The Pixel Farm

The ‘Virtual Gardener’ (depicted below) is a very simple web-based 2D augmented reality game engine.  Using color tracking in Flash, players can tend a virtual garden and grow a small patch of flowers by waving around a physical object in front of their webcam.

waterin' the virtual plants

The game is currently a very rough prototype and is missing all sorts of niceties (i.e. sound effects, scoring mechanisms, etc.) – hopefully I can refine this framework so that it can serve as the basis for a host of color-drive 2D AR games.

If you’d like to try it yourself feel free to click on the ‘Start’ button below.  You will need a webcam and a solid colored object about 2″ by 2″ in order to play.  When prompted, simply hold up this object so that it fits within the small rectangle in the middle of the screen.  Once the object appears within this region, click on the button that appears to cause the game to “memorize” the color value of your object.  From here you will be able to wave your object around in front of your webcam as though it was a mouse cursor.

The Carbon Peep Show is a project that I co-developed with Adam Harvey over the summer for Artist as Citizen. Developed as an entry for AAC’s  Burning Embers competition, The Carbon Peep Show is designed to showcase potential environmental scenarios that may play out based on the level of global warming that the Earth experiences over the next hundred years or so.

Upon visiting the Carbon Peep Show, visitors are presented with a closed set of theater curtains.  Behind the curtains lie a series of climate change themed videos that depict ecological consequences that may happen to our global environment if the world warms by a certain number of degrees.  The only way to watch a video, however, is to “pay” for it using a dollar bill.  Simply holding up a dollar bill to the highlighted rectangle on your screen (assuming that you have an active webcam on your computer) will advance the peep show to the next video in the playlist.

Hold up a dollar to watch the next video

In addition, the Carbon Peep Show is designed to be part of a larger conversation in which responses from the community can be showcased and broadcasted to the world at large.  By clicking on the ‘Participate’ button, visitors can submit their own video responses to be included in the project.  Will we be the victims of environmental disaster?  Will our cities become submerged under rising ocean levels?  Or, perhaps, will our ecosystem find its way towards a new equilibrium?  Submit your response and let the world know what you think!

The Carbon Peep Show wants to hear from you!

The Metaverse Pixelator is mashup project that captures, transmits and recreates your likeness into one of the many parallel universes that we call “virtual worlds.”  Using your computer’s built in webcam, the Metaverse Pixelator will digitally reduce you into a set of representative pixels and then beam them into Second Life as a series of 3D objects that are visible by anyone who is currently logged in.

To get started, just click here to access the web-based client.  You’ll be presented with an window that will allow you to snap a photo that will be sent streaming into the metaverse.

It's me, digitally reduced by a factor of about 20%

As if Wired magazine needed to be more digital

Once you’ve captured a photo you can click to log into Second Life and teleport your avatar to the Metaverse Pixelator screening room, which is located on a floating platform high above the world in order to give you the best view of your creation.  Click here to access a SLURL that will take you directly to this location.  Once there you can simply click on a big button in the center of the platform that will cause your image to be projected into virtual space.

Pixelly Wired cover. Note my tiny avatar in the foreground for scale.

Here’s a little video that walks you through the whole process.

Just a quick test of a light-sensitive Augmented Reality environment that will soon become inhabited by a colony of virtual snails!  Different colored lights will affect the environment in different ways, changing the system’s color balance and thus making certain snails easier to detect by predators.

In this demo you can see a blue light making small forests grow up out of the ground.  Eventually this behavior will be triggered by a green light [I accidentally left all of my LEDs in NYC this weekend! ]

Just a quick update to demonstrate how color detection can be used to interface with an AR model. The demo below shows me waving a blue crayon mark on a piece of paper in front of my webcam. The system is set up to determine the relative “blueness” under each verticie of the plane. When it detects something above its threshold value it raises that portion of the plane, increases the blue value and decreases both the red and green values. This technique will become the basis of a larger project – stay tuned!