notes from the bigfug

notes from the bigfug

programming light and other strange tales

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PatchBox and Twitter (weird features)

2009-06-08 - 0017It’s an increasingly frequent situation where, having just added some new feature to PatchBox (in this case vector text rendering), it becomes plugged in to a wide range of existing functionality that opens up such a huge amount of possibilities I have to go and sit in a dark room for about an hour.

Well, not quite that bad, but it takes me back a bit.

For example, as the whole of PatchBox is LUA scripted, I bunged together a quick 50 line script that reads the public feed from twitter every 15 seconds and renders the first entry as vector text, seen here with a phong lighting CGFX shader.

I didn’t have to add any extra code as LUA happily loaded some external libraries (luaexpat and luasocket) after I’d copied them into the PatchBox directory, and then it was a simple case of making an HTTP request and parsing the XML.

Pretty basic, but a quick proof of concept and it works!

Thinking it might make quite a fine installation rendering out the real-time twitter feed onto a building using video mapping.

FUN.

Anyway, back to the cafe project…

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