BYOB stands for Bring Your Own Books and it is the name of the project I presented for finals at school.
Why BYOB? Because I don’t like to keep books on selves that I will never read again.
When I like a book I like to give it to someone else to read. I will never have the time to read it again, so what to keep them for?
I specially hate them when moving from one place to another. So heavy. And I move so often.
It all started here:
This russian MIT’er [my friend Alberto García Saenz] made a presentation for his last ‘invention’ that was never taken into consideration. Seriously. Throwing books against a wall and getting the letters out to splat first on the wall and then fall seemed to me the perfect way to get rid of some heavy weight in my next moving.
Plus the act of throwing an object against the wall is a long time fantasy.
So, I geared myself to re-vitalize the project from ITP.
As I had been playing with Shiffman’s Particle System in my midterm project for DanO’s Computational Cameras, I knew I could use the Particle’s code to make the letters stuff and then I would use MaxMSP Jitter to track the book and trigger the processing code when the book hit the wall.
On the processing side:
I first made the particles to be an array list of letters. Then give them a time [to stay on the wall splatted] and make them fall. At the bottom of the screen, I'd make them roll to disappear, otherwise the applet would get too heavy. Then I had to make the letters start at a certain location that I chose to be the mouse location. this would later be changed to location x,y determined by the location sent by Max to Processing: exactly where the book hit the wall.
On the MaxMSP Jitter side:
I had to track the book, find its centroid, listen to the hit on the wall, scale from the image captured in the camera to the output screen, and send all this to processing, modifying the processing code to understand Max.
The Processing code can be seen here.
And the first final sight of the project looked like this:
I know it is just the beginning of this project outcome. The based is set, now it needs to be properly produced.