I have been interested in projection on spherical domes for a while, but never had the chance to experiment on an actual dome. This situation changed after I met Dave Pentecost a couple of years ago. Dave is an advocate and practitioner of the use of digital domes in education and art, and has been documenting his advances in the development of a low-cost dome authoring and projection system in this website. A dome system following those specifications is being installed at an amazing place in New York, the Lower Eastside Girls Club, a Center for Community for girls and young women on the Lower East Side. The Girls Club has been running since 1996, but recently moved to a brand new building that includes the 30 feet hemispherical planetarium, among many other facilities. A recent visit to the Girls Club’s planetarium allowed me to test the code I wrote earlier for dome projection (and realize that it was wrong), and discuss with Dave how we could use Processing and other software tools to allow people to easily create visual content for domes and to carry out artistic projects specifically tailored to the context of the planetarium. These tests and discussions lead to some recent technical developments that I will describe in more detail below.
Archive for the ‘library’ Tag
Dome projection 5 comments
Syphon Client working in Processing 16 comments
Syphon is an OSX framework to share frames between applications. The authors of Syphon, Tom Butterworth and Anton Marini, made it very easy to create Syphon plugins for other languages, frameworks, VJ’ing and mapping tools, etc. So a while ago I wrote a simple Processing library that allowed to send frames out. This was quite useful, but still missing half of the Syphon functionality. With some additional coding, we were able to add the client part, and I just put the new version (0.4) of the Syphon-Processing library up for download (it requires Processing 2.0a4 or newer).
OpenCV 2 in Processing 41 comments
Xavier Hinault recently released a new computer vision library for Processing, based on JavaCV and OpenCV 2: JavacvPro. This is a great contribution to the community, since it appears that the development of the original OpenCV library for Processing has stalled, without moving beyond OpenCV 1.0 support. JavacvPro is based on the very solid JavaCV wrappers by Samuel Audet, which provide access to the latest version of OpenCV (2.3.1 at the time of writing this), and in fact also allows to use other computer vision frameworks like OpenKinect, and ARToolKit. I did some testing of JavacvPro (version 0.3) on Windows, Mac and Linux, and the results are very promising as I was able to use the library on the three platforms. Xavier has also included many examples in the library package that show how to use it various features.
Fluid library for Processing 1 comment
Thomas Diewald (who is also the author of the excellent kinect library dLibs_freenect, and many Processing pieces) recently created another library for generating realtime fluid simulations in Processing, using either the CPU or the GPU: diewald_fluid. The results are quite amazing, and it is also very fast, specially when using the GPU.
New DMX library Leave a comment
Henri from Mots Cousus released a new library for handling DMX messages in Processing, dmxP512. It is partially based on the proDMX library I wrote a while ago, but supports more DMX hardware (enttec DMX USB PRO and lanbox LCE in its first release) and also adds things like buffering to prevent network/serial congestion. So basically dmxP512 replaces proDMX, which I don’t expect to develop any further.
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