Catherine McCurry

I began this project thinking I would be able to make an animal shape map to my body using colored LEDs. This turned out to be partially possible – and partially to look stupid.

I got a box of white LEDs from Chris Selleck (thank you) and experimented with glass paint, tinting the domes of the lights different colors. After experimenting with my webcam in a dark room, I was getting pretty good distinction between the 6 different colors. I did this using blob tracking in the OpenCV library. I used the java.awt library to define bounding rectangles around the bright LED blobs, discarded white and black pixels within the rectangle, and averaged the red blue and green values that remained.

So I started playing around mapping shapes onto the points.

This looked dumb. I realized that with only 6 points, I wasn’t going to get another form mapped onto my body to look like anything other than a joke. And I don’t have a sense of humor. Seriously.

I also realized, that my experimentations with the colored LEDs had been done in close proximity to the camera, and that if they were to be on my body, I’d have to expand the frame and move them a lot farther away. This caused the blobs to flicker in and out of existence. I thought I would play with the features of what I had created to work towards a slightly different idea.

I thought about the points as defining intersections in a web. The frame is filled with a web of lines emanating from the LEDs. When I move them, the web seems to stretch and deform itself. I mapped it out with a different colored web attached to the different points.

Ultimately, it is more compelling if the web seems to be part of the same structure, so I changed the colors to be uniform (though with differing alpha values to add dimension). I was pretty happy with the look of it.

So I put it on its feet, and of course everything was different. I attached the LEDs to my ankles and midsection using spandex fabric – of course some of the paint rubbed off. I held two in my hands and one in my mouth (why not) and projected it on my projector. I looked out my giant window and noticed all the neighbors watching me and…was embarrassed.

Windows closed, I continued to experiment with movement. I had difficulty staying in the frame with the feedback I’d given myself, and the code needs some more tweeking – but I think it’s cool. Initially I thought I would incorporate memory of the blobs’ previous locations so that if a blob was recognized, it had been red, and was close enough to the previous red location, it would continue to be the red blob (only checking the pixels’ colors every so often). When I was working with the code, the color tracking worked really well and was fast, so I decided to leave it for now. This would probably fix the flickering due to misassigned colors.

This is a short video of my movement experiment with weird music I made using feedback.

I’m hoping to take this project farther in 3D Sensing and Visualization next semester.

Last spring I worked on a play. It was an adaptation of Samuel Delany’s epic science fiction novel, Dhalgren. This book is crazy, and the play was crazy – I did the sound design. This is the kind of book that sticks with you (the wild dense prose, the imagery, the….extremely detailed pornographic sex), and there were many things from the book that weren’t realized in the play and I’m holding onto them. The book is set here – well, in a city somewhere in America – after an unnamed disaster has taken place. The city is a wasteland, but people are still living there. They live for free in parks, or squat in apartments where nothing works.

Gangs, known as the Scorpions, run the streets. This is actually the element I’m thinking about. Members of the Scorpions wear a projector necklace. When you press the button on the projector a holographic animal surrounds your body. It’s kind of like digital warpaint. One of the characters is known as dragon lady, because her projection is a dragon. One of them is a baby dinosaur – which I love. One of them doesn’t work correctly and looks like an amorphous blob. I find it weird that I can’t find an image of this somewhere. I feel like it’s one of the most memorable images from the book – gangs of fierce, oversized, holographic animals walking through the streets.

It would be pretty easy to have a static image follow a person with an LED using brightness tracking, but I wonder how far I can take it using what we’ve done in ICM. I’m imagining fixing LEDs to different joints and body parts (wrists, elbows, forehead…) and using a camera to track their positions. Then using their positions to map projections of the animal body parts to the movement of the performers body parts. This video inspired me:

They’re using individual projectors – and are doing something totally weird, but it’s the same idea.

If I could get my hands on an XBox and a Kinect, I’d love to do something like this:

I’m sure that motion tracking with a Kinect would work wayyy better than LED tracking, but it’s cost prohibitive at the moment.

As for the projection, I’d love to experiment with projecting on fog. I also have a lot of reflective film so I might look into the 3D effect you can get using a two way mirror (this would probably look awesome, but I’d need a pretty big piece of glass). Projecting directly onto the body is possible, though i’m not in love with the shadow you make on the screen. Rear projection might be the easiest thing – it would look just like the Helicopter Boyz video.

This will be a performance piece/video sculpture. Hopefully it will look badass and not totally lame.

Rhodes and I envisioned a rainy window, where raindrops would move from the top to bottom of the screen at random placements and varying in size and opacity. This turned out to be harder than anticipated. I made this, though, which i think is quite nice. The horizontal positioning, scale, and opacity of successive drops is randomized, and the vertical position increases successively so they gradually cover the screen. When they reach the bottom, the screen clears. You can also create “lightning” across the window by clicking/pressing the mouse.

makeitrain <- in action

This is, honestly, pretty heinous. But, it’s also the first thing I ever made in Processing. The background changes color, and the width and height of a series of arcs vary with mouse position.

I’m wondering how to draw on top of a background that is defined within draw. I tried to do that, but the updating background erased the strokes.

psychedelicstainedglass check it out in action…

source code