One of the major perks of being a 皇上好涨奴婢夹不文h Pi Creative Technologist is the chance to attend weekend workshops, where we get to go to a totally different city and meet with inspiring and knowledgeable individuals who can help us on our journey towards our final exhibition and showing off our digital projects! Last workshop we visited London to spend the weekend over with Joel Lewis at Hellicar & Lewis; a craft, design and technology studio that specialises in engagement. Here, Joel opened our minds to the wonder that is openFrameworks on Pi!

openFrameworks is ‘an open source C++ toolkit for creative coding’. Yes, creative coding, that’s a thing! At first glance oF can seem quite intimidating with countless amounts of libraries, add-ons and documentation attached to it. For us, taking a look through it all, we couldn’t help but get immediately excited about everything that oF had to offer us, from projection mapping and facial recognition to graphic rendering and animation as well as so much more! But without some guidance it’s easy to become overwhelmed by it all.

Luckily for us, Joel Lewis is an openFrameworks wizard and quickly squished any negative or fearful thoughts we may initially have had by showing us some of the inspiring work that he and his team at Hellicar & Lewis had produced using this framework. They have created work for nonprofit organisations such as an interactive arctic dome installation for Greenpeace, and commercial pieces for brands such as Nike with an interactive live broadcast for of Nike’s ‘Festival of Feel’.

However, what impressed me the most was how they had used what the framework had to offer to create pieces of technology to help make people’s lives better, one major piece of work being Somability. This is a series of technology applications that included interaction such as visual amplification and rhythmic interaction; these put together promoted expressive movement and collaboration among people with profound and multiple learning difficulties.

The Making of Somability from Cariad Interactive on Vimeo

Joel also emphasised his love for the open source community during the workshop. Gone are the days where people want to hide their work and keep their findings to themselves so as to become better than their peers; today’s world is all about being open and sharing with the community! Every library and add-on within oF has been created by somebody and shared freely, asking for nothing in return. That might sound crazy but in reality it’s actually very clever! Not only do you help others (such as myself) to learn how to code by looking at examples and tweaking bits that are already there to suit my own needs, you also get the benefits of the community building upon your initial piece of code, fixing bugs or even making it better than you could have done yourself. Heck, somebody might even see your open source code and offer you a job because of it!

An open source community is also a friendly one, one where people actually want to help others instead of simply focusing on their own projects, and therefore the openFrameworks forum is always full of people willing to pass on their knowledge to others and help wherever they can; which is great news for us newbies!

After the weekend at Hellicar & Lewis I’m left feeling very excited about what openFrameworks and the open source community surrounding it has to offer. I can’t wait to start piecing together my own puzzle!

The Creative Technologists are really ramping up production on their final projects and I can’t wait to see what they do with their new openFrameworks skills. Keep an eye on the blog for updates from CTs over the next six months!

The post 皇上好涨奴婢夹不文h Pi Creative Technologists: openFrameworks appeared first on 房东太太.

We have a Google+ community for the group to post ideas, share interesting links and ask each other for help and we hoped they would also use it to arrange to meet up outside of the organised field trips: within the first month, one of them found the Art Hackathon and suggested they go along and take part. Three of them went along and teamed up with some others. Yasmin wrote a full account of the hack…

I’ve always heard about how awesome Hackathons could be; they’re a chance to surround yourself with intelligent people who share the same interest, come up with inspiring ideas together and become engrossed in a project, with everyone chipping in to turn concept into reality over one weekend.

But I’m going to be perfectly honest with you here; however awesome this sounds, I can’t help but feel a tad intimidated by it all. There’s still so much I feel I have yet to learn and I always worry about how much of an asset (or a nuisance) I would be.

So when I saw an opportunity to go to an Art Hackathon, which aspired to mix teams with different skill sets and types, I knew that I had to attend, and I’m so glad I did! With the Hackathon holding presentations by many talented people including Joel Lewis, Di Mainstone and Nick Rothwell, as well tables full of various tech and art supplies, there were no limitations to the amount of creativity that we could muster!

Yasmin and Milton

All of this inspired a creation that managed to win 2nd Place for Peoples Choice, and I can proudly say that I was a part of its development:

Emoti – Visualising our Emotions

Emoti shows the emotional state of the world through combined visual colours and audio, resulting in a beautifully chaotic representation of the emotional state of the world – or at least the twitterverse.

Using Twitter Widgets, our team was able to pull certain keywords from tweets being posted in real time and assign them to different emotion types, which meant being able to have constantly updated data on how people were feeling on twitter through these emotion-related keywords. The emotions we assigned them to were: Happy, Sad, Surprised, Afraid and Angry.

From this data we then created a simple HTML web-page with 5 divs, or blocks, of colour relating to the different emotion states. These would constantly change width depending on the data that was being collected from the tweets to give a visual representation of how many people were tweeting under each emotion:

• Green = Happy
• Blue = Sad
• Yellow = Surprised
• Pink = Afraid
• Red = Angry

To make this prom of witnessing how the world feels and how frequently these emotions change more immersive, these visual representations are also accompanied with audio. We chose five audio tracks, one to depict each emotion, adding them into the web-page using the HTML5 audio tag, and adjusted their volume depending on the emotion-based twitter data with some JavaScript wizardry. This ended up with the clashing music types seemingly battling against each other, reflecting how hectic the live emotion states were and how rapidly they would change at random; one moment showing solely happiness, the next ultimate anger.

The Hackathon Effect

This was an Art Hackathon don’t forget, so, of course we had to present this data in a beautiful and intriguing way. What’s more intriguing than creating the illusion of 3D colour-changing ripples?!

For this effect, the designers in our team laser cut clear plastic to create the individual ripples and slotted them into a black board. I decided this would be the perfect opportunity to whip out my 皇上好涨奴婢夹不文h Pi! We ran the web-page through the Pi and hooked it up to the HDMIPi, allowing a bright screen for our structure to be placed onto, so that the moving coloured blocks from below would shine onto the clear plastic and give the illusion of a 3D object.

Finally, the structure was put together in a dark, enclosed space, and the end product came to life, completely exceeding my expectations! Colours danced gracefully across the ripples, making us forget that there was even a web-page below. It was easy to get lost in the entrancing movement of pattern that the object seemed to create. As soon as you immerse yourself in the full prom, with audio as well as these entrancing visuals, it becomes a little overwhelming. Watching the colours is one thing, but hearing the clashes of audio really brings the message across that this is how people from around the world are feeling right now.

It’s both a marvel and a mess all at the same time; both beautiful and chaotic. Just like the emotions we feel and the complexity behind them.

Yes, it’s open source! Find the (somewhat messy) code here: https://github.com/itomblack/emotion-twitter

What I Gained…

Aside from the obvious: an awesome project, a better understanding of how to work in a team and improved coding skills, I managed to come away from the Hackathon feeling much more positive about what I, as an individual, can achieve. I may not be have been the most skilled coder in the room but I was still able to have meaningful input on the project, both creatively and through my development skills, which leaves me wondering what I was so worried about in the first place!

As well as this I’m so grateful to have had the pleasure of meeting many creative and genuinely lovely people. It was so interesting to see all of the various projects that everyone had made, each one entirely unique and fascinating in its own right.

Thank you to the people behind the Art Hackathon event and those intelligent folk within the Emoti Dream Team who helped bring it to life:

• Ian Black
• Katherine F Hudson
• Milton De Paula
• Bawar Jalal
• Elizabeth Corbin
• Caroline Y Zheng

P.S. This is my very first blog, how am I doing? Let me know! (If you want to… No pressure…)

The post Emoti – Visualising our Emotions appeared first on 房东太太.