(Thanks, Spike, for board info which will be useful for future.) Spike and I are on the same page about first steps: we can do well by starting as simply as possible and just wire to what we have in-house - dumb fixtures and iCue motorized mounts, and some LED components. Instead of talking endlessly about sophisticated gear in the abstract, I'd like to see actual light modulation installed in our lab, running all the time, so we can hack it live, and so people other than technical experts can participate in the design and evaluation of our lighting modulation apparatus from the get-go. (I am thinking in particular of Tristana Rubio, Liza Solomonova, David's students, Patrick & his students, Komal, and me :)
It's a challenge, but I want to intercalate tech development finely with live action studies, and minimize programming in the abstract. Here are the motivating "games" that I want to build as soon as possible, as demos and reality-checks AKA Cruelty-checks (in the spirit of Artaud).
To be concrete, let me pose some feasible first steps. Who'd like to join us in realizing some of these experiments this term? Please invite / recommend someone who can work with us on the practical and elementary makings this month. (Navid or Spike, can you invite Ted to contact me cc Morgan, please?)
(1) Wire the camera-based tracking to
regular static fixtures via our dimmer (done),
iCue motor - to make a tracking spot,
some RGB fixture.
(2) Chase spot game with kids (XW, M?) -- or we could map Navid's moving virtual sound sources to moving spots. If video then we could vary the color and texture according to sonic cues.
(3) Color spots mapped to blobs by rank . Rank by size or speed. Devise rules such as
3.1 Intersect => a third color, or
3.2 Same speed (even if different location) => blend colors,
3.3 Same curvature => blend colors.
(4) Map vegetal, solar, building (Tristana, Komal, or Patrick's students) and other non-human temporal patterns to params (ie color, intensity) of fixtures mounted behind pillars or plant boxes, or other architectural accents in the room EV 7.725. I think we should map such slow data to state rather than to actual lighting parameters. This will take a weekend of collective re-wiring, to be scheduled perhaps in collaboration with Zoe & Katie (Annex / PLSS2 plant project).
Quality of light is not important at this stage - we need to create an entire signal path first and interpolate computational modulation. "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien"
Xin Wei