I ported a few of the wonderful examples on Dan Shiffman’s Nature of Code site. I hope they are helpful.  If you like them, let me know and I will keep putting my teaching examples on here.

The gifs were made with ofSaveScreen(), mogrify and gifcicle. Basically I exported a bunch of frames and then ran the following:

mogrify -resize 50% -format gif *.png
gifsicle --delay=10 --loop *.gif > anim.gif


PandaStream is a great new open source video sharing project. It’s still relatively new, but I’ve been having a great time hacking on it and making a couple of video sites for various projects. None of them are done yet, but I did give a workshop on Pandastream today as part of the Electrosmog festival at Eyebeam, so I thought I’d put up a little tutorial.

From the Panda site:

Unlike other video platforms, Panda is not just a service for encoding your videos for the web; Panda handles the whole process. From the upload form to streaming, Panda takes control.

This weekend I installed Red5 on my DreamhostPS account.  Note: You do need Dreamhost PS to run Red5 because it is a persistent process.  Non-PS accounts don’t allow persistent processes and it will be killed.  Here is what I did:

So I was having trouble watching The Office on hulu the other night due to an extremely slow network connection, but then I decided to look closely at my network traffic for a little while and see what I was actually sending/receiving.  This was very enlightening.  Excited about the information I found, I decided to also see which processes on my computer might be slowing down my machine.  This is what I came up with – a pretty good list of things you can do to speed up your Internet and your computer in general.

Recently I have come across a few alternative computer vision libraries, so I thought I’d share my findings.

Ferns Library by CVLab

This is a new app made by the wonderful Theo Watson.  He originally posted this in this openFrameworks forum where he also linked to the openFrameworks addon he made for it.

much more after the break

Here is some more FERNS stuff.  It is unclear to me which ones of these are FERNS and which ones are  are BazAR.  But one thing is for sure – these CVLAB people know their shit.

Real-time surface detection

Tonight I was playing around with some code that I found in this thread about natural marker AR made with SURF. It’s pretty neat stuff. This is building on some other stuff that I wrote just to do tempalte matching using a class I made: cvSURFImage. (cvSURFImage.h cvSURFImage.cpp)

Most of this stuff comes from the find_obj.cpp file that comes as an example with OpenCV.  But now I am digging into the locatePlanarObject() stuff that yaya from the openFrameworks forum wrote that uses cvFindHomography().  The idea is that the red square represents the plane that the identified object lies on.  But I can’t seem to stabilize the red square.

Chipmunk is a great physics engine for use with openFrameworks because it isn’t weighed down with any graphics support.  The documentation is pretty sparse, but I am starting on a little wrapper working and incorporated the ofxDelaunay addon by plong0.  There are still a lot of things missing, like springs and joints and stuff.  But I wanted to post this in case anyone else is interested in the code.  Here is what the wrapper class, ofxCPBody looks like.

I have been trying for a few weeks now to install FFMPEG-PHP on my Dreamhost PS account, and I’ve gotten damn close. I finally contacted Todd Kirby, the creator of FFMPEG-PHP, and hired him to help out. This was the result. I haven’t tested it 100% yet, which is why it’s not on the Dreamhost wiki. Feedback welcome.