the singapore river as a psychogeographical faultline

Above: Round Reactable at NTU ADM

This afternoon I met Yanying, one of the people who worked on the above round reactable which I saw at NTU, and she was kind enough to give me lots of advice on the process of building and testing such setups. One of the things I've learnt was that I really should think about including some reciprocal visual/audio feedback for all the interactions so that users know that their interaction is being registered by the machine.

As for more mucking around with using the PS3 Eye with Macam and reactivision, I was going to test some parts of the physical setup on a macbook tomorrow (as I was a dunce and got the wrong connector), so I reinstalled reactivision and macam on my 4 year old macbook.



For my future reference... Mini DVI Versus Mini DisplayPort
I've given up and bought the Mini DP for SGD17 on ebay
Do note that one step which is very easy to miss in the installation process of macam is the proper installation of the quicktime component. Boy I almost had a heart attack there when I opened up reactivision and THERE WAS NO MACAM PS3EYE. But then i realised that installing macam alone is not enough. One obviously has to install the quicktime component in order for all programs to detect the camera.

After recovering from the unnecessary apoplectic fit you just had when you thought that your USB camera might never ever be detected in reactivision and your reactable might explode, quit all the related programs which are currently open. Go to the Macam installer again. Drag the macam.component into "/Library/QuickTime".


Then restart reactivision and press "O" to see the following dialogue, which shows that the PS3 Eye can indeed be detected in reactivision.


Infrared light is present in sunlight - so that is me in a darkened room, with my face lit mostly by the evening sun. Out of the 1 kW/sq m of irradiance sunlight sends down to earth, apparently 527 watts is infrared radiation (light which is visible to this IR camera), 445 watts is visible light (the light we can see), and 32 watts is ultraviolet radiation (light which causes sunburns and skin cancer).

Playstation Eye for PS3 (USB)
Video Capture: 640x480
Field of View: 56˚ to 75˚ FOV zoom lens
Frame Rate: 60fps (640x480) or 120fps (320x240)

It finally came in the mail. Although this was not any particular milestone, I should add that I spent a good 15 minutes SIMPLY TRYING TO OPEN THE PACKAGING. I just had to say that this reminded me of the time I bought a £3.99 blender from Argos and spent more time wrestling with the plastic packaging and reducing the hard plastic shell packaging to disorderly splintery bits with a blunt scissor in the process of trying to extricate the goddamn product - and then everyone said, "But why of course, you bought it from Argos..." Why do companies fashion such impenetrable packaging for certain electrical/electronic products?

I installed macam and it works with my mac without a cinch. Interestingly, I can even run both my mac's inbuilt camera and the PS3 Eye (via macam) at the same time?


Uncanny resemblance of the word "macam" with the slang word "maciam". Brings unexpected local flavour to this rather functional program. "MACIAM NOT COMPATIBLE THEN HOW?" That is my greatest fear. Or do I have faith in information from the internets?

Next: to test this particular camera for use with reactivision, and to modify it for infrared.