Check out this brilliant quartz composition by Daniele Ciabattoni using kineme's opencv plugin and my quad warp glsl patch. Ace!

dynamic surface projection... from Daniele Ciabattoni on Vimeo.

My Secret Heart is a music and film installation & performance commissioned by Streetwise Opera with music composed by Mira Calix. Working with video artists Flat-e, we created visuals for the 48 minute performance, as well as versions for an installation and short film.

More information can be found at http://www.memo.tv/projects/my_secret_heart.

The visuals were created primarily with custom software written with C++/openFrameworks, with some Quartz Composer elements, rendered AfterEffects sequences and live action footage. The custom C++ app is audio-reactive and user-interactive, allowing the visuals to be 'performed' live with full control over the behaviour of the virtual inhabitants of the cylindrical aquarium-like rig.

Excerpts from the visuals (I recommend the HD version at http://vimeo.com/2131989):

More stills and photos from the piece and performance can be seen at www.flickr.com/photos/tags/mysecretheart

Stills from the piece:
(the short-wide strip along the bottom of the images is the full width of the visuals wrapped around the 16m circumference of the cylinder, while the top is closeup detail)

The Switzerland preview showings of My Secret Heart have come and gone and now we are left with but a pleasant memory, and the images below - and high hopes for the premiere at the Royal Festival Hall and subsequent galleries & festivals.

More images, videos and info can be found at the official site www.mysecretheart.co.uk and
memo.tv/projects/my_secret_heart.

Photos from Lucerne, Switzerland:

This is a demo of projection mapping with VDMX & Quartz Composer inspired by deepvisual's tutorial of doing it in modul8 (uk.youtube.com/watch?v=2bRfdn9lNO8).

VDMX unfortunately doesn't have this feature built-in, but fortunately has beautiful integration with Quartz Composer - allowing me to build a quad warper in QC using a GLSL vertex shader, which should be super fast.

(Watch the HD version at http://vimeo.com/2076022).

Also, around the 4:30 mark you'll see me masking the video on the box in the back. This is also using a custom Quartz Composition which allows 4 point mask creation. Usage is almost identical to the QuadWarper, but instead of warping the image it just applies a mask, or you can invert the mask and it cuts a chunk out. You could do the same by creating new layers, grouping, using as a layer mask etc. but its a a bit more hassle I think. Using the QuadMask is a lot quicker and you can put multiple QuadMasks on the same layer to draw more complex masks.

** Update 27/10/08 - Version 1.1 **

Added loop mode configurable from the preferences.plist

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MSAQTPlayer is a Mega Super Awesome (& mega super basic), fullscreen / multiple output Quicktime player with fast, greater-than-4096-pixels support.

I wrote this app for an installation because I needed to play a 4,800 x 600 Quicktime file across 2 outputs on my graphics card, each feeding 3 triple heads to go into 6 projectors, and I couldn't find a single application that could do it.

Most video applications which can output across multiple video-outs cannot play files larger than the maximum size of a texture (usually 4096 pixels). And even if the movie resolution fits in a texture, they are very slow because they convert each frame to a texture and upload to the graphics card. The only application I found which could play a large file is Quicktime Pro, but that cannot output across multiple video-outs.

MSA QTPlayer is a native Cocoa app which can do this (using QTKit and OSX 10.5) .

Well I finally caved in and bought an iPhone - and my favorite feature (and main reason for buying it) is of course the multi-touch capabilities. So currently OSCemote is my favourite app. Apart from having a few sliders and knobs which transmit OSC (similar to TouchOSC), it also has a multitouch pad which sends out TUIO messages, so any app which responds to TUIO (E.g. anything written with reactivision api) will respond. So I had to try out my visualisation for the Roots Project! Up and running in 5 minutes! Awesome! (I had to rotate the coordinates in my processing code though to have the long end of the iphone screen map to the long end of my desktop screen, slightly annoying that this isn't an option in the app... hopefully soon :P).

I'm very much into creating intuitive interactivity with minimum dependency on a controlled enviroment - so the experience can easily be recreated elsewhere with minimal hardware & setup (which is why I generally prefer optical flow analysis over blob tracking if I can, for vision related projects). So a conversation in the vidvox forums about painting in Quartz Composer using the Wiimote but without using the IR sensor really sparked my interest.

This is an 'early current state of app' demo for a multi-discipline event I'm working on with Streetwise Opera, Mira Calix and fellow visualists Flat-e, to be showcased at the Royal Festival Hall later this year with quite a few more venues lined up.

The app was written in Processing 0135 and is running realtime at 60fps, though if I add another couple hundred eels it does drop, so I may switch to OpenFrameworks if performance does become an issue (which it probably will). There are occasional freezes in the video which happened while capturing the screen so that is a bit annoying.

I'm controlling the eels using the mouse, keyboard and Quartz Composer (just simple sliders sending OSC to vary some parameters - similar to the 'magnetic force fields' video - I'm quite into this technique now, very quick and easy to setup, and you can have loads of sliders with descriptive names at your disposal to play with, and adjust your internal variables in realtime for tweaking heaven).

The final show will have many many more features, both in the digital realm, and physical... more info coming soon...

I strongly recommend watching the HD version at http://www.vimeo.com/1582196

This is a demo of creating and visualizing magnetic (kind of) fields in Processing and controlling with a tangible multitouch table and Quartz Composer. It gets more interesting after the 1 minute mark :P

I recommend watching the video in HD at http://www.vimeo.com/1569676

The demo came about as a digression off the Roots project I'm working on with Jordan & Owen - makers of the Bricktable (http://bricktable.wordpress.com/). You can read more about the Roots project at http://www.memo.tv/roots_creating_and_visualising_generative_music_on_a_... and http://bricktable.wordpress.com/about/what-is-roots/ .

I was sitting minding my own business, exploring accumulation buffers in Quartz Composer, when all of a sudden I just zoned out, and next thing I know, I found myself staring at Him on my screen. His Noodly Appendages came down and touched me, and guided my hands, connecting Quartz Composer's very own noodles in His Image.

His Noodly Screen Saver runs on Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) and you can download it below.

For those who do not have a clue what this is about, I suggest reading this: venganza.org/about
and this: venganza.org/about/open-letter

P.S. you can watch the above demo video in HD at vimeo.

RAmen.

I've always wondered (well at least since Quartz Composer 3.0 was released with Leopard) the performance difference between using the new and much easier to use Math Expression patch, and the old Math patch - and in fact compared to using JavaScript.

So I created the attached test composition and found some surprising results (at least I found them surprising, though in retrospect I can understand why :P).

First of all, all 3 methods are pretty quick, and are unlikely to be a bottleneck. Unless you are using the operations in an Iterator patch with a lot of iterations you won't notice any difference.

The figures below are for 2nd gen 2.33Ghz Macbook Pro:

Quartz Composer is a great piece of software for many things. It has a lot of features which really allow you to create amazing things very quickly. It also has some 'features' which allow you to lose your hair very quickly. One of these 'features' is loading images from within an iterator.

You'd think it was quite straightforward, just send a different string (either generated within the iterator or loaded from XML etc.) to the Image Downloader, but alas QC has other plans. It always loads the same image whatever string you send it!

I've just finished an interactive Quartz Composer project with Moving Brands for an American multinational corporation with a focus on designing and manufacturing consumer electronics and software products. Unfortunately due to the strict nature of PR, I cannot enclose any more information than this, but stay tuned...

I just returned from a fantastic week in Aldeburgh courtesy of Aldeburgh Music on the New Music New Media 2008 Workshop, and what a week it was...

Working with 14 amazing contemporary musicians - 6 composers and 8 performers, including cellist Olly Coates and pianist Sarah Nicolls - masters of sound-tech Sound Intermedia; and fellow visualists / interactive tech-geeks at Flat-E we delved into some nice Exploration of Audio Visual Diversity.

I created a little patch in Quartz Composer 3.0 which allows you to navigate a 3D scene using the 3Dconnexion Space Navigator.

Controlling Quartz Composer with the Space Navigator from Memo Akten on Vimeo.

A test in motion detection in Quartz Composer 3.0.

The music is all generated in real-time by me waving my fingers, hands and arms around (or in fact any motion) in front of a standard web-cam. No post-processing was done on the audio or the video.

The concept is by no means new, but still fun nevertheless - and I'm quite happy with this implementation. I'm using a very simple frame difference technique and generating midi notes based on where-ever there is movement (actually, as QC3 cannot send midi notes I had to send the data as OSC and use OSCulator to forward them as midi).

This is a demonstration of the different signal modes I added to the Mac OSX Wiimote midi driver - WiiToMidi.

None of the demonstrated signals use the IR sensor so the user has complete freedom of movement (can swing in 360s), stand pretty faraway from any received, computer etc. - and the Nunchuk also has the same position, velocity, orientation etc.

I was at the Adobe Air Tour 2008 in London today, and while most of it was very interesting, there were moments which were rather dry... so in my boredom I created this little Quartz Composition.

Last fall I was at Flash on the Beach in Brighton, and a guy called Craig Swann was demonstating some amazing things he'd been doing in Flash and Max MSP/Jitter. I remembered one of them today and decided to try and create something similar in Quartz Composer, the results are quite fun.

Basically it captures a very narrow slice of video input (in this case my webcam) every frame and creates a picture out of lots of slices from different times, essentially capturing a segment of time in one picture. The composition here can do it horizontally or vertically. You could try radial and other methods too.

Leopard only I'm afraid...

** Update **

In this previous post I mention creating data-source plugins or processing existing data-sources for VDMX using Quartz Composer. Well the specific example I've given in that post isn't that useful, simply does 1-x^2.

I've just created something which may be a bit more useful, its a springy smoothing patch. So you can attach springlike behaviour to data-sources and modify spring stiffness and damping. Here's the JavaScript:

I showed the VDMX / QC setup used in 'Amoeba Dance - Caliper Remote' to my girlfriend and some her friends and this is what they came up with.

Who needs Autechre when you have a bunch of mad girls!!

P.S. I have hours of footage of this if anyone is interested :P

This is a little test using GLSL in Quartz Composer 3.0, and controlling via VDMX. All happening in realtime and completely audio-reactive with no post production or timeline animations etc. The potential is humongous and very exciting!!

The current latest version of VDMX5 (0.6.2.7) now has the brilliant (undocumented) capability of using Quartz Composer patches as plugins (in addition to clips, effects and text sources).

What you need to do is:

1. Create a Quartz Composer patch with a published input, and a published output... with JavaScript or Maths nodes inbetween.
2. Plop your QTZ in your VDMX/plugins folder
3. Create an instance of your plugin from the Plugin Manager (at the moment you need to restart VDMX for the plugin to appear I think, I'm sure this will be addressed quite soon).
4. Assign any VDMX data source to the input of your QTZ plugin.
5. Assign the ouput of your QTZ plugin as a data source to and slider.

et voila! beautiful. I've attached my sample files...

Messing about with replicators in Quartz Composer 2. Click here to see it (you will need at least Mac OSX Tiger - 10.4).

I've created a dedicated section for VDMX / Quartz Composer Effects. These can be found here.
My patches can be found here.

WiiToMidi (wii2midi) is an open-source Mac OSX driver to convert Wiimote and Nunchuk (Niintendo Wii motion based controllers) data to midi. Its a Cocoa application based on the DarwiinRemote WiiRemote framework. Mike Verdone wrote the main app transmitting the values and button presses as midi. I added the modules to calculate and transmit an additional 16 midi cc messages. These are for calculating/transmitting the velocity, position offset and orientation for both the wiimote and nunchuk.