I’m happy to announce that New Zealand based artist Rita Godlevskis has integrated graphics from my Neon Splines sound visualization into her installation Connections: Music and Mind at the Do You Mind? exhibition in Auckland.

The video is from the actual exhibition and also shows Rita’s piece.

More pictures and information after the break.

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It’s been an incredibly long time since my last post and there’s been a reason for that: I finished my last semester at school! Aside from going through a lot of fun final exams and lectures, I wrote a thesis on audio visualization in Flash which involved the development of a prototype AIR application.

More information on the prototype and the thesis after the break.

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I’ve been playing around a lot with gravity and repulsion for force based layouts recently. I guess it’s no surprise that I eventually had to turn it in to another sound visualization. Here’s the result:

Open Visualization as Layer - Open Visualization in a New Window

(Click the fullscreen icon in the options menu for optimal performance.)

There are three emitters, one for each frequency range: lows, mids and highs. Every emitter either has an attractive or repulsive force which depends on the volume of the emitter’s frequency range. If for example the base is strong, that emitter will act as a repulsive field and force all particles away. If at the same time another frequency range is weak it will attract all particles surrounding it, basically sucking them up.

In addition to a force, each emitter has its own color which influences all particles surrounding it. The closer a particle gets to an emitter the more it will take its color. To keep the particles from being randomly scattered around the stage there is an invisible fourth emitter which acts as a counter-weight to all the other emitters. If the sum of all emitters’ repulsive forces is high, the fourth emitter will attract particles so that they aren’t just blown off the stage.

I recently had some time to experiment with Papervision at Big Spaceship and try out a new visualization. You can read my BSS Labs Post “Spectracular Music” to learn more about the making of.

Click the image below to see the visualization:

If the fps seem low you can try to turn off the backfaces, go fullscreen or reduce the overall size with the size slider in the options panel.

It’s nice when you’re able to apply the stuff you experiment with during freetime in real live projects. Just that was the case with the Coke X-Mas banners I made for argonautenG2. I combined my spline and particle engines to be rendered through a shared interface which produced these light-trails:

This is basically writing with my Neon Strings. Maybe I’ll combine that with some song lyrics someday - just couldn’t find any inspiring music that could do the job. Any suggestions? Anyways, here goes: Typo Splines with random lyrics.

Just the good old drawing API combined with music-synchronisation, filters and a couple of minutes of free time.

…with some more partying particles, fresh out of the oven:

Inspired by vektorfarm’s marvelous In An Absolut World Clip, some of my Permutation Particles joined the fun and started a little particle party of their own. Put on your dancing shoes and swing your hips after clicking the screens below.

I just uploaded a little demo video of my Flash webcam motion tracking project for all you guys out there without a webam, just to give you an idea of how it works.

Lay back and watch the demo video or set up your webcam and play a session of Webcam-Pong yourself.

Fanta.de has just been relaunched and my particle engine found its way into the homepage animation as an interactive alternative to prerendered video. Here is the dummy I created:

The final animation can be seen at www.fanta.de

(for argonauten G2)

Some blurring combined with a few thousand particles makes up the following little plasma animation. Different particle types and settings generate some quite interesting result, so give it a shot and create your own little plasma cloud.

I just added yet another particle behaviour with the permutation algorithm. This makes it more flexible and enables decoupled usage of its position data, like drawing directly into a bitmap, which drastically boosts the performance.

I’ve just been experimenting a little more with my particle engine, adding spring and vector based behaviour. As expected, drawing each particle via BitmapData extremely boosts the performance: I got up to 30.000 standard eased particles on my 2Ghz Core2Duo. No ground breaking news but still worth a small post I guess.

Vector particles with rotation

Vector particles using Bitmap

Eased particles using Bitmap

Spring particles using Bitmap

Due to numerous requests I have decided to publish the source code of my little tracking project. Unfortunately I haven’t had the time to complete the documentation and feature set yet. Nonetheless, here it is:

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I’ve recently been continuing work on my webcam tracking project and just implemented a lightweight version of the Pong game I created for Sony HD-Test by vektorfarm.

Just track an object with your custom settings and press any key to release the pong ball.

Happy New Year! To master my hangover I updated the tracking project for my studies and added some new features to the test environment:

• custamizable tracker size, tolerance and minimum number of pixels found to recognize an object
• automatical adjustment of tolerance and min. px found relative to the brightness of the webcam image
• histogramm showing the actual brightness distribution
• panel showing the tracked object’s path

I’m currently working on object detection and tracking in Flash for a project in my studies. The current implementation uses the Meanshift algorithm (without color adaption) and delivers a decent performance while only looking for certain colors in the local tracking area. Tweaking is still necessary, but I thought I might already show it as is.

Here is the Meanshift version (click on your hand or face if neither is found at startup):

I must say - I’m really starting to like AS3! To get a little more practice I also ported my permutation engine to AS3 and got very fluid animations for 5000+ particles. Herer is a smaller, browser-friendly version with ‘only’ 2500 particles:

To get into AS3 I ported my particle engine to latter and the result is quite nice. Now 1000 fully animated (position, rotation, alpha, scale) particles are possible at the same time. When only changing the positions of the particles and therefore being able to use bitmap caching, up to 4000 particles still deliver a decent performance on my machine.