In the City: Groups and a bit of research

First, I'll talk about what we did yesterday. We did the bullet time effect in our own way. Which is when an object is filmed at multiple angles while it is in distorted time. We peresented that today and I was really proud of what my group came up with. I think we did the best, our one was the one with the paper ball being thrown around the room. The video will be up on youtube soon, so I'll put the video here when it's up.

EDIT (15/5/2011): And here's the video =D




Today there was an introduction to SolidWorks, and the brief. The brief is to build a device for the camera to capture film in ways we normally couldn't and use the visuals/audio it collects for reinterpretation as something else such as audio, objects, machinery, etc. SolidWorks is for a 3D plan of the device.

In my group I'll be the one using SolidWorks, it's hard at first but I know that I can understand the program and make it work if I work with it more. Also, the group for this project in my point of view is yet another amazing team. I think with each member we're perfectly put together and will work very well as a team. I was worried that I wouldn't get a group that wants me because I've never welded before though I'd like to learn how to weld, I'm no good at programming, and I know nothing about CAD or SolidWorks. So I'm really happy that things just fell into place for me at the end.

We did a little brainstorm after class for ideas and my favourite ones were about time and the invisible things in daily life that have always been there, like in Richard Hammond's Invisible Worlds:





And something so slow that we can't see it is the path of stars. I.e. The rotation of the Earth:




However, we can't do the really fast ones because our cameras won't be fast enough to capture images like in the Richard Hammond example. I think maybe we can capture things like the movement of water trickling off city buildings, things falling, and stuff like that that aren't extremely fast. We can do the stars one if we wanted, but with city lights. But that requires a hacked still camera instead of a normal moving camera. Although we can't do those two things I think these examples really show us the idea and perception of time. I think time here is a centrepoint in this huge project that we need to manipulate in the data and reinterpretation.

A cool idea that we all agreed was good was using mirrors on our device to capture many different perspectives. This is when we have mirrors angled in different positions and maybe using concave and convex mirrors as well. Another idea I got from that was the infinity mirror when you have a pair of mirrors parallel and facing each other. Then when you put something in the middle you get infinity.

Here's an example:



With the tutorial above we can make two one way mirrors with perspex/glass with window tint applied to one side and put the camera in the middle to capture infinity. We can even blow up the scale to be like a room and people walk through it and are captured in the camera and in infinity. That puts an extra layer of interaction in the device.

Some themes that we thought about were experiences of a blind or deaf person in the city. I thought of more later about being a synaesthete. This is when you have 2 or more senses combine into one. For example, certain synaesthetes can literally see a sound or taste a colour. There are many combinations. Though little is known about this phenomena, there is growing interest in researching this area. Another theme I thought about was Alice In Wonderland Syndrome. When your perception of space is extremely distorted. For example, you wake up one morning and your room seems incredibly small and suddenly your dog is at such a monstrous size it's towering above you. This would be really interesting to play around with in capturing data.