Some of you might have seen the Animoitu liike -workshop I did in collaboration with Päivi Hintsanen and Live Herring in Jyväskylä public library (September 2009) http://www.liveherring.org/animoitu_liike/

This week I’m going to do part 2 of the workshop in Jyväskylä in collaboration with Loiskis. The Kinect sensor has greatly improved the project as I no longer need to use IR markers.

Here is a small demo. Running with a customized build of OSCeleton, Quartz Composer and Animata.

For demonstration purposes, I’m changing the character and the background by clapping my hands.

The drawings were made by students from the Keski-Palokka elementary school.

Trying out the very awesome OSCeleton http://github.com/Sensebloom/OSCeleton with Quartz Composer.

What is OSCeleton?
“As the title says, it’s just a small program takes Kinect skeleton data from the OpenNI framework and spits out the coordinates of the skeleton’s joints via OSC messages. These can can then be used on your language / framework of choice.”

It works straight out of the box with Animata and many other software, but the OSC formatting is not compatible with Quartz Composer. So I made a little Max/MSP patch that converts the messages to a format QC understands. I will try to write a tutorial about how to get the whole thing running pretty soon. But here is a quick rundown.

• Install OpenNI http://www.openni.org/downloadfiles/openni-binaries/20-latest-unstable
• Install KinectSensor http://github.com/avin2/SensorKinect
• Install NITE http://www.openni.org/downloadfiles/openni-compliant-middleware-binaries/33-latest-unstable
• Download OSCeleton http://github.com/Sensebloom/OSCeleton
• Download my OSCeletonToQC Max/MSP app and open it. (I think you need to install the Max Runtime from http://cycling74.com/downloads/)
• Dowload my QC example and open it
• Run OSCeleton with this command:

./osceleton-osx -p 8110 -mx 2 -my -2 -mz -1 -ox -1 -oy 0.75 -oz 1 -a 127.0.0.1

The options are to scale the values to something that makes sense in QC. You can play around with them. Check the OSCeleton readme for more information about the different options.

Let me know if the Max/MSP app or something else is not working properly.

Kallio 26/8/2010

Image by Kirsi Tuura

We couldn’t do a rehearsal on Wednesday so I was a bit worried about how everything would go down on the first night. Everything had worked fine the week before in Tapiola, so I was still quite comfortable… At least I was until Mr. Murphy once again proved that you should really take his law seriously.

Problem #1

No signal to the projector with a long VGA cable, so I had to move all my gear to a different location in the last minute and setup everything again. That left me no time to properly test the motion tracking and everything else.

Problem #2

All of the dozens of WiFi networks on this particular street corner disturbed our wireless network we had set for sending data and pictures. This increased the delay between the tracking and animation to several seconds instead of the normal tenths of a second.  It took me a while to figure out that this was the problem and of course no ethernet cables anywhere. Fortunately, Severi – our technical producer – somehow got a hold of a cable and we finally got the tracking working quite smoothly in the end.

We still had a problem with the communication between my computer and Markku’s laptop, so we couldn’t really update the character as it was planned. Somehow, we still managed to limp through the night and the last hour was actually quite enjoyable.

Emmi Vainio and Kalle Kuisma shot some documentation video.

Giants of the Hoods, Kallio 26/8/10 from Giants of the Hoods on Vimeo.

Kontula 27/8/2010

Kontula worked out a lot better technically as we had ironed out all the problems in Kallio. The mood was also quite different as we had a lot of children coming to dance and also because of the commitment of the people that took part in the workshop some weeks ago. It was also the “Night of the Arts” in Helsinki that day and I think it was nice that we did this in the suburbs of East Helsinki and not downtown where everything else happened.

Giants event in Kontula from Giants of the Hoods on Vimeo.

Tapiola 28/8/2010

Technically, Tapiola worked the best, but there weren’t that many people around. The cold and windy weather was against us, but we still had fun and it was nice to see some people who had been there the week before also when we did some testing.

No video yet, but i will add it here once it’s online.

Next

We are doing two more shows this week. On Wednesday, we are at the Aalto University Opening after-party in Otaniemi and on Saturday we have the event at the Lasipalatsi square. For more details: http://www.giantsofthehoods.com/

“A van with a mobile interactive media set parks at late evening time in the neighborhoods giving local citizens a chance to participate in a street performance and VJing to momentarily change the nature and purpose of a few chosen public places.

The passersby participate by collectively creating images of representative avatars – Giant characters of their neighborhoods, and by dancing in front of a video camera and computer system to make the Giant follow the movements of the participant. The dance of the Giants is projected in big size on a nearby building…”

So basically what that means is that we will project giant characters onto buildings around different neighbourhoods in Helsinki and Espoo. The passers-by have the chance to come and animate the characters with their own movements and even modify the giants by “donating” a part of their body to it. It has some similarities to the Animoitu liike -workshop from last Fall, but the overall concept and even how it works is quite different from that. Should be interesting.

More info coming soon on the website at http://www.giantsofthehoods.com/. Also check out the videos:

There is a new version of the Animata OSC plugin available. I’ve had the Z-axis support working for a long time, but I’ve just been too lazy to upload it here. Also added the option to change the IP address and port numbers. Useful when you need to send OSC from QC to a different computer running Animata. You really shouldn’t touch the port, but decided to throw in the option to change it just in case.

Download the plugin here.

Download the example seen on the video.

Version 1.2 Changes
- Added the Z Position port for the Layer patch. That means you can now move layers in Z-axis too. (requires the latest version of Animata 004)
- Added the option to configure the IP address and port number. (Please test this one)

I also updated the VDMX plugins to have the Z Position option.

Please test this and let me know if you run into any problems.

The jury awarded my Product Placement with the 2nd place. I was pretty surprised about that. I wasn’t really expecting to be on the top three.

And on the third place, Johannes Neumeier with Digital Captures.

Check out more info (in Finnish) at:
http://turku2011.fi/public/default.aspx?contentid=149392&nodeid=14281

Watch all of the seven finalists here. Including a work by my homie Aku.

More about the entire competition: http://www.live2011.com/

Original concept & background graphics: Päivi Hintsanen
Programming and interaction design: Matti Niinimäki
Full credits and other information (in Finnish)

Photo by: Sirja Moberg

The idea of the workshop/installation was that anyone could participate in the workshop by walking in, drawing their own character and then animating that character just by moving their own body.

This video shot by YLE for Keski-Suomen uutiset illustrates the process. (In Finnish)

The dances were streamed live to the internet. The first video (the last dance we did) has all of the characters on screen at the same time.

You can also browse all the videos over at the bambuser channel http://bambuser.com/channel/animoituliik. Unfortunately due to some technical problems, some of the dances were not recorded. Another issue is the sound. On some of the videos the sound is clipping very badly and on some of them there is no sound at all.

Almost 90 people came and drew their characters, 94 dances were recorded online and probably double that amount came just to see what was going on during the three days this project was running.

The movements of the participants were tracked by a custom built solution based on tBeta and Quartz Composer. The participants wore infrared “beacons” on their ankles and wrists that were being tracked by an infrared camera. The information was then sent over to Animata to animate the characters.

The infrared light can be seen weakly in normal photos as well:

Photo by: Sirja Moberg

Here are some photos from the workshop and behind the scenes. The first photos are from a little workshop that I taught covering the basics of Animata for some of our assistants.

A HUGE THANK YOU to Live Herring and all of the other people who made this possible.

• Animoitu liike website
• Review of the workshop at liikekieli.com (in Finnish)

Canadian Cameras at Work: A Video Art and Photography Exhibition

• Three Shadows Photography Centre – Beijing, China
• August 27 2009—September 3 2009
• Public Opening on August 29th
• http://www.threeshadows.cn/en/exhibition200908029CanadianCamerasatwork.html

So if you happen to be in Beijing during the next month, go and check it out. Other video works by Audrey Delorme, Erin Corbett, Ivan Rubio, Vincent Drolet, Sadaf Hakimian, Tyson Parks and Robbie Murphy.

I’m not actually Canadian and I didn’t use a single camera to do the animation, but it’s all good.

Here is the basic outline:

Part 1: Basics of Animata
Introduction to creating real-time animations in Animata. How to use the interface. How to set up different characters and scenes from still images. Creating meshes, joints and skeletons. Simple animations inside Animata.

Part 2: External control of Animata with OSC
The real power of Animata is in the way that it can be controlled with external applications using OSC messages. Examples will be shown on how to use MIDI controllers, sound input and Arduino to control real-time animations. Software examples at least in Max/MSP and Quartz Composer. Examples on how to set up a scene for a live visualist gig.

Register for this and the other workshops at the AVIT-Kezmarok website. http://kezmarok.avit.info/

This is a modified rig of the Mr. Cool character I used for my Product Placement animation. I used Max/MSP when I did the animation, but QC is just much more fun.

Mouth and body movement controlled by the sound. Arms have a small LFO on them and you can trigger some other movements with the arrow keys.

Download the example files. Requires the Animata OSC plugin for QC. You also need a recent build of Animata from the svn. Compile it yourself or download this one that I compiled. Should work on intel machines running Leopard.