Feedbacks:

I had great feedbacks from the 4 awesome artists I had the chance to talk to dring the Show-A-Thing Presentation

When I exposed my concerns about having to prompt on screen or write on a board what my project is about, Tong Wu gave me the great idea to present images, webpages, and other visual elements that I could disolve into particules  to make right away the connection between those elements and the particules flowing around.

Jim Schmitz gave me great onlines ressources to learn Python as this language is used inside TouchDesigner and I may need to code inside the software to get the results I want. His questions about interaction when multiple people have their bubbles touch each other (in case I could do the interaction for multiple people at the same time) was really interesting. It motivates me to do those interactions and it is definitely something I wish to explore as soon as the main interactions are done for one person.

Matt Romein had similar questions/concerns as Andrew Lazarow as interactive particule systems have been used for some time on big art project and  encourage me to think about more layers, more interacions especially if I can make it work for multiple persons like Jim Schmitz previously talked about.

Yuguang Zhang was really reassuring after I explained my project and one again he had the same questions as the others about the interactions if multiple people were present in front of the video installation.

Those feedbacks were encouraging and gave me a great idea for opening/presentation of the project but also raised a lot of questions on how to incorporate multiple people and how to do interaction between them. With my current skill level in touchdesigner it is kind of stressful to think about all the missing skills to do all those things but by going through milestones, one step after the other, I hope I can achieve something interesting even if I think I may not reach the level of quality I wanted.

 

Current Status:

Right now, it is still an very early stage. I’m doing a lot of tutorials and research online for TouchDesigner as I need to figure out how I can do what I have in my head, create it, test it and see if it needs to change anything to make it work. Because I don’t know enough about the software now, it seems that everything I do look like crap but everyone experience the same thing when doing something new but it is a stressful state now as I know how much better I should be before doing something good with this program and I don’t know if the timeframe would allow me to do it.

 

Right now: 

I managed to track the spine to attach a sphere or a cube that can be changed using a switch and create a dynamic silhouette of multiple people. However I have an issue as the elements can switch between people if the person in the back comes forward and so far I didn’t find a way to attribute a specific ID to a specific silhouette and keep track of the same person. The 3D object can be deformed by noise based on the music and by moving hands as they are tracked as well to change the geometry.

Also, I know how to create a flow of particles that can be attracted by an attractor ( link to hand probably in the end). However, I need to figure out how I need to position the particles emitters and how to change the colors based on the particules colors.

I need to optimize the network of nodes to make sure the framerate is consistent.

I’m also looking into replicators to create moving images that will dissolve into particles in order to link a folder of images and having movement and particules transformations generated by a single node instead of creating one for each images which would be obviously a laborious not optimal way and which would may cause a lot of issues (bug, latency,..).

 

Question:

Is there any professor in NYU expert with TouchDesigner with who I could book office hours or ask questions/send my project to have technical support/feedbacks for this thesis?