Saturday, April 12, 2008

Experiments with Movement Sensing

So far I have set up the sensors and cameras, gathered some audio material for the sound sculptor to sculpt and thought about what effects and how they could be applied to give the right impression. I am at the stage where I will be testing out these certain effects and will choose the most effective ones to feature in the installation. More on this later.

I am concerned about the aesthetics of the performance. What I already know is that I will have and octagon or hexagon of perspex screens and the sensors and cameras will be placed on these. Whether or not these will be perfect shapes i have left open. I am keen on the idea that certain areas of the space will have different sonic characteristics. I have already decided that there will be four areas each triggering different groups of sounds. and this will be realised using the four IR sensors that I had so much trouble getting to work. Overall subtleties of sound sculpting overall will be realised by cameras. I have three iSights, mid and side and one birds eye view. This information from the cameras will control effects on all outputted sounds from the sensors. Probably in the form of filters and delays. As previously mentioned I am concerned about thaat aesthetics of the performance. I originally intended for the room to be dark and laser beams would be visable to the audience. However, I am unsure whether the motion tracking in jitter will be able to see well enough. The laser beams would be static beams projecting the beam of the IR sensor and I feel a quite important aspect of the installation. I suppose that even if the beam is not seen the dot will be seen but this wil not be as effective, I feel a compromise coming on :( One way would be to use luminosity sensing, but stil the laser beam that jitter would be sensing would be static and so no movement sensing would not work this way. If I could find a way in which this could work- for example using the laser level that emits a line and this line could be intercepted to show horivontal movement. But I can only find one of these lasers lines in my budget. I would need two front to back and side to side. but maybe I could work this out with the proximity on the IR sensors. I originally intended to map out the image coming in from the cameras into areas that possessed certain sonic characteristics- but am starting to worry that it won't work because the lighting will be low.