Eyeo Festival 2014!

A few months into my current project with Mirada, David, the lead programmer on my project, told me about an art, design, and code conference in Minneapolis that I should consider attending, called “Eyeo Festival”. I visited the website and thought it looked neat, so I went ahead and bought one of the passes when they went on sale. I didn't think too much about it for the next four or five months, up until I was checking into my hotel room in Minneapolis the day the conference began.

Wow. From the beginning of the first keynote of the opening ceremony Tuesday night, up until the end of the closing party Friday night, I was blown away by how encouraging, friendly, and open an environment this was. There was so much collaboration between artists/designers/creative coders from all industries, and so much YES-AND-ing.

I saw a great variety of innovative creative coding projects, from apps to interactive installations to creative code/performance art hybrid pieces, and beyond. Every talk I went to, every person I met or spoke with, inspired me or changed my perspective in some way. Over the next few posts, I'll discuss some of my favorite talks and the resulting thoughts and ideas I've had.

Eyeo was by far one of the most eye-opening, stimulating, and enlightening experiences I've had. There are not enough words to describe how much I enjoyed this amazing conference, and I'm excited to see what they'll have in store next year!

Life Update!

Wow, I didn't realize it had been so long since my last update...

Since we last spoke, blog, I have been to Turkey, to Greece, and back, and begun a new job as a programmer/creative coder at Mirada Studios in Los Angeles. I was fortunate enough to be able to stay on the Westside where I lived and worked previously, and have spent the last eight months working on a super-secret and super fun data viz installation project for Mirada's Special Projects team! I have learned an immense amount since I've begun. I am working with a really smart, creative group of people who continue to inspire me every day, and I'm looking forward to learning even more as I finish out the project this year.

I've also, for the past 5 weeks, been teaching an introductory programming course to 11-17 year-olds in Processing at Digital Dragon. The kids are all really smart, sweet, and eager to learn. It's been a great learning experience, and very rewarding to boot! I did a short interview for DD a few months ago. You can check that out here.

Kos, Greece

During this project, I've gotten to experience working with algorithms and code as it relates to design and design principles - that is, designing with code, rather than creating a design and implementing it with code. It's a very different way of approaching problem solving that I think makes more sense in the creative/entertainment tech context. One such algorithm I've encountered is the Slabtype algorithm: a way to dynamically generate typographically beautiful layouts for text. You can read more about the algorithm and how to implement it here. I highly recommend checking it out; it's an interesting read!

Houdini Engine + Play Mode

I've been messing with the Houdini Engine API to see if I can get Engine assets to cook in Unity during play mode.

It does work, as long as I don't ask it to update more than once every few seconds. Otherwise I end up with a memory allocation error:

I'll have to find a good workaround for this.

SIGGRAPH 2013

I went to SIGGRAPH about a month ago with SideFX, where I spent the majority of my time running the Houdini Engine demo at SideFX's expo booth. I really enjoyed getting to know SideFX's Toronto staff, and talking to people interested in the Engine.

I had the privilege of speaking at the "SIGGRAPH Birds of a Feather: VFX Student & Intern Showcase," where I talked about my path from student to professional and showed off some of my internship work. It was a great experience!

Aside from that, I spent a lot of time walking around the Emerging Technologies hall. E-Tech always has a lot of neat technology, and this year was no exception. Some of the ones I thought were especially interesting:

• Incendiary Reflection
• Aireal by Disney Research
• Transwall
• AquaTop Display

I had a blast at the conference, met some amazing people, and caught up with a lot of old friends, including my mentor from Georgia Tech, Greg Turk. Hopefully I'll get to go again next year in Vancouver!

Messing around with audio...

I've been getting back into computer audio recently. I really enjoyed the course when I took it at Georgia Tech four years ago, during which my teammates and I wrote a basic autotuner (back when autotuning was still cool). More recently, I've been brushing up on comp. audio concepts (yay, wikipedia!) and playing around with scripting an audio spectrum analyzer in Unity: https://vimeo.com/71708392.

I've also done some more work on my Kinect pointcloud visualization in Houdini: https://vimeo.com/71702497. This one's an audio-driven CHOPs animation of a Kinect pointcloud. The particles change color according to the pitch and percussion. R value for percussion, and G & B according to pitch. It's not perfect, and it's still a work in progress, but it's getting there.

Kinect experiments part 2

I have a render! I'm still waiting on my Leap Motion to arrive, but I'm checking out ZVector meanwhile.

http://vimeo.com/71382971

I'm working on a few Houdini Engine experiments right now. Stay tuned. :)

Kinect Experiments...

Recently, I've been messing around with bringing Kinect pointcloud data into Houdini. Here's a screenshot of my work in progress. I should have a render to share soon, too.

After that, I plan to do the same with Leap Motion data, and probably mess around with ZVector, too. If I could tie the three in together somehow, that would be fun, but I'm not sure how, yet. Some brainstorming is necessary... More soon. :)

Inspiration: http://mattiaslindberg.com/tag/houdini/