Concrete Forest – an art project that turned into a party from Obscura on Vimeo.

The video shows the result of a fun little project we did in collaboration with artist Louise Bech Pedersen. We cut out these animal figures of a special acrylic rear projection material and used them for mapping using Modul8 and MadMapper.
Doing the mapping was trivial using these tools – it was the acrylic material itself that proved to be a bit of a challenge. The light projection properties of the material were terrific, a clear and bright image from all angles. For people like us who are used to projecting onto fabric or walls it was a joy to see the brightness of this professional screen material.
However the material was a quite brittle and cracks appeared a few places even when using a saw made for use with acrylics. And the deer lost the tip of the antlers when one of the party goers tried to bring it down with an empty vodka bottle!

Some beutiful old syphon bottles

I had a hard time finding a headline for this post. The thing is that something is happening in the VJ/visuals world that is getting me very excited. That thing is a new technology on the Mac called Syphon. At this point I think only a small circle of programmers and techies are aware of Syphon as it hasn’t yet been released. I think it’s going to have a tremendous impact on the way realtime visual apps (think VDMX, Modul8, Resolume) and visual programming environments are going to work in the future. Let me try to explain.

Update: As of today November 3rd, there is a public beta for download for Quartz, FreeFrame, Unity 3D and Jitter.

Today each visual app or VJ app is like a closed cage. You create your graphics and it is then sent to your monitor, your video projector or whereever. The output of the app is locked. It cannot be altered after it leaves the app.
Imagine you had two apps each producing a live image. Up until now there has been no good way to combine the outputs of those two apps into one image in real time. Like if you created a background in Resolume and a nice particle effect in Modul8. You would have to save one of them as a file and then import the movie into the other app. Or you would have to use a screen grabber to catch the image from Resolume and put it into Modul8 in real time, but that uses a lot of the ressources of your computer and tends to slow down the other apps if you are not careful.

So in reality most people working with real time visuals just get used to preproducing clips and importing them into their favourite VJ app. And in general you just have one visual app open when you perform live. But why should it be like this? Why can’t you e.g. have one specialized app for producing a nice 3D background and bring that into your favourite VJ app to play with? Or why can’t you bring the output from your VJ app into another specialized app that puts some final touches onto the image before sending it to the screen?

Syphon seems to bring the answer for this. It is a sort of bridging technology – Mac only – that allows applications to ‘talk to each other’ and exchange graphics in real time without any delay or loss of image quality. It only works internally in one machine at this point (I think – Syphon people correct me if I’m wrong) but it still brings a lot of potential for those who perform with visuals live.

One example of this is the MadMapper software. This is currently also in development and has not been released yet. This software allows you to use the output of any Syphon capable app as material for a mapping installation. The MadMapper allows you to split up the image into areas that can be projected onto an object. In this way you can produce your images live in another app of your choice and then let MadMapper handle the final alignment of the image onto the object.

I hope you can share my excitement here. This is just one example of why we should ‘open up the cage’ and set the visuals free. If Syphon catches on I think everybody is gong to benefit from this ability to exchange visuals between applications. My bet is that we will see more specialized applications for live visuals instead of giant VJ apps that try to include every possible feature. This is a good thing in my opinion as I think the overall quality and the number of options available will benefit from this.

For those who stumble upon this article and are not familiar with the term, projection mapping is the technique of beaming video (with a standard video projector) onto three dimensional objects and adjusting and masking the image so that it seems to follow the shape of the target object instead of spilling out onto walls etc. The result can be surprisingly effective and eye catching as the video is no longer a flat square on the wall but becomes an object in space – an animated sculpture if you will.

However besides this definition it might be difficult to explain to clients and others outside visualist circles exactly what is the big deal and what is the value of projection mapping and so we need to be able to point to good examples. I’ve tried to collect a few of my favourites.

The first one I have included because it clearly demonstrates the technique applied to a commercial context perfect for a store interior or a window display. This mapping display was developed for the MINI Cooper store in Paris:

Mapping video MINI from VisionSonore on Vimeo.

The technique used is simple and affordable for a trained visualist. In the above example the software Modul8, three computers and three video projectors were used.

The technique of projection mapping can be taken much further and the above example does not really show the full potential. Giant outdoor video projections onto buildings using advanced 3d animations creates a stunning faux 3d effect. The example in the video below is not the first work of this kind, it has been technically possible for some years now to deliver projections on this scale, but this new years show is a humourous and well made example:

3D Projection Mapping from anema on Vimeo.

Finally another fun application of the technique onto a tennis court. Actually no advanced 3d here, just some simple 2d graphics. But I like the innovative idea of using the shape of the court. The creators also did use the opportunity to project the classic video game ‘Pong’ onto the playing field.

TETRA.Tennis from 1024 on Vimeo.

I hope to be able post the film soon although my little baby girl keeps pushing my personal deadline for when it should be ready. That’s okay – these days I only do projects with a very flexible time frame.