I recently updated <Bloccupy>
it’s an interactive media installation with kinect/video input, which I built for Projektil, Zurich in 2015.
It wouldn’t run anymore for various minor reasons. plain old code-rot and no devs around to prevent it.
while getting rid of some dust and freshing it all up, I did a nice screencast I wanted to share 🙂
I also wanted to summarize the basic building blocks and concept used for Bloccupy.
As most graphics-related things I did in the past years, it relies on crossplattform C++ and OpenGL.
pin toy metaphor
The underlying metaphor for the concept is a pin-toy.
Like in other projects I really fancy the procedure of downsampling something close to the point where it becomes unrecognizable and exploring this borderland.
To achieve the blocky look and elevation behaviour I manipulated a simple array of points in 3D space.
Those are fed into a GLSL geometry-shader and transformed into cuboids.
As input we used a raw depth-camera image in combination with video-footage, the update of point positions is performed with a couple of OpenCL kernels.
The depth values and/or color information from video is mapped onto the elevation of the cuboids and their color.
The scene is shaded and lit with a couple of point-light sources, to be able to visualize the intricate details of the resulting geometry.
colormap
optionally a colomap can be applied to better highlight different elevations.
I used this one, called “hot iron”:
results
nothing more to add, enjoy this outtake from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, rendered by the Bloccupy Engine.
hope you like it,
croc