I’ll post some further details of the work here soon. But for now:

I completed ‘Texturisr’ in 2005 as a nod to the then booming obsession with ‘Web 2.0′ and took advantage of the Flickr API. Flickr was then not owned by Yahoo. I was also interested in the public display of personal images. I have added a few other aspects to the project for this exhibition included a small element of natural language processing - my take on the ’sense detecting’ of the exhibition title.
Sense Detectives is Watermans’ latest collaboration with Thames Valley University’s Digital Arts department to explore sensor and search technologies through an innovative and participative working practice. Sense Detectives combines four different exhibits that will be on show at Watermans in late 2006 and early 2007.

Charlie Gere, author, historian of digital art and academic, has written the catalogue introduction for the Sense Detectives Exhibition: http://mercury.tvu.ac.uk/~richardc/kwomodo/sensedetectives3.php

Paul B Davis, of the BEIGE ensemble/collective, says of ‘Texturisr’:

“While Web 2.0 is a bit of a technical buzzword, as it’s underlying delivery technologies are no different than whatever you’d want to call what existed before, to me it represents a conceptual shift in thinking about network-based information. As pieces like texturisr demonstrate, the semantic web really takes shape when we stop thinking about the network as a broadcast medium and instead think of it as a medium for user-guided information interchange. Collaboration, communication, remixability…these are the operative words which describe our Web 2.0 interactions. These interactions are a sort of meta-level complement to current information infrastructure, and they have the potential to be equally comfortable at home, in public space or a gallery.”

Sense Detectives is Watermans’ latest collaboration with Thames Valley University’s Digital Arts department to explore sensor and search technologies through an innovative and participative working practice. Sense Detectives combines four different exhibits that will be on show at Watermans in late 2006 and early 2007.

A second version of my ‘tiger reflections patch’. Now with a simpler interface and Noise Industries ‘FXFactory’ ready!

The patch is simplifed and slightly more reliable than the previous version. The generated image can now rotate without producing artifacts. The gradient setup is now automated. Less control but simpler. I have done this to create a test composition that works in ‘FXFactory’ - which is very simple to use. It really unlocks another realm for Quartz Composer developers.

Link: http://www.noiseindustries.com/fxfactory/

(more…)

The patch does a simple thing of producing an ‘aquafied’ circle. I created this patch when I was exploring masks and how best to create a circle using the current Quartz Composer toolset. The patch contains some useful techniques working between pixels and Quartz Composer units. It is also an exercise in ‘pixel based positioning’. I am sure the visual effect can be improved upon, but I quite like the principle of instantly produced graphics using quartz composer. I followed several online tutorials for producing aqua styled graphics - then simplified the process. I reckon quite complex aqua graphics could be produced in this way, like widget graphical elements etc.

Some Issues

The accuracy of positioning of bottom gradient may need improving. Hence the ‘tweaks’
Better control over how the bottom gradient is generated. The rules seem to break down at smaller sizes. Fun though.

Download Link: iris_quartz_composer.zip
Some Notes

The patch is quite simple to use. For a recent digital puppetry project, I connected the iris radius to a the output of a midi foot pedal so I could create scene transitions in real time. More of that elsewhere.

The patch demonstrates a number of useful ideas: pixel to unit conversion, creating a circle (using the hole distort patch), masks and the ’source atop-in-out-wave-it-all-about’ patches.

Some Notes on Custom Patches, Hidden Patches and Core Image Units

My original patched originally used one of the hidden patches ‘CICheapBlur’ that you can enable by following instructions here.

See http://fdiv.net/2006/09/19/61-hidden-patches/

For the download here, I have replaced the ‘CICheapBlur’ patch with a gaussian blur - so there shouldn’t be errors if you do not have the ‘hidden’ patches activated. This effects performance slightly. With custom core image filters appearing in the QC patches pane, I am sure it is quite possible to distribute compositions that will not run on other people’s machines without the custom CI filter. There seem to be more useful custom patches appearing on the scene with a number of excellent ones from Boinx. I hope a useful installation mechanism can be constructed to distribute the pre-requiste elements for custom patches.

Link: http://www.boinx.com/chronicles/category/quartz-compositions/

I do not intend to post the full patch as it is very dependent on other media, the wii controller and the Behringer midi controller, but you can view the root of the composition in the image below. I have split some of the more useful elements up and will be sharing them in other posts. I attempted (and will develop further) the idea of having a separate ‘buses’ for scenes, effects and transitions - a little like the way (I think) quartonian (and other vj-ing tools) work.

Image (1.8mb large): Screenshot of Root of Performance Composition

The project used some of the following ideas:

• instant chroma-keying and garbage matting of a performers blue face and the compositing of a hybrid character with live mouth and controllable pre-recorded eyes into multiple scenes
• midi control
• nintendo wii remote control of a virtual character (this meant I had to write a custom cocoa application to host the open source darwiinremote.framework ‘)
• Quasi 3D (or 2-and-a-half-D) effects derived from 2D frames - I’ll post some movies of this.
• Depth of focus and pulling focus effects
• Dynamic real-time titles

Some Images and Commentary

A fuller walkthrough of the final images with a commentary can be found here:

Screenshots and Scene-by-Scene Descriptions Link: http://www.daisyrust.com/quartzcomposer/moocher/

Image (above): Prototype of the Garbage Matte and Chroma-Keying Patch

Download Link: garbage_matte_bluescreen_demo_002.qtz.zip

This demo patch makes uses of Sam Kass’s excellent core image kernels available here:

Link: http://www.samkass.com/blog/

Images (above): Behringer BCF2000 MIDI controller controls scene sequencing and properties of various screen objects and parameters in real time

Image: Real-time Mouth / Recorded (controllable) Eyes Composited into an Image in Real-Time

Full credit and copyright acknowledgment to the Fleischer Brothers Estate for frame grabs and stylistic inspiration.

Download Link: movie_thumbnail_viewer_001.qtz.zip

It works in principle but there are a number of issues I’ll go into in a moment. It is an early version of an idea that could produce instant time-lines, retrospective after-the-fact storyboards, onion skinning and other video frame manipulations. I use it to visualize the flow and movement of time-based imagery and to produce illustrations for lectures. It is the kind of process that makes Quartz Composer a pleasure to use. To produce such a layout in Photoshop would take a good deal of preparation and layout work. I love the grid layout and the visual effects produced by this patch - as images in their own right.

Basic Operation

You set the path to a quicktime movie.
Make some basic choices about number of frames per row, number of rows (you need to enable / disable each row as needed)
Set the time interval / frame shift to jump on each row.

Image (above): Frames demonstrating early pioneering rotoscoping from Dave Fleischer’s “Snow White” (1933) with Betty Boop and Cab Calloway (full copyright acknowledged).

Image (above): Sequences from Bill Plympton’s “Your Face” (1987) (full copyright acknowledged)

Some Issues

Here are some of the important issues that need to be improved:

• Performance.

The patch runs slowly. I am sure you could do a similar thing programmatically with QTKit that would be much faster in the generation of the rows / thumbnails. I may even have a bug / design flaw where each row gets iterated more than once.

• Manual Tweaking

It is always a design goal for me to have no manual tweaking necessary, for a composition to do it’s work with the minimum amount of set-up. This patch needs more work in this regard.

• QC Bug - Some codecs produce unexpected results [bug submitted]

It seems some codecs (I forget which from my tests - I mentioned it on the qc-dev list) produce unexpected results. i.e. only two different thumbnails are generated and they then alternate across the sequence. Some sizing / aspect ratio issues of the thumbnails when the viewer is resized

I have fixed this issue on other similar patches I have made - but have yet to implement the fix here. This patch would benefit a rigorous going over. I’d love to hear from anyone who finds it useful.

Additional Details

Images (above): the optional ‘info’ panel and math patch. This part of the composition is interesting and the maths contained there-in could for the basis for a future improved implementation.

Image (above): The basic macro with most of the important published ports

QCWii is an application that lets a user connect a Nintendo Wii Remote to the mac and control a simple teapot.

It is a proof of concept for a digital puppet controller. The final project controls a face - where the mouth is real-time video and the eyes a pre-recorded video loops that can be controlled from the wii remotes buttons. Please see the following website for more details and the project write up.

Link: http://ellington.tvu.ac.uk/ma/computer-arts-major-project/

The source code demonstrates the following:

• how the darwiin-remote framework can be used to control a 3D model in a simple Quartz Composer patch.
• how cocoa bindings work connecting UI elements, code and published keys from a quartz composer patch.
• a crude ‘full screen’ mechanism.

Many thanks to Jasen Jacobsen for advice on how to make the animation smooth and to Hiroaki for the ‘Darwiin-Remote’ framework and project.

Link: http://sourceforge.net/projects/darwiin-remote/

Usage

To connect to the Wii Remote: press button 1 and 2 on the wii remote so the lights flash, then click ‘Connect with wii remote’ on the preference pane:

To activate sensor tracking: click ‘Track Motion Sensors’ on the same preference pane.

That should be it. Most of the buttons on the Wii are connected to do something in the Quartz Composer composition - if only signal a connection to the patch.

• The cursor pad moves the object, left, right (x axis), forward and backwards (z axis).
• Buttons 1 and 2 rotates the object around the Y axis.
• + and - scale the object.

It is acknowledge that both scaling and translating on the Z axis is probably not as useful as moving up and down.

To exit full screen mode - press SHIFT - F on the keyboard.

Some Additional Information if you wish to edit the Quartz Composer Patch to do something other than move a teapot around

To find the QC composition:

ctrl-click on the QC-Wii application ‘view package contents’ and dig down to ‘resources’ that is where the QC patch - wii_to_qc.qtz - lives. You can (carefully) edit that composition to do something different other than trigger the text display and move the teapot… Just don’t change the name of any of the root level published port ‘keys’:

Image: The crucial published keys that bind the patch to the wii remote via the application. Do not change the published name of these - or the application will break
If you edit that composition, save it. Then when you re-launch the application, it will use the edited composition as it’s source.

This way you don’t need to use xcode or re-build the application.

The qc patch needs to run inside an application wrapper. The application handles all the blue-tooth connection wizardry provided by the wiiremote-framework, the calibration preferences etc and toggling full screen. So you can’t simply edit the composition and preview it using Quartz Composer itself and expect the WiiRemote to connect.

Ian Grant January, 2007

ian [dop ] grant [at ] mac [dop ] com

Here we go! I did this once then failed to remember how I did it - and I’m not surprised - because the functionality to attach a speech command to an application specific key-press can only be accessed by SPEAKING the command “Define a Keyboard Command” - highlighted below in the Speech Commands window. (more…)

Download link: quartz composer video matrix test files 001 - 003

Notes: These are patches in development and (except patch 001) need some tidying - the published parameters are slightly out of order on 002 and 003, but you should get the principle from patch 001.

I have been wanting a patch that does this for a while and these are really just a proof of concept and may not be the most elegant solution. There are some limitations.

Limitations
The number of X tiles (columns) can be determined interactively. Unfortunately at the moment, the number of Y tiles is fixed. If you wish to add a row you must edit the contents of the “3D Transformation” patch and add new copies of the highlighted patches (indicated below), edit that names of published keys, plumb them in (following the pattern of the others - at this and the parent level) and set the Y position of the new row. Pain. But okay if you know what size of matrix you need.

For convenience, there is an image source that switches between camera input, images and a couple of movies - you will need to remove my movies and add your own.

Development - motion detection / computer vision
I have an idea (maybe wrong) that a static matrix like this could be used as the starting point for a motion detection / camera vision thing. Imagine if you processed the video (desaturate, detect outlines for example or use the “flood fill” that appeared on the quartzcomposer-dev list recently) and had something like a kernel that could sample each cell in the matrix and output a value or a boolean dependent on the white / black balance. I don’t think the core image kernel in quartz composer can output anything other than an image - but a kernel possibly can when used in core image in a cocoa application. Interesting.

Download link: quartz composer video matrix test files 001 - 003

Step One: Get MagpieRSS here! Head to sourceforge and grab the latest copy of the excellent MagpieRSS.

Step Two: Read the docs. Quickstart: setup a directory on the webserver that looks a bit like this:

Set the permission of the “cache” directory to 777 - world writable. You may be able to get away with more restricted permissions.

Step Three: use the code below as a starting point for exploration. You can see the results of it here here

There are several lines you can comment/uncomment to see the object magpierss returns. The current example is set to return the results of a blogger feed. With some extra code one can detect the feed and provide summaries accordingly… that is to come.

< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">







< ?php
require_once('magpierss/rss_fetch.inc');
// the @ suppresses errors
// change the URL to the blog atom / rss feed. If the feed is not atom but RSS some of the item names will be different - one will need to check. The info is in the 'channel' array.

$rss = @fetch_rss( 'http://internetandnetworkart.blogspot.com/atom.xml' );
// $rss = @fetch_rss( 'http://ellington.tvu.ac.uk/dev/?feed=rss2' );

// dump the object to the screen to study the structure magpie returns
echo '
';
print_r($rss);
echo '';
// end dump

$channel = $rss->channel;
echo "Blog Title: ” .$channel[’title’];

//display links recent blog entries:

echo ”
Latest blog additions:\n”;

foreach ($rss->items as $item) {
   $href = $item[’link’];
   $title = $item[’title’];
   $author = $item[’author_name’];
   $created = $item[’created’];
   $content = $item[’atom_content’];

   echo ”
$title created by $author on $created

\n
   $content\n”;
}

echo “

“;

?>

The sample files can be downloaded here: magpierss_blog_scrape.zip