For my independent study I planned on working on a few new pieces and Everyday Life of Objects project. I was primarily interested in creating some sort of computer vision software; A program to read in web-cam images and distinguish various objects based on color. It will read and display up to four colors write now, without any significant slowdown. I’m very happy with the results- it’s not quite what I anticipated, but I love the complexity of the output. I spent a significant amount of time just setting up this whole system, so one of the more substantial performance pieces I had planned was put on hold (until mid-june). I decided to make a simpler piece based on the camera tracker. This piece was just finished Saturday. I’m pleased with it, the images don’t look that great, however. The camera continuously tracks the movements of these Lego characters as they float through the water. I was worried that the Lego people would remain motionless, but they do float; and the effect is very hypnotic. I think the over setup needs more consideration. I’m planning on finding a better place, and documenting it well within the next couple of weeks.
I spent the early part of the semester working on ELOO. I wrote a lot of code to optimize the viewing (so that only objects within the view frustum would be drawn). This will make the whole program run a lot smoother. Things were put on hold until the purchase of Deep Exploration, so that the textures could be exported without difficulty. Within the last week I finished the basic code to read and write targa image files (which support alpha/transparency). Now the textures need to be applied to the planes and displayed. I’ll be working on this next week. I feel like if I sit down and focus on it without distractions I could get it done. After all of the texturing we can try some sound tests.