Carson Baker

A month ago I announced Fic­tio­naut, a writer’s com­mu­nity I co-​founded back in April. Since then there have been over 200 sto­ries posted and hun­dreds of inter­est­ing com­ments. If you’d like to take a peek, we’re now actively solic­it­ing new users. To see what it’s all about, simply request an invitation.

Car­olyn Kellog of the LA Times Jacket Copy recently had this to say:

The site has a sophis­ti­cated, clean design, one which seems to assume that its mem­bers will plunge in and begin read­ing with little hand-​holding. With its inte­gra­tion of social net­work­ing and magazine-​style con­tent, Fic­tio­naut might just take off and be the next best ver­sion of Zoetrope’s Vir­tual Studio or NaNoWriMo.

So when’s the offi­cial launch date? Well, we’re still watch­ing the way the com­mu­nity works — if every­thing is run­ning smoothly then it shouldn’t be too much longer.

I bor­rowed Samuel Bravo Silva’s excel­lent “cylinder_​tree” sketch and ported it to my native GL frame­work (called CBGame­works, soon to be released). Down­load Octopus.zip (51KB) (seen above). Keys ESDF move the camera. R peds upward. L tog­gles light­ing, off by default.

Source code (73KB) is avail­able for down­load, bun­dled with an undoc­u­mented and symbol-​stripped ver­sion of my CBGame­works library.

It’s truly amaz­ing what Ben Fry’s little frame­work has done to the demo scene in the past two years. Despite having made no real tech­ni­cal achieve­ment, Pro­cess­ing has become the de-​facto engine for inter­ac­tive art — exhibit­ing itself in gal­leries, on mag­a­zine covers, and all over the inter­net. Its suc­cess lies in its sim­plic­ity, its ele­gance — the shared value among artists and pro­gram­mers that con­nects both sides of the brain. And while it’s true that more pow­er­ful tools are avail­able, noth­ing else comes with such a clear method­ol­ogy, exten­si­ble design, and fanat­i­cal community.

Check out the pro­cess­ing group on Vimeo. Stun­ning. The top two pro­duc­ers, in my opin­ion, are Marius Watz (watz) and Robert Hodgin (flight404) of The Bar­bar­ian Group.

Available to down­load from Google is a small part of the data set from Radiohead’s recent House of Cards music video, shot entirely with­out cam­eras — just LIDAR and 3D cap­ture. Part of the idea is that fans will be able to remix the “footage” or mash it up in some way.

This is tremen­dously cool and very thought­ful of Radio­head to copy­left this part of their work.

Unfor­tu­nately Google or Radio­head has only pro­vided a one minute sample of the ani­ma­tion data, which isn’t much to work with. Of the 14,000 data down­loads and count­ing, I think this prob­a­bly explains why no one has come up with any­thing too strik­ing on the YouTube Remix Group.

Still, I grabbed the data and got to work. First step: better tools. Per­son­ally I feel the Pro­cess­ing code is just too slow and painful to work with. OpenGL really needs to be run through native code.

So the first app I wrote is a Obj-C based first-​person browser of the city street land­scape (which includes 1.3 mil­lion ver­tices). It’s intel Mac-​only and com­pletely untested, but if you’re daring it might be fun to play with. It takes a couple sec­onds to load all the points, but then runs sur­pris­ingly fast. I get 30fps on my first-​generation Mac­Book Pro.

You can down­load it here (21.6MB):
http://​files.​car​son​baker.​org/​h​o​c​/​H​O​C​-​C​i​t​y​S​c​e​n​e​V​i​e​w​e​r.zip

Or watch a quick demon­stra­tion on YouTube.

Two more apps are on their way. One just dis­plays the other land­scape; the other is a facial ani­ma­tion viewer of Thom. These projects are lay­ered on top of a custom OpenGL threaded graph­ics frame­work I built four years ago — just some­thing that comes in handy from time to time. In a way it has kind of evolved into its own mini-​version of Pro­cess­ing, with­out the per­for­mance penalties.

So, what about source code? Well, if Radio­head releases the entire data set then I’ll post sources for every­thing, includ­ing my graph­ics frame­work and the client code. I don’t know how hard it is to pre­pare the data, but I don’t think that’s too unrea­son­able of an idea. I think it’s win-​win — more people could put together better mon­tages with a more capa­ble tool.

If Google decides to release more of the data, one thing I sug­gested is not dis­trib­ut­ing the vertex points as CSV data. It makes it much bigger to down­load and slower to parse. Why CSV anyway? Hope­fully people aren’t open­ing this stuff up in Excel. Save it as binary! We can handle it. Here’s some code to do it:

http://​files.​car​son​baker.​org/​h​o​c​/​c​s​v​_​t​o​_​b​i​n​a​r​y​.​c.txt

Also — for anyone that might know:

It’s not clear to me how the Geo­met­ric Infor­mat­ics cap­ture hard­ware works. What’s the tech­nol­ogy behind it? How much does their GeoVideo system cost? I’m having a hard time find­ing this out.