophy using the keyword “Form”, this topic is interesting and also how the world really is affect the answer of  ”how could we think” and “how should we live”?  Then it focus on the Intermedia art.

“Intermedia refers to the simultaneous use of various media to create a total environmental experience for the audience. Meaning is commun-i cated not by coding ideas into abstract literary language, but by creating an emotionally real experience through the use of audio- visual technology.” We already have “Place and Audience” and “intermedia art is trending toward that point at which all the phenomena of life on earth will constitute the artist’s palette“, and also the target “The new consciousness doesn’t want to dream its fantasies, it wants to live them.” But I’m still not understand why he said “Major internationalizing by artists is going to become very important, and so will the myth-making process.“

“Being an audience is necessary. A major factor in living in an overpopulated world is that we really cannot deal with each other directly. As the Japanese do, for example. They’ve spent thousands of years cultivating this idea that they’re there but they’re not there. Because they’ve been jammed together for a long time, they’ve learned how to do it.”  I agree with this phenomenon much, but still no totally agree with the reason the author gave.

The following part tells the development of the movie as what he said: “Movies are the ultimate illusionistic system.“. I’m still not familiar with the movie, the cinema, but what the cinema represented is really interesting.

Interaction as an Aesthetic Event (Manovich)

As for this passage, I want to give some keywords first:

“Aesthetization of information tools”

It’s a core of his theory.

The transformation from “efficiency and functionality” to “friendly, playful, pleasurable, aesthetically pleasing, expressive, fashionable, signifying culturalidentity, and designed for emotional satisfaction”. Which means, “the modernist design formula ‘form follows function’ came to be replaced by new formulas such as ‘form follows emotion’.”

An important part of this article is the idea “the interface should be invisible” was replaced by “interact with an interface” itself. Which tell us: we should not design the cellphone’s interface in the way design for a car – actually, the destinations are different and these two kind of interface should also be differentiated. “One is a physical interface such as buttons and the phone cover. The secondis a media interface: graphical icons, menus, and sounds.”

As for the following part, it focus on the latter one, described how some big brand developed their products, what this economy and why we should make it be “concentrated” but not “invisible”, “computer designer and theoristBrenda Laurel published a ground-breaking book Computers as Theatre in 1991.She called interface an expressive form and compared it with a theatrical performance.Using Aristotle’s Poetics as her model, she suggested that interaction should lead to’pleasurable enjoyment’.” It give us lots of interesting problem like what the interface should be like, but didn’t disclose this part much – actually, I still some kind disagree M’s point because I think not every interface should obey this rule, it changed, but the main reason should be the tools changed themselves (for human). So the key point is whether the interface should appeal the focus or be invisible, but how could it leads us to what we “want” to do.

I have two ideas about the project, they are some kind of similar because both of them based on a smartphone have gyroscope, accelerator, and a good ability to computing, but the first one is focus on Graphics and the second one focus Audio.

Let’s begin at the first one:

The Invisible “I love you”

One day, Marry received a message from her boyfriend, “Look at the sky over the city center!” She ran the app “Magic city”, used the camera of the phone to look at the sky, and found the big “I love you” made by the clouds floating on the sky, like this:

(Well, I know it’s “Merry Xmas!” )

The other day, on a celebration of Newcastle, Marry found in the 3D virtual space of Newcastle “Magic City”, a huge logo of Newcastle floating upon the city and the flowers dancing in the sky, like this:

(OK, I know, there is no flowers dancing. )

This idea is came from this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iikd_hucZbY

But what quite different is, the 3D virtual space of the city could not only used to navigate, even navigate, we could also use some icons in the sky to make it more gorgeous, like make the hundreds of icons floating like a pyramid, the highest one is the city’s logo, then some bigger one lower are some important place – like the nearest police station, then others… Even we could erect a huge monument like this:

An important point is, this idea may run faster then lots of augment reality programs on the cellphone, because:

1. It didn’t based on the analysis of the image, so the speed to build 3D models could be fast.

2.GPS’s an important disadvantage is it is not precisely enough, but our application is not used to navigate. After the first time the cellphone received the location information from GPS, it started to use gyroscope and compass to  computing the location of the virtual object, it could be faster than always driven by GPS(It is a little similar to Google’s Skymap) and because the virtual object of this app alway be hundreds meters tall or big, only several meters imprecision won’t affect the result heavily.

The Second Idea: The Invisible Bell

The city beside my hometown has a big bell, everyday the bell ringing to tell people the time for thousands of years (a little similar to Newcastle’s bell rings, but louder). So could it be like this:

One day, I wear a headphone, and clearly sound a huge bell ring came from the sky over the city center (like the bell hang on a cloud in the image). Even when I change some direction of my head, the sound always came from there.

To make this come true, we must assisted by 3D sound( headphone ), the Binaural Recording is the best way I have ever know, like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IXm6SuUigI

but actually, it’s still hard to build the model of auricle in computer, so we could also use this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqqiIR017SQ

Then if we add a gyroscope and a accelerator on the headphone, we could know how our head and the virtual sound source located in the virtual city. The data would be analysed by the smartphone and get a output to the headphone. Then, we could have a virtual huge bell tower in the city center.

Plus, the GPS+Radio is also a great point, some people said, Radio is a soul of a city, different with the TV, Radio is closely related to the city we lived. What could it be combined with GPS? Maybe this street select this song? The other street sell some old things broadcast another style of music? It could strengthen the atmosphere of the street much.

Also, because the source of the sound is far away, the imprecision could be some kind ignored. Furthermore, as the city is also 3D itself ( some cities already have a 3D model of themselves ), based on the texture, even the sound effect like how sounds broadcast in the environment has lots of building or forest could also be simulated.

At last, the city’s virtual space is an important topic today, as the more convenient head-wear display devices’ improvement, we would get rid of the camera on the smartphone’s restriction, at that time, how the virtual city based on the reality would looks like? What is this city’s “identity”? Would be more and more significant.

PS: I still have no experience on programming on sound, so I plan to do some work on the first idea first. My cellphone is HTC G1 (Android) and the coding work would be based on the GPS , gyroscope and accelerator methods which have already included in the SDK published by google.

This is EX4A, I walked in Leaze Park at the night, around 23:30. Quite quiet, some times there are some ducks been waked by me. There are also some young guys singing in a remote place.

The latter one is EX4B in the same path in Leaze Park, but in the morning around 9:30. I took a little spanner to kick objects, I didn’t do this yesterday because I’m afraid to be arrested by policeman.

[soundcloud width="100%" height="136" params="" url="http://api.soundcloud.com/playlists/615455"]

The Map link is here:

View Sound Walk in Leaze Park in a larger map