Archive for Projects

Smart Light Fields

August 6, 2009 Projects No comments

In addition to my involvement with the janus project for the Smart Light Sydney Festival, Joanne Jakovich and I were invited to collaborate with the NSW Department of Planning in an ambitious short term project during the festival.  The Department of Planning, along with Metropolis and D-City had the initiative to setup a small amount of resources for live event data tracking to be visualised for the duration of the festival.  Our first taste of this was in an email inviting us to join, with a specific aim towards generating realtime visual information using passive bluetooth tracking technology.I’d worked before with bluetooth tracking (in the 2008 UTS MDA masterclass Street as Platform), and I’d recently mastered the small monster of embedded MySQL insert queries so it felt quite appropriate to combine these two techniques in producing the visualisation.  In essence, the project asked for the following;

  1. Networked and located sensor nodes, tracking any visible devices nearby
  2. Central storage and collation,
  3. regular output of recent activity (the last 3 hours)
  4. visualisation of current activity and any paths of movement picked up by the sensors

The project had been allocated resources for sensor nodes, internet connections, software programming and some kind of visual output – in this case a projector.  Joanne managed to secure space in Customs House for the project to live, we arranged for the hardware and software combination to be installed and we were off the ground.  Ben Coorey (who had been a stellar student in the streetasplatform masterclass) came onboard to help us produce the visualisation in what ended up being a solid fortnight of work.  We went from concept through design and installation in just over two and a half weeks – not an insignificant feat!This project marked a first in many regards – it was the first time I’d worked in this capacity as an artist/designer with an external client, providing data surveillance and visualisation with aesthetics and information.  It was the first time I’d been given access to such a large data set, with potentially hundreds of thousands of visitors making their way to the SLSF precinct during the three weeks of festival activity.It happened to produce the first meaningful coalescence of a body of researchers Joanne and I had been working to pull together for the last 6 months – into the newly founded and launched anarchi.org.  We were now an organisation, able to pull in assistants and coders, all within the framework of a budgeted project, able to provide payment for their time.  This mightn’t seem like much of an achievement, but having worked with friends and colleagues for some time now (relying on generosity and willingness to help), it gave me a huge sense of pride in being able to offer a small sum of money to repay the hours of work put in.See Also;anarchi.orghttp://www.designbuildblog.com/2009/06/16/smart-light-fields/http://www.australiandesign.org.au/

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Janus

August 6, 2009 Projects One comment

As part of the Smart Light Sydney Festival, May 2009, Tom Barker (Professor of Design, Architecture and Innovation at UTS) and Hank Haeusler (Post-Doctoral Researcher at UTS) were commissioned to design and produce an interactive light sculpture to be exhibited on the light walk in the Rocks.  The piece conceived by Tom was called Janus and was pitched to the SLSF body as;

a giant floating human face in The Rocks..inspired by Janus, the Roman god with two faces, Barker and Haeusler’s installation is part of their ongoing research into complex and non-standard media facades.  Janus uses social media and new technologies to engage the public and influence its art. Photovoltaic cells are used to power the installation.

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The concept for the project was for the face sculpture to act as a mirror to the emotions of the city, as measured using the social media of mms, email and blog updates.  Toms’ earlier research had lead him to explore notions of the nature of facial expressions, our abilities to read and emote via the expressive capabilities of our faces.  With this in mind, it was an interesting experiment – is it possible to measure, collect and respond to accumulated faces – can you determine how happy a city is by watching its’ inhabitants facial expressions?I was invited to join the project as the software design component of the project, as Tom had seen some snippets of my interaction design work, as well as the work of my students in the computational environments class.  Naturally my first thought was to ask Frank Maguire if he was interested in joining me on the project – having worked with Frank on the Filtration Fields installation, his industrial design skills and generally snappy logical mind made him the perfect partner in crime..

The main crux of the project production from our end was in coding the algorithms which would translate images of faces into emotional readings (happy, sad, surprised, angry, fearful, disgusted and neutral), using these readings to trigger pre-recorded videos and controlling the video output to a non-rectilinear array of 192 pixels.Having worked frequently with camera images, facial emotions I was confident in that component of the programming, as with the data munging and video triggers.  However, having never used more than 4 LEDs to output recorded/live video, I couldn’t be so sure I could guarantee the display robustness – but with such a challenge, how could I say no to the project!After a few initial tests using a standard Arduino board in a non-stanard manner, I had managed to get ~20 LEDs lighting up with varying PWM values and we were off and running.  It turned out that the technique I had tested was naughtily using the arduinos’ onboard resources and was not a sustainable way of outputting video – so we had to look elsewhere.Options included using a daisy-chain of chips to multiply the output of an arduino duemillanove board, an arduino Mega and the phidgetLED 64.

With project timelines fairly short, we opted for the output mode we felt would be simplest/most trusted/idiot proof, which our experience told us would be the phidgetLED 64.  The phidget range of interface kits are bread and butter for the interactivation studio, as well as my computational environments students, as well as being able to claim a dedicated output of 64 PWM leds per board – which meant that we could order 3 and end up with spare LED output pins.The face itself could then be split up into separate sections to be addressed individually by each Phidget board – the forehead, center and chin regions containing around ~60 pixels each.  This allowed us to divide up the phidget output coding into regions and simplify a bit of our output matrixing.  I’d spent some time earlier working with maxduino to get greyscale LED output from pixelated video (a matrix of 6 x 1 pixels!), and luckily I was able to put that patch to work with a little bit of scaling, upgrading to the required resolution.The first issue we came to was the phidget method of sending single line matrices to the phidgetLED64 from top-left pixel to bottom-right pixel.  Since we were not working with a rectangular screen, each row of pixel data had to be offset from the starting 0 point, yet still line up with the neighbouring rows.

See Also;http://vividsydney.com/ http://www.smartlightsydney.com/artists/barker-and-haeusler http://www.timeoutsydney.com.au/aroundtown/smart-light-sydney–vivid-sydney.aspx

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Filtration Fields

August 6, 2009 Projects 2 comments

Recently Joanne and I were given the opportunity to exhibit in the DAB Lab Research Gallery at UTS, in the Design, Architecture and Building faculty building, as an opportunity to refine and showcase our collective research into realtime responsive architectural environments.The filtration fields exhibition in the DAB Lab gallery was a realtime interactive installation using simple camera tracking to measure daily activity within the DAB courtyard.  The exhibition was as a prototype test for ideas on the overlap of surveillance information and participation in architecture by its’ inhabitants.  Our premise for the installation was that the architecture of the DAB Lab gallery and surrounding courtyard space would be given eyes and ears, a brain to consider and a mouth to speak its’ mind.  The exhibition space of filtration fields was, unlike all pieces held in the DAB Lab, not the space of the gallery itself but the outside world upon which it had a threshold.  The silent box would become an active element in the architecture of the courtyard, no longer only passively inviting people inside but actively seeking to make its opinions known.  The void space of the courtyard would act as a performance stage for the activities and life of the DAB, and the natural bookend to the void was an appropriately matching wall of glass facing the space of the gallery.

The DAB gallery sits nestled under the canopy of one side in the DAB courtyard, standing as a window into another world, a place of existence in the imagined mind of another.  All of our experiences in the DAB Lab gallery were of surprise and delight, the little gallery had observed us and prepared something appropriate to show.My initial thoughts for the piece revolved around an image I had imagined of the DAB Lab gallery space existing as a small part of a sensory system extending the fabric of the whole building – the glass wall fronting onto the courtyard was in fact the glass lens of a large and ever curious eye.  The rear wall of the gallery would be the retina upon which the useful information would be refracted and transferred for processing elsewhere.  Other senses of the building were to be placed in the surrounding architecture outside, remote senses (microphones as ears, light/temp/hum/vibration as skin) of a much larger organism.  Each of the senses would be dislocated but connected, each informing the other regarding the goings-on of people in the courtyard.As the project took shape, it became clear that the focus of the exhibition should not only be the ‘eye’ of the DAB, but rather the effort to interpret the overlay of many eyes, ears and other senses into information, all representing the happenings in the courtyard.  The focus of the exhibition is not the DAB Lab itself, but the affect it could have on the lives of people moving through the space in-between.  Each of the glass wall panels would form opposing viewpoints on the courtyard, illustrating different relationships between the viewer/participant and the data they created.  The concept of the DAB as being a semi-conscious entity gave us the notion of eyes (an overload of information, all visual and uninterpreted for meaning) and brains (filtered information, abstracted for patterns of activity).

More to come..

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Computational Environments'09

February 23, 2009 Projects No comments

Gearing up for the first week of class for Computational Environments, the Master of Architecture design studio Joanne Jakovich, Bert Bongers and I will be teaching at UTS.Last time round the studio culminated in the Skinform project, see below;From tomorrow onwards we will be launching into a new semester, complete with a new brief, renewed vigor and an even greater expectation.   We will be setting up a platform for the students to share and explain their work, so keep an eye out for that – I will post more details when they are at hand.Looking forward to an exciting, thought provoking and intensely productive semester!

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The Street as Platform

November 22, 2008 Projects One comment

The Street as platform – a street rendered in data.

November has been a busy month! Along with Anthony Burke, Dan Hill and Mitchell Whitelaw, I’ve been running an intensive masterclass studio in the Master of Digital Architecture program at UTS.  The masterclass is based on one of Dan’s earlier posts called The Street as Platform, in which the notion of the static street in contemporary urban planning and architecture is discussed as an anachronistic idea and one in dire need of reform.  The street as platform talks about the dynamically linked nature of the modern street, where mobile communication, ubiquitous computing and traditional number crunching merge as a new kind of informational street ecology that exists just outside of our normal consciousness.As students and teachers of architecture, it could well be said that the dynamism of the street in it’s inhabitation and occupation is implicitly known and explored, but never clearly articulated as a driver – in it’s own right – of architectural decision making regarding form/content.

With this in mind, we set out to investigate the lived inhabitation of the street in an attempt to visualise and understand the hidden seams of activity, an attempt to make the invisible visible.Along with Dan, Anthony and Mitchell, we had a selection of super keen students and a handful of sensor equipment with we set about taming the data beast of Harris St.  Our aim was to produce some meaningful information, based on corellated data sets gleaned and generated from our surrounds.  The students searched for data on Harris st from a number of sources relative to Harris St (google, flickr, youtube, newsrolls, blogs) and then used processing to scrape, munge and visualise the data.  Also included into the mix were a number of sensors we wired up to collect site specific data such as light/temperature/humidity/rainfall levels over the last week, Bluetooth devices in the vicinity, webcam images from the street as well as audio readings and a magnetic sensor.

All up the live data feeds were a bit of a mixed bag with plenty of teething problems, but over the next fortnight these issues will look to be sorted.The students presented their work on Friday to an invited panel including marcus trimble, andrew vande moere and kirsty beilharz, one of our new professors in Design at UTS.  The presentations went very well, showcasing some very good work and sparking much discussion amongst the invited guests.The students have diligently been updating a blog with images of the process workand sketch ideas throughout the last two weeks, which can be found at http://streetasplatform.wordpress.com.  The studio will be exhibiting some of the work at the upcoming UTS Architecture exhbition on the 4th December, so come see some of the live feeds being visualised on the night.

See also; http://offshorestudio.net/ http://cityofsound.com/ http://theteemingvoid.com/

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pixeltag

November 22, 2008 Projects No comments

pixelTag is an experimental working prototype for creating digital art using hand-held devices and radio signals.The current pixelTag prototype uses the Nintendo Wii remote controller, in conjunction with Osculator and Max/Msp.  The prototype generates pixel graphics in real time,  based on x/y/z motion information sent to Max by the Wii remote.  The prototype has the ability to incorporate up to 4 artists at the same time.pixeltag has been in existence for just over a week now and so far it’s generated a small amount of buzz.

Thanks to the DAB Lab opening night schedule (which happily coincides with the weekly experimentation playtime in the interactivation studio), I’ve had the opportunity to demo the project to a widely varying audience.  Last week at the Convergence exhibition opening I was able to test the project with none other than Charles Rice, Desley Luscumbe, Adrian Lahoud and Sam Spurr as my hapless guinea pigs.  Many others were also subjected to my user testing and the feedback was generally positive.  I’m excited to see that a project in such baby steps can take on a life such as this, allowing fantastic possibilities such as collaboration and further refinement.I’ve been posting videos of the project in action to vimeo, but in case you’re in lock-down mode, I’ll be looking to embed content directly into my posts rather than linking to 3rd party software.  We’ll see how things go, watch this space.pixeltag 081106 ft. Tony Curran from Jason McDermott on Vimeo.

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pixeltag playtime

November 6, 2008 Projects No comments

Here’s the latest update from the Real Perspective show at TAP Gallery.‘pixeltag’ (2008). from Jason McDermott on Vimeo.Wicked!

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Interface Edinburgh

November 6, 2008 Projects No comments

The interface only exists between a body and it’s environment.Come to this place and see that we are outsiders, foreigners in a new land‚ naive and blissfully innocent of this place.   We seek to make a connection, an understanding, to learn from the city by touch and by feel.  By striking, pulling and tearing.  Each time we impact, resonate and crash through the layers of a city’s resistance, we learn something more of its limit.  It is conversation, but not spoken.  This information is physical.In the space of the gallery, the interface folds back on itself.  The results of our exploration are projected onto canvas‚ but only when the canvas is activated by touch.  Curious onlookers (and the many other outsiders) do not passively observe but become involved in revealing the city’s unspoken surprises.  Strangers are offered the chance to play the city instrument.  We touch, scratch and pound the canvas in the gallery, we hammer and kick and make noise.   The interfacing is deemed a success!It is the same thesis that drives a child’s desire to test unseen boundaries, we want to know our (?) place and not by mere observation.  The interface always reveals itself informed, regardless of environment – it is both body and information in one. We touch, scratch and pound the surfaces, at all times looking for an answer.  Our in-situ interface is given over to new form or understanding.  The city and gallery converse via the active canvas and the information it holds. We interface with the city in as many ways imaginable.  We play the city’s instruments, be they playful, curious or sinister.We attack and wait for response.Interface: Edinburgh (2008) from Jason McDermott on Vimeo.

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pixeltag update

October 30, 2008 Projects No comments

The pixeltag project has progressed once again;* the interface has been amended slightly to allow for yaw input (not just roll) as the ‘x’ axis data,* the ‘cursor’ item has been implemented, allowing the user to see where they are about to draw prior to doing so,* The up/down ratios have been adjusted to allow for nicer wrist movement.Tony Curran came by the studio today to give the pixeltag a test drive – he seemed pleased with the current level of interaction and novelty of the system, but asked for the following things;* IR sensor location for the ‘z’ axis (depth into/off the screen)* different input sensors (such as any one of the many phidget interfaces)* tighter control over strokes* pressure sensitivity for subtle differences (computer intuition, perhaps?) between strokesthis last point is an interesting one, as it would allow for varying conditions to be created by the user’s own interaction with the system, rather than a simple closed system with a predefined output.  I have some ideas for the nunchuck that could work well with the wii as a dual mode interface (left/right hands doing different things..!)

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continuum exhibition

October 27, 2008 Projects No comments

The Chennai Free Information Zone project is exhibited as part of the Continuum: Tactics for Contingent Environments Exhibition in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  The Continuum exhibition is a collaboration between Anthony Burke of UTS DAB Architecture and David Burns of Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture.

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