For my final in Daniel Shifman’s Nature of Code class, I continued my work with clouds from my midterm, CloudVideo, but extended it to use a custom soft circuit controller rather than video input. The piece was a collaboration between Aiwen Wang-Huddleston, Hsin-Yi Chien and myself that was also on display at the ITP Spring Show 2010.

MyCloud invites participants to lay down on a grass filled lawn and interact with clouds projected above them. Using a wireless cloud shaped pillow as a controller participants are given the ability to have a tactile relationship with clouds above them and to exercise their imagination by using the sky above as their canvas. By squeezing the pillow in different areas, forces are applied that allow participants to control the shape and motion of the clouds. There are four cloud pillows so participants can interact with each other’s clouds and collaborate on their shapes. The physical construction consists of a computer running processing connected to an Xbee that communicates with all four pillows, a pair of speakers playing ambient music and sounds from a public park, a projector aimed at the ceiling and a roll of fake grass over a custom made wooden hill.

To create the air like nature I used Pbox2d to form body of particle emitters. When the pillow detects a squeeze in one of its 10 soft circuit sensors, a particle emitter appears facing the cloud to create a push like effect against the cloud. Each particle displays a small image of a piece of cloud that fade out over time. This creates the smoke like effect.

You can download the source code here: http://db.tt/MCS2Xp

CloudVideo is an application created in processing that allows a user to interact with a digital cloud using their webcam.  This was created as my midterm for Daniel Shifman’s Nature of Code class. To create CloudVideo I combined pieces of code from Daniel Shiffman’s Blobby, a PBox2D example, with an Memo Akten’s Webcam Piano.  CloudVideo works by first dividing your webcam’s video input into a grid. Each point on the grid is then analyzed by taking the current frame of video input and subtracting it from the previous frame to find a rate of change.  If the a grid square has a high rate of change it generates a particle that can interact with the cloud.  To allow the user to have more control I there are two controllable parameters: The sensitivity of your force on the cloud and the contrast of the of the video displayed.  CloudVideo uses the processing libraries ControlP5, PBox2D.

You can download the sketch files here: http://db.tt/z4T0nz

Theres something captivating about our ability to imagine shapes in clouds.  For my Nature of code midterm I am to create a cloud mirror.  Heres a rough idea of how it will work.

One: An image is take by and the edges of the person are detected using edge-detection in Open CV.  I know this is very fickle at best so I am considering using max/msp’s OpenCV libraries to send coordinates to processing.

Two: These coordinates will then act as constraining boundaries. Using Toxilib, the edge points are then used to generate a particle system filling the boundaries to the shape in the image.

Three: Each particle on the system will use a Cloud node class, which will allow transparency shifts and generation of more smaller clouds to give a fog like effect.

In addition the user can change wind speed and direction, allowing your cloud to linger or blow away.   Each user will also be allowed to save their cloud photo.  I could see an application like this becoming very popular once used in mobile devices.

Another idea of implementation would be to measure the input camera’s the rate of change from each pixel to generate the boundaries.  In a previous project I used the concept in a previous project to effect an audio source.