I have been experimenting with openFrameworks and openCV lately. This is a short demo of using one video (a live webcam) to control playback of another I recorded earlier. It analyzes the direction and speed of motion to set the playback speed.

The “flow” of movement uses something called block matching, often used in video compression. The interface to use openCVs implementation in openFrameworks is here: https://github.com/kellyegan/bmOpticalFlow

Some variations from a Processing sketch that simulates a body being pulled on by a series of other points. Not quite Newtonian gravity but similar.

Monopoly now has an all-knowing tower in the center of the board, that keeps tracks of moves, money and property. That way players don’t have to do all that annoying thinking. Some might think this takes the fun out of the game but I think it is perfect for our times. Better to teach our children to accept the will of our corporate/government overlords.

The new game does seem ripe for hacking. Perhaps someone could push it to its logical conclusions: non-negotiable bank transaction fees, forced pat-down for passing Go, or maybe that tower should incorporate TSA body-scan technology. Of course the Jail space seems redundant at this point.

I have been brushing up on my trigonometry in order to do some coordinate based drawing scripts. Here is a design inspired by a hand drawn pattern I found on Shapes / Scrapes / Scapes. I have created a number of variations on the original.

Several variations from a Processing sketch that iterates colored ellipses.

Although not as fully featured, these transceivers are much cheaper than the similar Xbee units, and so can allow for lower cost experiments in radio communication networks. After some initial experiments with JeeLabs  RF12 Arduino library I ended up writing my own library. I am currently working on some possible applications.

You can find the source code for the Radio library on GitHub here.

Photoshop filters bear a striking resemblance to the cellular automaton, Conway’s Game of Life. Just as Photoshop compares neighboring pixels to the current pixel and then adjusts its value, Conway’s Life compares neighboring cells to the current cell to determine whether it lives or dies.

Realizing this, I thought I would make a simple Photoshop action which implements Conway’s algorithm. It uses the Custom filter to blend neighboring pixels. A Gradient Map pushes the pixels back to black and white.

• Video of the action.
• Photoshop action file.

This is an algorithmic image I made a number of years ago. It is a diptych that has been run though an algorithm that offsets each horizonal row of pixels by a random number. The same offset is repeated multiple times, eventually forming ghostly doubles of the original image.

I attended a meeting about forming a Hackerspace in Baltimore, last night. Turn out was much better than expected.

We are in the processing of looking for space. Adam and Mark have gotten the baltimore node web presences going. Look for more news in the future.

Photo from @mehuman.