motionLife
I wanted to play with depth as medium for expression. My original idea to capture real life depth and translate it into virtual depth. However, as I worked with the display, I began to experiment with other ways to alter depth, translating other real world changes into depth changes.
First, I captured video from a web cam. Then, I created a field of spheres and colored them with the corresponding pixel of the captured video. This gave me an interesting representation of the video. Next, I tracking changes in colors per pixel from frame to frame.
I decide it might be interesting to think of the spheres as the air and that they get disturbed by motion. I made the spheres shoot up based on how much they were disturbed (level of change of color). The sphere’s than gradually bounce lower an lower until the return to their original resting place. I began to think of this piece as the opposite of a still life, so I named it “motionLife.”
Though I started development in Processing, speed became an issue when I attempted to up the resolution to one I was happy with. I ported my code over to openFrameworks and found I could get reasonable responsiveness from much higher resolution video.
When I initially presented motionLife to my class, it was suggested that when there was no motion, the image became too static. I thought about this, and decided that having the spheres oscillate slightly, even when in resting position, would add an interesting element to even still frames.
I decided I wanted to try turning the pixels into apples and oranges, to futher play on the notion of still life. I started working with Will McDonald, who’s very experienced with shaders. Will did a great job coming up with orange and apple shaders for the spheres. He also, helped optimize the code that rendered the shapes.
While I really enjoyed the apples and oranges. Unfortunately, most people didn’t realize that the objects were. Also, the shaders slowed down the motion to the point that it felt stilted and awkward.
However, the optimizations we put in did improve the project a lot. I continued playng with the shapes and the motion of them. Added rotation to them, so the flipped as the rose and fell. The final product ended up being this:
