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Tantalus Quest is a game / installation that I developed at colmeia for FILE 2008, Brazil’s main electronic arts festival.

Game designer Fabiano Onça conceived the game, in which people must fill geometric shapes with their own silhouettes (as captured by webcams hanging from the ceiling):

Tantalus Quest at FILE 2008 from eduardo omine on Vimeo.

Software was built with OpenFrameworks, which is to C++ what Processing is to Java. A prototype was built with Flash (AS3), but it was slow — reading pixel values (BitmapData.getPixel) can be processor-heavy. Thanks to OpenFrameworks, porting the AS3 code to C++ was quite easy.

The application is very simple: the images captured by the cameras are brightened, blurred and thresholded, resulting in black blobs. The amount of blob pixels inside the geometric shape count as positive points and the pixels outside the geometric shape count as negative points.

This was my first project with computer art in a physical space — it’s something that I should explore further in my personal projects.

More pictures at Flickr.

Finally managed to experiment with Context Free, a software that uses context-free grammar to generate images. Substitution rules define a grammar — it’s very simple but also very powerful; appropriate to explore the concepts of recursion and randomness.

More Context-Free images at Flickr

Caffeine Viewer is a proof-of-concept experiment we made at colmeia connecting our coffee machine to the internet using Arduino and Processing.

Using our office’s coffee consumption data (available through a public API), we made a few data visualizations — mine was made with Canvas and Javascript (with a little help from my favourite JS framework, Mootools).

One of the coolest things about Canvas is its ability to draw cubic bezier curves (Actionscript can only draw quadratic curves natively). To convert the logo outline from Adobe Illustrator to a collection of points in Javascript code I used SVG as transport format.

Every 100 milliseconds the screen is updated — each point of the logo is displaced by a random amount of noise that is proportional to the amount of coffee consumed during the selected period of time. Check its source code.

Caffeine Viewer – Jitter

Moscow Olympics: Second Trace from eduardo omine on Vimeo.

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This is my first music video; made with Processing + Ess library.

The song is Second Trace by Filipino band Moscow Olympics, from their recently released debut album Cut The World. Although the band’s musical references are clear (post-punk, shoegaze), their music has that ineffable quality that makes it stand out.

I’ve been posting some images I produced with Processing to my Flickr account. The latest batch is a series of pointillist pictures.