Tantalus Quest at FILE 2008
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.
Neat technology, Eduardo. I like what you guys are doing over at Colmeia. I wrote a quick blog entry about Tantalus Quest over at www.ENLIGHTEN3D.com. It is a blog about Computer Vision and 3D graphics.
JoshK | October 31st, 2008 at 11:29 amThanks Josh.
eduardo.omine | October 31st, 2008 at 12:31 pm