Clock and counter display

For a small weekend project we're working on a display for in our office. We use a couple of big 7-segmented LEDs we bought at farnell. Tim was so nice to make the wooden frame for us! Thanks a lot Tim. Together with Martin we'll fix the hardware this weekend. We're going to create our first custom made PCB as well! Then maybe, when we've some time left, I'll try and create our first Womby produced project, which will be a great test case.

18 June 2010

Screenshots from Breda Graphic Design Festival

Forgot to post a couple of screenshots from the application I created at the Graphic Design Festival Breda during the openFrameworks Lab. As I've mentioned before... it was a great week, meeting lots of nice and enthusiastic people working at the field of code and art!

8 June 2010

Curles with openFrameworks

After reading a paper on Physically based animation of sea anemones in Real-Time, I had a math++ moment. I can tell you that I'm not very fond of the way math has been taught to me and well.. actually everyone else I know. Math is teached abstract, though also very practical, but always taught in a theoretical way. I've always wondered why institutions arent trying to find other ways to teach about math. I image a math teacher, not only explaining the theoretical and practical parts, but relates math to something visual. Visual-information is much more suited for learning than just plain abstract theoretical information... at least it is for me but I'm sure others can back me up on this one.

About my "Math++" moment... the sea anemones paper talks about the locality of a change. What's that, I hear you say. Imagine a grass stalk (stalk A) with a tiny curle at the very end of the stalk. Imagine another stalk (stalk B) where the curle starts at the root and finishes at the tip. You can say that the curliness of the the stalk A is more local than the one of stalk B. The nice thing is that you can use the C++/math function pow(base, exponent) to define this "localness".

In the images below you can see a stem which uses around 40 separate segments. Each segment gets an index value and the more towards the tip of the stalk the higher this index value gets. We use the index number of a segment for the base component of pow(base,component) to specify the position/range of the specific segment in relation to the whole stem. So the base value changes from 0.1 to 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, etc... but the component stays the same which results in the images below!

Read more for the some C++ code that I use to create the stem.

27 May 2010

openFrameworks workshop at SETUP Utrecht

Today we had a super nice workshop / freakday on openFrameworks at SETUP in Utrecht with lots of nice people! I've been researching different solutions to draw stems which curle in and out based on a external force. I want to add some extra visuals and create a PDF from the visual output using the ofxCairo addon.

Some green...

And with some fishes!

Read more to see some of the posts we did on piratepad

23 May 2010

openFrameworks workshop at SETUP Utrecht (photos)

23 May 2010

Touch table: mounting the lasers

This week Tim and I worked an a solution to mount the lasers onto the touch table which improves the fine-tuning. When using infra red lasers for a touch table it's extremely important to position the lasers in such a way that the beam is solid and just a little bit above the surface. Tim created a 3D model of the mount for the lasers using some bright solutions to fine tune the position vertically and horizontally. Next weeks we will work on a couple of prototypes for these mounts.

22 May 2010

OpenFrameworks LAB @ Graphic Design Festival Breda

Wow.... last two weeks have been amazing! Last week Martin and I went to the OF-Lab in Breda. The OF-Lab was a workshop given by Zachery Lieberman and Todd Vanderlin, both inspiring creative-code researchers/artist. During this week we generated posters using code... with the awesome openFrameworks library. I played around with a springy mesh to which I applied a texture. We were coding around 10 hours a day! Had a great laugh with Tim Olden and Dirk van Oosterbosch.. I hope there will be something like this OF-Lab again soon!

Last Sunday I came back from the OF-lab and went to another workshop at Philips Lighting on Monday and Tuesday for which we are doing a project. We had a room in the fantastic Art Hotel just next the Philips building. They toilet and bath-tub were... well enormous.. like a swimming pool :). From Wednesday until today (Sunday) Martin and I have been working on our new office (see the other post for some pictures), which is gonna be an amazing place!

15 May 2010

New office space for Apollo

Last week we signed the contract for our new office in Amsterdam! It's an amazing place on the first floor, next to the water on a quite road! We've been repainting everything. Today we painted the floor and our new logo onto the wall. We're looking for one/two other persons who want to share the space as we do have another room for rent!

15 May 2010

Barbarian Group: Cinder

Once in a while something big happens for creative coders.Way back we got Processing, then not so long ago we got the amazing openFrameworks (of which I'm a huge fan!) and yesterday we got Cinder, another beautiful c++, creative coding library.

The only comparable library is openFrameworks and it seems that Cinder aims at programmers with a bit more knowledge about openGL and C++. Event handling seems similar, the general application flow is similar to openFrameworks (prepareSettings() → setup(), draw() → draw(), update() → update(), etc..). Though I notice one big difference; when I look at the Cinder code I see lots of direct openGL calls which one does not see in openFrameworks very often (at least not directly). Personally I like Cinders approach, though this is probably because I've been using openGL calls directly instead of openFrameworks wrapper functions (ofCircle/ofLine, etc..) as I needed to learn openGL.

The examples (46) which are shipped with Cinder are amazing! Some of these examples have been created by Robert Hodgins which are beautiful and it's nice to peek around in his code and learn from the "master". There are many many more examples with some not-so-basic examples like shaders, voronoi, bump mapping, etc.. which are definitely worth checking out.

So if you're into creative coding make sure you download this library and give it a try!

Here are some screenshots of the example applications

29 April 2010

Touchy Remix

Last Friday Martin and I went to the Bright Night at Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam to see the touchy remix. The touchy remix is a touch table with with a fiber case. As we're working on a prototype touch table ourselves, I thought it was a good idea to see how the touchy remix looks and feels like. I've to say they Touchy looks nice! The casing is made of fiber kind of plastic which feels just nice. One of the benefits of this touch table is that one can use the touchy as a "real" desk, as in, you can put chairs underneath it. I think the table is not high enough to use it as a regular desk, so you would probably use it as a standard touch table. The responsiveness of the table is.... not good. I was dragging a picture around which suddenly jumped across the screen to the hand of someone else who stood on the other side of the table. I've not yet played around with optimizing blob-tracking, as this is what the touch table software does, but responsiveness would be my major concern. Maybe this is as good as it gets, which is not a problem when you don't sell these tables for a price around € 19.000, yes.. that's correct. The Touchy is highly overpriced. For that amount of money one wants to get a 100% working table. Not to mention the minor details in the design like the fans where you see the wires hanging around. The Touchy is the first (public) release so they will probably need some time to work on these details. Still, the Touchy is one of the nicest touch tables I've seen so far!

26 April 2010