Perceived Space
Stuck in a space that looks a bit off.
Nobody to keep you company except some freaky floaty box that keeps pulsing.
And somehow everything seems to be following you around.
Being a beginner in the field of all things programming the thought of creating something somewhat presentable in a completely new environment seemed daunting to say the least. After seeing the possibilities of OpenFrameworks through some of its examples, however, ideas for a project started to form. Even though almost none of those ideas came to fruition, they were a good starting point.
The concept of this work evolved slowly over repeated failed attempts to implement various other concepts. In fact this project could be considered a very pretty recycle bin containing leftovers from other ideas. When obstacles were encountered that seemed to be unfeasible to overcome, but were related to a crucial aspect of the concept, the idea was scrapped, save a few of its aspects, and yet another idea was born from those aspects.
Rinse and repeat.
An attempt to graft a face onto an object became an attempt to graft a face onto a moving object which became an attempt to manipulate a single object with face movement, and so on and so forth.
The resulting project is an attempt at creating a sense of space and depth in the viewer, using manipulations of simple shapes. The simple shapes in question are numerous circles and a single box. The circles change in colour causing the feeling that the smaller, centermost circles are furthest away of all the circles, while actually they are the ones being drawn the last, so they are in fact the circles “closest” to the viewer. The black colour of the box, its size constant pulsing, and
the difference in its movements compared to the circles behind it creates a contrast that helps to give the feeling of the box floating in some tunnel-like space.
The constant slight changes in the shapes’ sizes gives the viewer a slight feeling of space, depth and slight uncanniness.
By default it is set to be controlled by the position of the mouse but it can be controlled with face detection as well.
Press any key to control with face detection.
Click left mouse to control with mouse again.
NMNT LAB 2 from Ásbjörn Erlingsson on Vimeo.
Sources I used when making this project
The Invaluable Lewis Lepton OpenFrameworks tutorial series.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4neAtv21WOlqpDzGqbGM_WN2hc5ZaVv7
Various (and numerous) forum OF forum posts.
https://forum.openframeworks.cc/
https://openframeworks.cc/learning/
Addons and tools I used:
ofxOpenCv
I used ofxCvHaarFinder to track face movement
Future work
Finetune the movement of the circles so that they give a greater sense of depth, but the math behind it escapes me.
Streamline the facetracking, which can be jumpy and awkward.
Restrict the movement of the circles so that they do not go off screen