the singapore river as a psychogeographical faultline

today me and dominic succeeded in approximately aligning the camera/projection/fiducial setup with the visual response in my flex swf. i've switched to using CS5 Flash Builder because I eventually want to publish it as an Air app. so far its been sweet using reactivision with TUIO AS3 library.

we are using a 3.6mm lens for the PS3 Eye and the projector is at a resolution of 1024 x 768 x 96hertz. apparently hertz refers to the refresh rate and when i set it higher than 120 hertz it says out of range. this is all gobbledygook to me too but what i know is that when i stare at the back of the projector and shake my head (oh the migraine!), for a split second i see the light dividing itself into bright bands of red, green, and blue...

I downloaded the TUIO AS3 Library, ran the demo file for fiducials successfully, and checked it with a trace. ClassID is the fiducial marker number, SessionID is the Movieclip instance number. x and y are the onscreen coordinates. a is the rotation. capital-letter X Y A refer to the velocity at which the variables have changed.





Current setup:
+ TUIO AS3 Library with LCConnector
+ UDP FlashLC Bridge
+ reacTIVision
+ In-built Macbook Pro iSight

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).