Intersections Digital Studios

Metal that remembers

Suzi Webster — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 22:30:45 +0000

The most common shape memory alloy is called nitinol. Equal amounts of nickel and titanium are combined and melted in an electric furnace at 1300 degrees. The process is carried out in a vacuum to avoid contamination. Ingots are poured, and then either rolled into sheets or very fine wire.

A sequence of heat treatment is used to “program” the material to a specific shape. For example, a length of wire can be made to remember that it should straighten out if heated above 70 degrees. If you bent this wire at room temperature, it would stay bent. However, if you put the wire in a glass of hot water, it would immediately straighten out.

This cycle of bending and then straightening when heated can be repeated thousands of times. This can also be triggered by passing an electric current through the wire.

Some common uses for shape memory alloys include:

fire alarm systems to trigger a sprinkler, or in coffee machines to open a valve so that hot water flows onto the coffee.

Bobbi and I decided to try out the two experiments listed in our sma kit.

smatest1

smatest2

Our next step is going to be programming the nitinol ourselves with the help of Leon in ceramics and his high-temperature kilns!

Open Ended Group

mlantin — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 23:41:52 +0000

I recently came across an artist group called Open Ended Group composed of three artists: Marc Downie, Shelley Eshkar, and Paul Kaiser. There are some great artworks featured on their site, including some very innovative stereoscopic work (see Depth, and Upending for example). Another interesting bit is the interpretation of the motion captured Merce Cunningham Loops dance performance. The motion capture data is open source and available for anyone to view and re-interpret. A recorded full body performance of Loops can be seen here. In the motion captured performance Merce used his hands only.

And as if the creative force that is the Open Ended Group is not enough, they also developed an authoring environment called “Field” which allows real-time development of CG interactive works. It is built on Java and so can incorporate other libraries built on the same (including Processing). Field is open source and is the authoring environment they use for all their works. It is built for Mac OS X but could be ported to Windows with some help.

As an aside, I’ve seen lots of these open and/or free environments for the development of interactive work recently. Of note, Touch Designer from Derivative which is a really nice blend of signal processing and 3D CG. It has a very active development group and a friendly community. So far I’m quite impressed with what it can do. It runs on Windows only.

New 3D Stereo Camera from Fuji

mlantin — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 00:13:02 +0000

Fuji is coming out with this camera in October in Canada. Should cost around $699. It can do still (1omp) and video (640×480).

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Updated XSI stereo camera rig

mlantin — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 00:23:15 +0000

I cleaned up the XSI stereo camera rig I posted earlier. There were some problems with it and it wasn’t very customizable. This new rig has 3 parameters that can be modified:

EyeSep – the eye separation in whatever unit you choose
mmPerUnit – number of millimeters in the unit you are working in (so if you are modeling in centimeters you would put 10)
zeroParallax – how far the zero parallax plane is from the camera (in the example scene posted here, this parameter is linked the z position of the camera rig…so the zero parallax plane is always the zero plane).

Here is the new example anaglyph movie: newrig+cube.mov

The new rig with the cube example: newrig+cube.scn

The new rig on its own: newrig.scn

Virtual World, take 2.

mlantin — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 23:22:11 +0000

Sheldon Brown, author of Scalable City, is the Director of the new Center for Next-Generation Digital Media which will focus on developing a different kind of virtual world which proposes to be visually richer and more flexible than existing virtual worlds. The center is in a partnership with IBM and will use their new platform based on ‘System Z’ mainframes.

I actually just saw Scalable City (in stereo!) at the Stereo Displays and Applications conference in San Jose. It was definitely one of the better clips shown during the 2 hour screening. I’m looking forward to seeing what this new partnership brings.

Here is a clip of Scalable City:

[youtube]rvsAudGTsGY[/youtube]

[via The Wired Campus]

Inlakesh Alaken, a success!

mlantin — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 19:50:13 +0000

Inlakesh Alaken, an event organized by Joanna Ambrosio, one of our Masters students, was a resounding success. The event linked 3 sites – Vancouver, Guadalajara and Los Angeles – in an evening of shared video feeds, tandem graffiti and laser tagging. Photo documentation for the event can be found on flickr.

The technology for the event was provided by IDS, as well as:

Upgrade! Munich, with the platform A Day in the Life (http://www.a-day-in-a-life.de)
Tangible Interaction (http://www.tangibleinteraction.com) and their Graffiti Wall, and
GRL (http://www.graffitiresearchlab), and its free software Laser Tag V.02

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Stereographics article in Animation World Magazine

mlantin — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 22:05:34 +0000

Rick Overington, our motion capture technician, pointed me to this interesting article on stereoscopic production in Hollywood.

Stereo Rig for XSI

mlantin — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 07:18:42 +0000

Stereo Rig Test XSI

UPDATE: a new rig has been posted.

For those of you that would like to experiment with Stereo in XSI. Here is a simple scene with a stereo camera rig. It’s actually really easy to set up. You just need 2 cameras horizontally offset by a standard eye separation of 2.5 inches. You then need to decide on your zero parallax plane which is the distance at which objects will seem to be at the screen surface. Using that value you then compute the lens shift necessary to create that. The formula is:

eye separation/2*focal length/zero parallax plane
(make sure all your values are in the same units)

You enter the result in your camera setup. Left camera has positive value, right camera negative. In XSI, the parameter is called the Optical Center Shift.

In the example scene, the final compositing creates the anaglyph movie. You can change the fx tree to create two separate streams for the setup in the mocap studio.

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Inlak’esh Alaken (Mayan language: you are me, I am you)

mlantin — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 00:05:52 +0000

Joanna Ambrosio, one of our Masters students is organizing this event in the IDS. Hope to see you there!

Inlak’esh Alaken (Mayan language: you are me, I am you)
3rd Anniversary Mátika Magazine
http://www.matikarevista.com/inlakeshalaken

March 11th, 2009
6pm-11pm
ECUAD / IDS 2nd Floor
live video broadcasting + graffiti + fun
Vancouver + Guadalajara + Los Angeles

Inlak'esh Alaken (Mayan language: you are me, I am you)

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Workshop on ilovesketch with Dr. Seok-Hyung Bae

mlantin — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 02:15:00 +0000

During reading week, Dr. Seok-Hyung Bae from the University of Toronto came to Emily Carr to give a two day workshop on ilovesketch, a software program that he developed to help designers sketch ideas in 3D. The first session was a general overview of the features of the program, followed by one on one instruction for some of our faculty, sessionals and technicians. We are working with Dr. Bae on ways to integrate ilovesketch into our curriculum. The goal is to create a new sketch lab which will support the integration of digital drawing at Emily Carr. In the interim, we will find smaller ways to start using ilovesketch in our research projects and classes.

Here are some pictures from the workshop:

: ilovesketch workshop

: Car drawing by Seok Hyung Bae

: ilovesketch workshop, students looking on

: ilovesketch drawing

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