A new semester is well underway, and with half of my (first) senior year completed, this second semester brings some interesting topics to study. Currently, I am in a class that teaches techniques in interactive video and sound. This post contains the creative brief for my first project. I am pleased to announce the Orchestra of Faces.

Orchestra of Faces

Overview

Orchestra of Faces is a simple concept that allows a group of friends to build and modify a piece of music through their presence and spatial relationships. Instead of using buttons, keyboards, and other input devices to control a song, the user or group of users becomes the controller.

Method

Through the use of computer vision technology and a digital camcorder, the face of each member of the orchestra will be recognized and tracked. The location, position, and scale of each face will be converted to a live stream of numerical data that will be used to modify pre-sequenced MIDI loops.

For example, when one participant approaches the Orchestra of Faces, the first MIDI sequence initiates. As the participant moves closer to the camera, the scale of their face changes, thus altering the stream of data used to modify the MIDI sequence. When a second participant enters the camera’s field of vision, their face is detected and their presence initiates the second MIDI sequence. The process of adding members and tracking their positions continues until each person leaves the camera’s field of vision, thus ending the MIDI playback.

Technology

Orchestra of Faces uses the following technologies:

• Max/MSP/Jitter by Cycling74 – http://www.cycling74.com/ 
• cv.jit computer vision library by Jean-Marc Pelletier – http://www.iamas.ac.jp/~jovan02/cv/  
• Digital Camcorder
• Macbook Pro

This concept and brief is © Jason Lang, 2009.

Please make sure to take an hour tomorrow and go to your local polling place and vote. Do it for yourself, your family, and your country.

Artwork done by me, 15 minutes, while arguing politics with friends.
I am proudly voting Barack Obama

Here we stumble upon the problem. Each one of those web application require a username and password. Passoword managers a great, but they are attached to a browser or a specific computer. My concept is simple – gather together every login and password, and store them in a central and safe location.

Click this link to visit a partially functional demo of my concept web application called “Gather”. This idea was conceived for a project that focused on interface design, so the interactivity is not fleshed out. Gather would be compatible with most of the top web applications, securely storing login data, and sending that information to the desired source. The 3d environment is used to add depth to the application, allowing a user (theoretically) to sort and arrange the login panels in space. To activate one, simply click to bring it to focus in a manner reminiscent of Expose on a Mac. At some point I may update the concept and even make it fully functional. Let me know your thoughts, feedback, and ideas for improvements.

Politically charged Photoshop disaster. 

www.barackobama.com or www.johnmccain.com — please just vote for SOMEONE.

I find myself passively watching many TV series’ but one of my favorites has been Pushing Daisies. If anyone has seen both Amélie and Pushing Daisies, you would have to agree that the similarities in color, texture, and style are remarkable. So, the bottom line is that tonight’s movie experience was delightful.

Below are few links I want to pass on.

So much could be said about the political situation right now, and so much is being said; to help you keep up with everything, Twitter has put together a wonderful aggregator web-app to pull together current thoughts. Its well worth spending a few minutes watching the world talk about politics over at http://election.twitter.com/.

I ran across an awesome web app tonight called Wordle. You can copy and paste text and it creates a word cloud of the most frequently used words. Very elegant, nice typography, and fun to use. Truly a novelty item, but very fun!

Approx 10 minutes. Rollerball pen. Dark blue, light blue, and black Permapaque wide tip markers. Reference on light table.

This is a simple one color design to be printed on a white shirt in either dark blue or black.

This design is based around a sketch of “Old Man Winter” that my girlfriend did a long time ago. Its been laying around her house and I asked if I could turn it into a shirt and this is the result. 

These may be available at some point for purchase as I will print extras once the screens are made. Some will go as gifts to friends, I am sure. Let me know what you think of the designs!

As we were flipping channels to tonight, we saw the dreaded BSOD on the Public Access channel. You know, the lame slide show channel that advertises the local vacuum cleaner store and runs terrible ads (created in MS Paint) for your local community college. Get a Mac?

Finally attached the wall graphics for my sisters room. These were pretty simple. There was a pattern on her bedspread that I freehanded on to three different pieces of white poster board, then simply cut out with scissors. I am really happy with how they turned out!

I find that junkmail often brings the largest amount of mediocre design, but when I ran across this, I could not believe my eyes. This is a rather normal looking Christmas catalog. You may wonder why its laying on a huge piece of paper? It just happens to be the order form that was stapled in the middle. With 9pt font all over it. Front and back. Seriously, who thought this was a good idea?

I found this while browsing through a Fossil store in the local mall. They usually have some great shirts and have had nice colors and designs despite their tacky one-liners. This shirt, however, made me really mad—to those who have used Windows or a Macintosh, the error on this shirt should be obvious. Editing fail.

I do not really know what to say about this one, except I had a moment of awkwardness when I saw this product while browsing through the housewares department in a local discount store with my girlfriend. I did a double take before I read the headline. If an Auto Wine Opener really must be in that shape, please increase the size of your product name on the box.

This one is a childhood favorite. Saw one laying around the other day and realized how much they make me smile. I really wonder sometimes what the names of toys are telling young kids…

***Sorry about the quality of the photos. They are just cell phone images.