v3ga

Simon released the source code of the program we assembled for the Web Flash Festival some weeks ago. Check it out.

cadavre exquis web flash festival from crazy snake on Vimeo.

Here is a sketch written in Processing that allows you to retrieve in real-time SMS messages from a phone. It uses a MySQL-driven database to store the messages, you’ll need to have one at your disposal (remote or local).

A convenient way to install such a database on your computer is to download and install MAMP, then it’ll be just a matter of drag’n'dropping a folder in your Applications folder, the easy and usual way on Mac.
The package comes also with phpMyAdmin, a popular web-based tool to manage MySQL databases from within your browser.

Softwares/hardwares needed to run this program (assuming you have Processing installed):

• Mac computer with bluetooth enabled.
• A mobile phone with bluetooth capabilities (and enabled).
• Access to a MySQL server. Download and install MAMP if you want to run one on your computer.
• Cocoa UltraSMS. This software uses bluetooth communication to connect to your phone, and SQL database to save the retrieved messages.
• MySQL library for Processing by Florian Jenett. The page comes with description to install a MySQL server too.

Here are the few steps to make the program run :

1. Install MySQL and create a database called processingsms.
If you installed MAMP, use phpMyAdmin to perform this operation. This step can be skipped if you have already access to a server.

2. Download and install Cocoa UltraSMS.
Run it and click on the Setup button to modify some parameters. Also, choose your bluetooth-enabled mobile phone in the list.

Note that the screenshot parameters are important and may differ from your MySQL configuration. This paramaters will be used in the Processing sketch to connect to the database :

• hostname + port. On a default MAMP installation, these are set to 127.0.0.1 and 8889.
• database. The name of the database that was created in the previous step.
• username + password. On a default MAMP installation these are both set to root.

3. Click on the Test button to check if UltraSMS can connect to the database. It will also ask you to create two tables (smsins and smsparts), click Ok. The Empty button will remove all the messages already saved.

4. Open Processing IDE, load the ProcessingSMS.pde sketch. In the config tab, change the values of the variables accordingly to your UltraSMS setup.

5. Click on the Start button of the UltraSMS application. If everything goes well, the status should switch to Connected.
6. Run the program, it should display in the console your sms messages that were inside your phone.
7. Tell a friend to send a message on the connected phone, it should be grabbed and saved in the database !

I recently used this configuration in two installations, one of them being the particles cloud that was shown during the Web Flash Festival.
One of the main drawback I had to face is that the UltraSMS application deconnected when messages were sent massively to the receiving phone. You have then to reconnect manually , which may not be a good thing if this system is to be used in standalone installation. UltraSMS source code is available and there may be a hack to force an automatic reconnection in such situations.
The mobile phone I used for the tests was a Sony Ericsson K600i.

The .zip file containing the Processing sketch also contains a php script to simulate the sending of a SMS into database, which is quite handy when you’re in debugging mode. MAMP is then the tool of choice as it also installs Apache which runs a localhost webserver and lets you execute php scripts.

Any feedback would be very much appreciated. If you have tips, mobile phones that worked / not worked with this configuration, projects using this stuff (or other type of configuration), that would be lovely to share. Thanks!

Inauguration of our studio in Bordeaux,France. from 2Roqs on Vimeo.

Two weeks ago we@2Roqs inaugurated our new studio in Bordeaux (read my previous post). Invitations were sent to guests by e-mail that linked to the stop-motion video above. It was shot during some rainy days of April, and the idea was to create something non-digital that would show our new place and at the same time some of our past and present references, while displaying infos about the party itself. You may have recognized the green screen and the pixelized bee of that good ol’ Atari-St. The music was specially created by Arnaud, the man behind Bordeaux-based Splank Studio.

The party itself went super well, most of the people we had invited showed up to say hi (and drink a bit too ;-). For this occasion, we had re-worked one of the first interactive application (called RoqsTree) Mike and I started to develop back in 2004. The concept is quite simple, people can register to the application by taking a photo, and then their avatar is shown as a kind of fruit on a tree grown in a 3D model of the place hosting the event. Some interactions can occur too between the participants. More details soon !

Photos courtesy of Michaël.

I spent an intense week-end in Paris where I perfomed a coding session with Processing (see my previous post). I had the pleasure to be associated with Simon Geilfus for the whole Sunday afternoon and we just had six hours to produce a program around the theme “Playable”, knowing that our production would be shown during the final ceremony on the evening (pressure, pressure!).
Fortunately we met the day before around a beer so that we had time to plan things a bit and talked on how we could possibly interpret that theme. We quickly agreed on the fact that it would be a good opportunity to let the audience participate and play with our application in some way.
We ended up re-using and re-mixing some code we had taken with us, and produced an animation which rendered 30000 black and white audio-reactive particles. Simon did a great job on this, by using a special technique with a pixel shader for individual particle drawing (cheers for showing me that :-).
People were then able to send SMS messages, and words were then dynamically assembled by picking up some of the particles and coloring them. All of their movements were controlled by some flocking behaviour. That was awesome, and I think people really liked it as we received almost 50 messages in 2 minutes…! We had very positive feedback, though a last-minute-we-didnot-let-run-the-application-enough-time bug prevented the application to display the whole set of received messages.

Links:

• Vimeo video
• Photos by Ludovic Gibert
• Photos by Les designers interactifs
• Photos by Quasimondo

Andrei Thomas recently adapted the Blob Detection library for Actionscript 3 and extended the functionalities into a BitmapBlobDetection object. Great!

I’ve been invited to participate to the next Web Flash Festival @ Le Centre Pompidou in Paris, France. The performance I am involved in is called “Le cadavre exquis de code” in which several programmers/artists will create a program around a given topic using Processing environment. Each participant will remix what his predecessor has just written and the creation will be exposed during the final gig on Sunday. The whole event will last one afternoon and will be public. I will be pleased to share/remix code with Simon Geilfus, Fred Fauquette and Victor Taba. If you come by, please stop and say hi :-)

The festival will feature conferences by Andre Michelle (yay!), Quasimondo, Etienne Mineur and Motion Twin among others.

Should be cool !

Links
Ecrans.fr

I had the pleasure to work with artist Etienne Cliquet on a project involving Mobile Processing and BlueTooth communication. The application is exposed and running during three weeks for the the Déplié international exhibition @ Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris (13 May-8 June), and is part of six origami-centered installations Etienne specially created for this event.

The project consists in embedding poems written by Sonia Marques on a phone midlet program in order to be sent to surrounding bluetooth-enabled devices that can receive and display texts or other type of media. During the event, an inhabitant of the Cité Universitaire will carry the phone, wandering and sending the poems around.

Links
Ordigami / Folder
Déplié international par Etienne Cliquet (french)
Useful links about bluetooth & transfer protocols using J2ME.

Some people wrote me to ask where some of my processing sketches were gone. Well, they’re lying somewhere on my server with a webpage I don’t maintain anymore. When Processing Beta came out in 2005 (I think), Martin Antolini kindly adapted my sketches from Alpha to Beta version. I just packed all of them in an archive file >> here <<.
It features a first naive implementation of marching squares algorythm for drawing metaballs, a better one in 3D, a verlet engine (2D / 3D), some animated splines, arcball, and some other stuff.

The two following videos show live coding in action in Vision Factory using OpenGL commands in Javascript. This was demoed @ Les Jeudis du Multimedia in Bordeaux / France, the 10th of April 2008. The event was organised by Medias-Cite which regularly invites artists / programmers to expose their personnal project(s). This is a good occasion to meet people and discuss on various topics related to code, software and art in general.

Edit : Crap. Vimeo does not allow HD videos embedding. Click on the links to directly access the page with HD features. Much better.

RGB Cubes - Live Coding (1) from v3ga on Vimeo.

RGB Cubes - Live Coding (2) from v3ga on Vimeo.

Many thanks to Soubok for his invaluable help with the integration of Spidermonkey / Jslibs with Vision Factory.

Un grand merci à tous les partipants de ce week-end ! Les code sources qui ont été dissequés sont en ligne à cette addresse >>ici<<.
Ils contiennent notamment le code du serveur OSC utilisé pour l’application de dessin collaborative.

A big thank you! to all the participants of this week-end workshop. The code sources of the programs that were studied are online >>here<<.
It contains the sketch for the OSC server used for the collaborative drawing scene.