Powered by Twitter Tools.
Powered by Twitter Tools.
Powered by Twitter Tools.
PatchBox is becoming quite the powerful tool for architectural video mapping but sometimes even I miss a certain sense of immediacy that I’ve grown accustomed to from my years of VJ’ing.
It was with much delight then that I received a link from my old chum (and favourite Stylophone player) Tom Hume last week pointing me towards a site where a chap based in Helsinki called Jürgen has created some software for using your mobile phone as a spray can, called - surprisingly - MobiSpray.
He’s been travelling around with a laptop, video projector, and generator, drawing all over buildings, fighter planes (!), rocks, and bags of rubbish all while wearing a military outfit.
Good man!
The system works by taking the tilt information that some models of mobile phones generate (like a Wiimote) and sending it wirelessly to a laptop that does the painting. It can also use photos taken on the phone - nice touch!
However, it wasn’t really the interface that excited me - it looks a bit fiddly (sorry Jürgen!) - but the flat colour style of his drawings and what a very powerful and immediate effect they, and the drawing process itself, created.
I knew I wanted to achieve the same end result but using a different hardware interface, namely my nice little Wacom graphics tablet with all of it’s pressure sensitive goodness.
I’d seen a CGFX shader months ago in the NVIDIA Shader Library that could do painting within the shader itself. I re-wrote it so it uses a seperate render target (for reasons that will become apparent later), and added the support code into PatchBox.
Initially it utilised the mouse but as a proof of concept it worked well, so I started looking at Raw Input (hence the comedy Google post earlier today) but ran into a few walls trying to integrate it with wxWidgets, so instead I put in the support for Wintab, giving me direct access and control of the tablet information.
So, at about midnight, it was ready for the first projector test:
First test of the new PatchBox paint mode
Aw, pretty flowers and… is that a… kind of squirrel? The lower part with the lady dancing is a video screen.
This was shortly followed by test #2:
Second Paint Mode Test
And the actual screen grab from PatchBox:
Screen grab of the second test
I’m really excited about the results! There’s a couple of features still to add (saving the textures out, hence the render target), but I’m already thinking I need to project on something… bigger…
Powered by Twitter Tools.
Unexpected moment of Google Comedy
Powered by Twitter Tools.
Powered by Twitter Tools.
Powered by Twitter Tools.
Powered by Twitter Tools.
