Fun Experiments

Weather Tube Report

Weather Tube Report displays the weather condition and a selection of videos from YouTube, based on the zip code you enter. The videos are selected on the fly based on predetermined search parameters. The weather condition dictates these parameters – which include musical styles and instruments – to search for suitable videos. The weather condition also determines the background color.

The name is inspired by the band Weather Report and some of their song names are used to produce the gibberish text to display the temperature and condition.

Weather Tube Report uses the Yahoo! Weather API to retrieve weather information, the YouTube API to retrieve videos and a database to store the search parameters.

Built with PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS and jQuery.

Check it out here!

Feel free to leave me comments, questions, feedback, bug reports below. Enjoy!!


Categorized as Development, @Parsons, Spring10, Dynamic Interfaces, Fun Experiments, Mashups, @Parsons, Spring10, Webdev

Visualizing Leo’s Room

http://www.vimeo.com/9174985

A visualizer for Leo’s Room by Vangelis, from the movie Blade Runner. The visualizer was made with C++/OpenFrameworks and composited into a single still image. I created this as the first assignment for the Visual Music Studio class at Parsons.


Categorized as Fun Experiments, @Parsons, Spring10, @Parsons, Spring10, Visual Music Studio

quikdrawl

Quikdrawl is a drawing interface which uses 2 hacked gun game controllers with red LED attached to the front of each. Clicking the trigger turned on the LED which was color tracked to find it’s location. Each time the trigger is pressed, a bullet hole through layered textures appears on the screen. The textures were preprepared but the intention is that these would be captured and created from a certain section of the users silhouette and layered in with previous textures. Nick, Steve and me worked on this application for our set pixel class. Made with OpenFrameworks.


Categorized as @Parsons, Fall09, Fun Experiments, OpenFrameworks, @Parsons, Fall09, SetPixel

A/V performance tool

A scene for the a/v engine/live performance visualization tool Nick, Steve and me are working on. This is an underwater scene where bubbles are generated based on the FFT and emerge from the near the top of the cv blob, near the performers mouth. The bubbles generated in the background are also based on the FFT and bounce of off of the performers contour. These are produced to give the illusion of swimming through water to the top. The screen capture is a little laggy and has a test video overlayed to demonstrate the position of the performer. The scenes were created with the intention of performing live with Analogue Transit. Music in these videos by: Nine Inch Nails


Categorized as @Parsons, Fall09, Fun Experiments, OpenFrameworks, @Parsons, Fall09, SetPixel

Tweetcatcha

tweetcatcha1

TweetCatcha seeks to uncover the organic nature of news as it travels through Twitter over time, by examining the movement of NY Times articles through Twitter. Nick and me worked on this project for our data visualization class and my AS3 class.

The New York Times Newswire API is used to load news for the last 24 hours. The title and URL for the retrieved articles are used to search for tweets with the BackTweets API, a BackType service.

The articles are placed around the center arranged clockwise based on the time they were published. The tweets for each article emanate from the article near the center to the outside. These are based on the time difference between when the article was published and when it was tweeted. The 24 rings indicate the hour difference from 1 near the center to 24 near the outside.

Data was collected between November 13, 2009 and February 9, 2010 via a cron job set up to pull and store the data locally. The current database is 107 MB, with 15,327 NYTimes articles and 311,885 tweets for those articles.

Demo

Presentation:


Categorized as AS3, @Parsons, Fall09, Dataviz, @Parsons, Fall09, Flash, Fun Experiments, @Parsons, Fall09, Web Media 2

Basic virus creation and interaction prototype

Here’s the latest prototype Nick and me created for thesis. This was programmed in OpenFrameworks to prototype the following:

Physics and attributes of virus
Virus attacking characteristics
Amount of user movement to create virus
User interaction with virus
  • Physics and attributes of the virus
  • Virus attacking characteristics, not demonstrated in this video
  • Amount of user movement required to create virus
  • User interaction with virus

Here’s the latest iteration of our thesis abstract for more context on what we are working towards.

Humanizer – A Study of Humans as Viruses, Infecting and Mutating Systems.

Humanizer is an interactive audio/visual installation that explores the relationship between humans and systems. The state of the system is represented by an evolving audio/visual composition, projected on a large surface. Users can infect and mutate the components of the system with the human virus through gestures. This leads to evolving and humanizing the system, emphasizing humans’ effect on existing systems.


Categorized as @Parsons, Fall09, Fun Experiments, OpenFrameworks, @Parsons, Fall09, Thesis, Prototypes, @Parsons, Fall09, Thesis

Color tracking and grumpus

A simple color tracking app that tracks 2 colors. Made with OpenFrameworks.

Uses frontal face tracking, the cats eyes follow the face detected. Made with OpenFrameworks.


Categorized as @Parsons, Fall09, Fun Experiments, @Parsons, Fall09, SetPixel

Actionscript video and audio experiments

Screen shot 2009-11-14 at 11.12.44 PM

A video experiment with AS3 that uses Marilyn Manson’s “The Beautiful People” video. The code grabs the pixels from a specified area of the video and displays it in a 10 x 10 grid. You’ll need a good internet connection for this to play correctly.

Screen shot 2009-11-14 at 11.15.02 PM

A simple audio visualizer in AS3 for Porcupine Tree’s “Circle of Manias”. Crank up the volume!


Categorized as @Parsons, Fall09, Fun Experiments, @Parsons, Fall09, Web Media 2

Re-drawing application and game prototype

A refreshed drawing application. This one stores the color and x and y positions of the drawing and plays back an animated Julia Set fractal.

Get Adobe Flash player

Kanye’s Nightmare is a prototype for a game where Kanye needs to kill Taylor Swift zombies with a baseball bat. Use the arrow keys to move around and the spacebar to attack. If I develop the game any further I plan to include different weapons, more animation for the sprites, score and submitting highscores, maybe different levels and of course improved graphics.

Get Adobe Flash player


Categorized as @Parsons, Fall09, Fun Experiments, @Parsons, Fall09, Web Media 2

Drawing applications

Simple drawing applications built with flash/as3. The canvas is divided into 4 sections. Components are used for color selection, line thickness, opacity and a clear button. The first one simply draws and the second one animates the drawing.

Get Adobe Flash player

Get Adobe Flash player


Categorized as @Parsons, Fall09, Fun Experiments, @Parsons, Fall09, Web Media 2