Hogtown Consulting » medialabtoronto

Twitter wall for #hohoto event

Patrick Dinnen — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:02:58 +0000

Monday night was party night for the Toronto geek crowd, at the #HoHoTO party. Read about it or watch an awesome video about how it all came together. It was a great event put together by a very cool bunch of volunteers, with 25k was raised for the local foodbank.

This was a great chance for me to roll out the TXTris wall version 2 which I’ve been working on.

I customised the projection to be all software and it ran on two huge screens at the Mod Club for a large chunk of the party. I plugged into Twitter as the content source, so people at the party could senda twet and see it tumble down the screens in real(ish) time.

More details over at Media Lab Toronto and some (rather dark) pictures from the night on Flickr.

Cardboard augmented display prototype

Patrick Dinnen — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 14:53:35 +0000

I’m working on an update to the TXTris projection system. You can read about the original and details on how it works. The gist is that it’s a txt message projection system that is ‘aware’ of physical obstacles placed in front of the projection screen.

This new version uses JBox2d, a open source code library for doing in game physics. I’m using it to provide much more realistic behaviour from the text. Now it slides, bounces, flips and falls in a realistic way.

There’s a grainy video after the jump showing how this looks working against my computer monitor. The final will be a projection at wall size.

The text is a portion of Barack Obama’s acceptance speech and the skyline it’s falling onto is Detroit. Congratulations Mr. Obama and U.S. voters for making the right choice.

Huge Balloon Project

Patrick Dinnen — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 20:04:02 +0000

I’m eyeball deep in a great project to build an interactive system for 250 5ft, colour LED lit balloons right now. I’m collaborating with David MacAllum and Gabe Sawhney and we’re working with an awesome installation by KPMB for the Luminato festival.

update post-event: We, Media Lab Toronto, worked on sound reactive lighting effects that ran at various points throughout the week. We were given special billing along with the Silent Rave event (slightly odd, given the sound reactive nature of our setup). Gabe built on the control system I had put together in Processing and came up with a really elegant system for controlling the lighting colours and rhythm by hand. The night was earily silent (as billed) but loads of fun. Raju Mudhar from The Star described it like this:

â€œWith the choreographed lighting from the balloons in the square, it did feel a bit like an outdoor club. But more than that, it was spontaneous and fun. People shared earphones with those that didnâ€™t have. Every festival in town could use more of these types of moments.â€

You can read more at Media Lab Toronto and see photos of the setup, silent rave and some rainy shots.