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LG WOW is the latest website we developed at colmeia featuring Papervision3D, webcam interactivity, Flash Media Server streaming, and integration with a Django application using remoting (PyAMF). It is a product showcase for LG Electronics.

To enter the website, choose between webcam and keyboard modes. After the countdown, shout “wow” to the camera (or simply type it if you chose keyboard mode) and 3D particles will explode according to your voice loudness. The camera feed will be recorded to Flash Media Server, but it will only be published if you choose to do so later.

Navigate the website through the floating objects or the menu (at the top).
Check the Gallery (to watch other people’s reactions) and the Stats section too.

This website doesn’t push the boundaries of Flash and PV3D (we just used Planes with MovieMaterials), but I think we were still able to build something unique for the client.

Concept and product pages by Sinc (advertising agency).
PV3D design and development by Colmeia:

• Design: Caio Sartori, Gustavo Sonoda.
• Backend development: Eduardo Silva, Arthur Lima.
• Flash development: Flavio Ensiki, Eduardo Omine, Edgar Akiyama.

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.

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