The code and binaries (/binaries/Bin32/MoveBones.dll and /binaries/Bin64/MoveBones.dll) are available it’s own GitHub repository.

UDP listener and sender, with multicast variants too. Should come in useful, e.g. for getting OSCeleton data from the Kinect.

The code and binaries (/binaries/Bin32/Udp.dll and /binaries/Bin64/Udp.dll) are available it’s own GitHub repository.

Here’s a work he produced for his final MFA installation, with construction detail:

Wolfie on the left side of the image is made up of 432 unique 8-sided polygons. To convert him from polygon mesh to solid polygons, I wrote a plug-in for Rhino. A CNC company in NZ cut him out.

Hamish Dunlop

 
I’ve really fallen in love with the aesthetic and tactile qualities of faceted objects. I created a beautifully faceted object accidentally when I sent a 3D reconstruction to be printed, and discovered the backside of the model:

Detail from the Victoria and Albert Museum Cherub Reconstruction, Josh Harle 2010

 
From here, I was inspired to explore ways of achieving larger scale, cheap, faceted 3D models. An obvious avenue to investigate was papercraft; unwrapping 3D models into a 2D, foldable net/mesh and then folding it together into the final model:

Harry Portrait, Bert Simons

 
I made a number of experiments using papercraft meshes as molds for cast plaster objects. At the time, I was mainly interested in the possibility of producing the models with photorealitic colour. I used colour transfer paper, with an inverted mesh (the detail printed on the inside and folded with the tabs outside), painted the finished model in latex, and filled with plaster. This gave varying degrees of success in terms of colour transfer, but always gave great results as interesting objects. The intersection between planes in these papercraft models are emphasised by the folds in the paper, so they look and feel great:

Concept exploration, Josh Harle

I’m also interested in using the papercraft unwrapping software to take large-scale 3D reconstructions of environments, built using photogrammetry, and cut them into 5mm MDF, to create spaces. I’m keen on looking at something like this wonderful work, but as en enveloping space:

Fragments of memory, Twana Sivan

 
Finally, here’s a look at other forms of interesting reduced/simplified geometry. These are taken from an exemplary student of course I am tutoring called Experimental Modelling. The final stage of the course is the processes of fabrication either with 3D printing or laser cutting – Good Fun!

Project renderings, Matt O’Brien 2011

Nicolas Burrus’s Kinect Website has an updated version of the RGB demo that allows this sort of scanning of rooms…

Following on from Herein Berlin, this Saturday my collaborators and I are presenting an opening/performance of an “Analogue” Augmented Reality installation; this time called Herein London.

This work is a collaboration between myself, researcher Will Pearson, and writer Craig Selwyn Roper, and is an attempt to address the danger of Augmented Reality applications in homogenizing and rationalizing spaces. Story-telling is a powerfully evocative tool. By using Interactive Fiction as a medium to navigate mythic spaces and poetic encounters we attempt to reactivate the imagination as a faculty through which to experience our surrounding.

Join us 6 – 7 pm Saturday 12th March, at the south-west corner of Leicester Square, London (Facebook Event) with your imagination and phone pre-installed with a QR-code reader.

View Larger Map

This Friday in Leipzinger Platz, Berlin I am having an opening/screening of an “Analogue” Augmented Reality installation called Herein Berlin.

This work is a collaboration between myself and poet Hayden Daley, and is an attempt to address the danger of Augmented Reality applications in homogenizing and rationalizing spaces. Story-telling is a powerfully evocative tool. By using Interactive Fiction as a medium to navigate mythic spaces and poetic encounters we attempt to reactivate the imagination as a faculty through which to experience our surrounding.

Join us 6 – 7 pm Friday 4th March, Leipzinger Platz, Berlin with your imagination and phone pre-installed with a QR-code reader.

View Larger Map

Background

In a chapter titled “Walking in the City”, spatial theorist Michel de Certeau writes from the top of the world; the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. (1) Looking down on Manhattan from this “God’s-eye view”, he muses on the exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge related to a lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more. The elevation has transfigured him into a voyeur, and from here, with the city apparent as a whole, it is possible to believe in fictions of abstract representation such as The City. For de Certeau, this typifies the “Strategic” spatial practice of those with demarcated territory to control; the institutional, the logic of the state.

In contrast, down in the street:

The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other. (2)

Julani Pallismaa shares de Certeau’s concern with the surveying, reifying vision of dislocated observation. In The Eyes of the Skin he challenges the pervasive ocularcentrism of contemporary architecture – the privileging of the image and the eye over the other senses – and calls for an architecture that appeals to “the essence of lived experience [...] moulded by hapticity and peripheral unfocused vision” (3)
For him, focussed vision is a confrontation with an object, whereas peripheral vision envelopes us in the “flesh of the world”, a concept borrowed from Maurice Merleau-Ponty to describe the “interweavence of things and space, a presence of a human body in the world into which it is immersed.” As Artist Polona Tratnik articulates the consequences of a model of the “flesh of the world”:

A human being lives in an environment and is a part of it; he does not gaze at the world as at a display or something that is distant from him. He touches things and regards them. In such a manner he is seizing them, they are becoming a part of him. (4)

This interweavence fits well with de Certeau’s emphasis on the inadequacy and restrictiveness of abstract representations of place as administered by authority (land owners, city planners, architects). This definition of place de Certeau identifies as similar to Merleau-Ponty’s “geometrical” space of “homogeneous and isotropic spatiality”, in contrast to an “anthropological”, phenomenological space. (5) Exposing the quotidian lived experience of space which is enacted beyond the geometrical, de Certeau defines space as socially constituted; streets can be sinister or inviting not based on a label on a map, but on others’ practice of the space, i.e. “space is practised place”. (6)

The abstract conception of place is held by those with established, demarcated territory, who attempt to control, survey, and order it. He calls this action strategic. De Certeau’s emphasis on surveillance follows Foucault’s analysis of the panopticon as a metaphor for state power. He states:

[Strategy] postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets of threats ([...] enemies, […] objects of research, etc. ) can be managed. [T]he eye can transform foreign forces into objects that can be observed and measured, and thus control and ”include” them within its scope of vision.

In previous papers (7) I have explored how despite its appearance, the use of AR is a predominantly strategic spatial practice; The documentation and digitization of elements of our world in this way is a form of autographic surveillance. Codification using tags, categories, and ratings neatly enframes (8) the city into a concrete, Cartesian-space system which begs the question of the city as something that facilitates optimized, directed engagement – a city understood through productive logic. (9)

De Certeau’s model of strategic and tactical spatial practice emphatically suggests that simply voicing counter-narrative accounts of the meaning of the city is in danger of being strategic, and points to the importance of resisting this through art and the poetic, lon-literal exploration of ideas. Herein Berlin attempts to explore the meaning of spaces through personal mythologies and invested emotions, rather than an objective knowledge system, while humorously subverting the high-tech aesthetic of Augmented Reality.

1 Certeau, M. d. (2002). The practice of everyday life. , University of California Press.
2 Ibid. p93
3 Pallasmaa, J. (2008). The eyes of the skin : architecture and the senses. Chichester Hoboken, NJ, Wiley-Academy;
John Wiley & Sons.
4 Polona Tratnik, A Minima, http://aminima.net/wp/?language=en&p=826
5 Certeau, M. d. (2002). The practice of everyday life. , University of California Press. 117.
6 Ibid., 292.
7 Harle, J. (2010). TACTICAL AND STRATEGIC EXPERIMENTATION IN SPACE, Studia Philosophia, LV, 2010:3
8 Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology, and other essays. New York, Harper & Row. 182.
9 David, E. (2008). Archive Fever, Arthur No. 30

I can’t embed it, so you’ll have to link to the separate page. It requires the Silverlight plugin, and the wall starts at the very of top of the box. You can go fullscreen.

http://files.neonascent.net/camperdown/Test.html

If your browser setup is not compatible with the Silverlight plugin, you can alternative view a reduced image of the wall reconstruction on Flickr.

I’ve written a modification to Christoph Hausner’s SynthExport that will export the camera positions of your PhotoSynth, and create projection maps of the original images to retexture your model in high-res. Let me know how you find it!

Download the CameraExport app here: http://files.neonascent.net/CameraExport_v1-2.zip

GitHub of the CameraExport app: https://github.com/neonascent/SynthExport-Fork

Henri Astre has also added the functionality into the latest version of the PhotoSynth toolkit.

 
 
Previous Updates:
 

Edit 1: I’ve just changed the way the composite materials chain; they now cascade which makes everything a little more straightforward.
  

Greg Girard is a Canadian photographer living in Shanghai, and documenting some of China’s fringe architecture (whether on the edge of destruction, or ad hoc growths):

Hak Nam, the giant slum city in Hong Kong’s Kowloon that was torn down in 1993:

Vancouver-based photographer Greg Girard visited Hak Nam several times in the late 1980s, in spite of warnings that he was putting his life in danger (the place was renowned for its criminality), recording both the physical and the social fabric of the settlement, and the relation between the two. The fact that Hak Nam, in architectural terms, grew organically over time according to its inhabitants’ needs, as opposed to being constructed according to a pre-existing blueprint, made the city’s take on ordered chaos particularly compelling. As new-comers arrived, changing the social make-up of the community, so their built environment changed.

‘City of Darkness’, a book of Girard’s Hak Nam photographs, was published in 1993 (Watermark Publications), offering a series of compelling tableaux of life within the citadel. All of humankind could be found here, apart from the police. Their visits were few. Beyond the criminals, drug addicts and prostitutes, a micro-society operated with its own shops, doctors, factories and schools. And all under a pall of Dickensian darkness. As the book’s blurb puts it: ‘Through a continual process of demolition and rebuilding – with never an architect in sight – individual buildings gradually homogenised. Only at street level did the old grid of public alleyways still exist, but hemmed in and built over: dark, dirty and squalid.’ Yet somehow it all worked.

Though I’d say that entirely because it was organically grown, it worked – at least for its day-to-day functioning (earthquakes and fires might have been another matter).

Other Photography:

 
 
And Girard’s most recent project – Phantom Shanghai:

The book is a record of Shanghai’s vanishing historic architecture [...] From what I’ve seen so far, the images are imbued with a palpable melancholic beauty.