On Saturday 20th the website, Jue Festival Chinese tour, and app version 1.0 of Hologram Nails were launched at Loop Bar in Melbourne. Though I was in Ho Chi Minh the live internet stream meant I could be virtually present for the first public preview of my augmented reality nails app, hosted by Producer/Director Thea Baumann and Dancer/Performer Shian Law.

With the main technical hurdle out of the way, and a good reaction from the people present, I’m looking forwards to developing the themes visually and exploring this entirely new space.

http://aphids.net/current/METAVERSE_MAKEOVERS_LAUNCH_PARTY

Support our development: http://www.pozible.com/index.php/archive/index/4826/description/0/0

This Sunday I will be giving a workshop on how to design and create an Augmented Reality Cocktail in Shanghai at XinCheJian hackspace. No programming experience needed, just a smartphone and a laptop with blender, as the focus will be on AR techniques over software implementations.

More into and bookings at XinCheJian : http://xinchejian.com/event/?ee=113

The Australia Council for the Arts blog Artery profiles Thea Baumann and the Metaverse Makeovers project we’re currently working on:

Most manicurists define bling as painting little pictures or designs on fingernails, or perhaps applying tiny decals or imitation jewels.

It could be called art, at a pinch, but what if you could look at your nails via webcams or a downloadable app, and see designs jump off your hands thanks to a dynamic augmented reality (AR) holographic effect?

http://artery.australiacouncil.gov.au/2011/12/thea-nails-augmented-reality/

Image via Thea Baumann from a publication of work from the last Metaverse Makeovers piece - My Own Private Neon Oasis.

While in Tokyo I created and remotely installed the AR experience for Hologram Holidays at a Sunnybank mall in Brisbane . Using a combination of effects, models, videos and computer vision, guests saw their hologram-hosted experiences culminate in an interactive swirl of hypercoloured gem nail art, tropical fishes, and neon fumes.

In between experiences triggered by the hostesses, live Vietnamese TV was streamed via the internet onto a rolling surf of polygonal shards, wrapping them with hypersaturated daytime soaps and Californian pharmaceutical ads.

Earlier this year I provided a little technical direction, an infinity skinsuit print, and augmented-reality make-up for the first Metaverse Makeovers live performance installation on March 19th 2011 at Fur Salon in Melbourne, Australia, during the Melbourne Fashion Festival. The AR make-up was to be projected onto the performers and react to their movements in unique ways for each of the 3 stages of the performance/evolution. The work was a collaborative effort between project director Thea Baumann, Brooke Amity-Stamp from BalletLAB,  stylist and contemporary visual artist Alice Lang, contemporary media artist Katharine Neil, documentary film maker Adele Wilkes, and myself.

The footage below is mainly culled from shaky iphone clips of on-site testing of a single effect (as I spent most of the performance in a wire-filled cupboard). I will post an update with footage of the final performance as it becomes available. Also see below for a more detailed description of the piece.

A collaboration with Illustrator Rus Brockman, New Methods of Deception is a manual for evading detection in a future of ubiquitous sensors and analysis of huge volumes of data on individuals and societies. Constructed as an underground handbook for paranoiacs, dissidents, criminals, academics, cultural tourists and non-beings, it bears traces of its passage from mind-to-mind and medium-to-medium; supplemented, edited, betrayed and distilled.

Page One

Page Two

Originally commissioned by Higher Arc Magazine.

A 3d flocking simulation that gathers around performers’ hands. Needs a lot of tweaking but has a surprising sense of depth when seen in person.

Audio is an unreleased track by Crops and Alex Akers.

www.bferns.com

Seeing what I can do with some audio-reactive 3d cylinders and tracking.

Music used for the test and the video is an edit of De De Mouse‘s Windowlicker (slice & scramble mix). I saw him at SuperDeluxe the other week and started thinking about minimal glitchy visuals while watching Leno VJ

I was asked to provide post-production and some extreme color-grading for this post-apocalyptic spot for Dunlop via Vice Magazine; re-imagining an Austrailian tale of winning Wimbledon in a pair of borrowed shoes.

Referencing Italian horror and experimental Japanese films, the feeling of physical gels interacting with reprojection was combined with the harsh lines of modern digital, matching the spot’s balance between sinister and camp.

The full-length Visuals produced for Omelas as a back-up for when I couldn’t use live feedback effects. I don’t play it any more so thought I would post it here.

The initial idea was visualising Stanisław Lem’s idea of any other intelligence in the universe being forever beyond our comprehension and capacity to communicate, despite being based on the same simple universal physical processes.

The neccesities of the live visuals format meant the first experiments were stripped back to better suit the stage environment. Starting as pulsing spotlights that replicate across the stage, eventually the performers are enveloped in an infinite fractal grid of glittering points.

Some test footage of an optical flow effect (simulation driven by andrew-benson‘s HS-flow shader ), including one of its first live uses. A lot more to explore in this direction.

Test footage of the realtime visuals for the second Terminal Beach. Techniques used included fluid simulations, live video tracking, virtual cameras and industrial decay.

MRIs provided by Inside Insides and DICOM test imagery.

MSAFluid Library used for fluid simulation.

A series of visuals designed to be projected accross the whole stage and the performers themselves when live video processing wasn’t feasible.

Visuals for the first Terminal Beach came via an automated VJing program, designed to picks scenes at random from a carefully-curated library of films. Incidental narrative flows, juxtapositions and deconstructions emerged from the machine, their meanings inferred by viewers unaware of the arbitrary nature of selection and presentation.

Live development continued throughout the evening, adding more traditional functions like loops and BPM matching to allow for faster cuts. The broadening range of options available to the program and increasing BPM as the night continued resulted a gradual loss of narrative cues and consistency in favor of rapid-fire repetetive motions and moments from the entire library.

Moon Theory Tour – Melbourne