regulated.lines

*new* Portfolio work up at: Architizer

*new* Teaching work up at: archCUA.tumblr.com

While the absurdity of the term “augmented reality” surely has thinkers like Baudrillard rolling in their graves (or beds), the technology - whatever you want to call it - is still pretty damn cool. Although this type of system has been employed for years by hollywood, Inglobe Technolgies is the first company (to my knowledge anyhow) that is has released so-called “augmented reality” technology as a plugin (free trial) for software as mainstream as Google’s Sketchup (free non-commercial).

Here’s a video of it in use:

As I said, this is not new technology, but I think its introduction into the Architectural Design Market is nonetheless significant. As we know, the Architectural Design Market has been incredibly slow one to adopt new technology - especially when compared to most other design professionals - and in my mind any technology that has the potential to provide additional (and hopefully meaningful) design feedback is welcome in my view.

Adding to the development of an (unhealthy?) admiration for Rem…

I took it upon myself this weekend to learn Grasshopper (formerly the explicit history tool), a new plugin from McNeel (Rhino).

All I can say is that the plugin is incredibly easy, and poised to change many things surrounding the field of architecture. It’s absolutely brilliant. While there are other products on the market that work in a very similar way (ie. Generative Components), none that I’m aware of are so simple or packaged with such a versatile and intuitive modeling package. Grasshopper plugs directly into Rhino and uses all familiar Rhino commands, so there is very little learning curve. Really, really, really simple and powerful plugin. Very exciting.

Since Sunday, I’ve been working on my first Grasshopper definition, which was inspired by a number of things, but primarily:

• The need to laser-cut things in a way that was not extremely tedious and annoying
• A Rhinoscript I was working on last year but never finished (but had less control)
• An earlier, and similar in function (but not in implementation) definition by Andrew Payne of LIFT Architects (and fellow Creative Commons user).

From here...

...to here in about 30 minutes.

(The blue tape is a result of a mistype for the material thickness…painter’s tape is not a structural material…)

Here’s the Definition (you can also find it in the experiments section:

Waffle House v1.0

And the Tutorial (apologies for the poor quality):

Waffle House v1.0 Tutorial from Benjamin G Callam on Vimeo.

I’m sorry can you please repeat the question?

For my wedding this past august, I worked to design a few elements. Since we were conducting the ceremony in a single (nasty, ball-)room we needed a flexible way to create a more intimate space for the ceremony, and a more open space for the reception. I created a mock-up of the room for seating purposes using Revit to be able to parametrically manipulate and “schedule” (count) the number of chairs for the reception (boring…). I then exported the model to Rhino to play with the schemes for the hanging curtains and stage lighting. The final setup was constructed by The Design Company out of Charlottesville, Virginia and pretty close to what I had modeled.

The Curtains were hung from the same track that the ballroom dividers use (those nasty doors used for conferences, etc.) and a pipe was inserted in the bottom of the curtain so that it would splay out at the bottom. To further sculpt the shape, fishing wire was sewn through the curtain about 2/3 the way up and buttons (button!) were used to constrain the shape of the curtains (to restrict the width of the wire). Since the room needed to be converted quickly for the reception following the ceremony, the staff needed to only remove the piping at the bottom of the curtain to tie them back during the turnover.

The last piece that might be of interest was a “computational design” written in Processing that served as a backdrop for the ceremony. The 90″ x 240″ design was based off “Sands of Time” by Jared Tarbell which was adapted for the ceremony. One of the technical challenges here was to get processing to write out such an enormous file (each was about 400 megs) while still being able to view the progression of the algorithm in realtime. Here are a few variations of the designs (we used #3), which was split down the center for printing.

Variation #1

Variation #2

Variation #3

Variation #4

Variation #5

Variation #6

Variation #7

Speaking of printing, special thanks to Jonathan Healey and Colleen Gove for their help with the last minute printing - it took about 2 hours for to print each banner. I hope I can be as helpful for their wedding (congratulations guys!)

If you don’t know Processing, you should.

In Courtney’s Arch448E course last spring (at Maryland) I developed a number or Processing Sketches which made use of a live video feed as a generative device for on screen graphics. These made use of a couple techniques. One technique was sequential frame differencing where each frame (or series of frames) is evaluated against previous frames to determine where pixels have changed. This technique is especially good for situations where light and/or background conditions will change. This was used in my “Studioscapes” sketch, where the live feedback is used to display what is essentially a three dimensional graph of the motion. This became interesting when students began to understand that their motion produced the onscreen effects, which created what I thought was an interesting feedback loop, and often led to complex human patterns of movement. As you can see from the video compilation, the graphics respond not only to the current frame, but decay (logarithmically) over time as a short history of movement.

Studioscape from Benjamin G Callam on Vimeo. 

An alternative technique of static frame differencing worked essentially like a green screen. The program takes an image of the static scene (the background) then checks every subsequent frame for pixel variations from the original. This approach proved difficult primarily because of technical difficulties, but otherwise should be a very easy way to detect onscreen presence (in this case, people). The difficulties arose because the cameras I had at my disposal would automatically adjust their sensitivity as light conditions changed. So for example if someone walked in front of the camera with a white shirt, the camera would adjust and suddenly every pixel has changed (it also didn’t help that I was exhibiting this at dusk)…but at any rate it was frustrating. I was trying this with the built-in iSight in my Macbook Pro, and was not able to find a way to “turn off” the brightness adjustment. Anyhow, for the Particle People project I adapted the Traer particle simulation class to attract to changes found by the frame differencing. This also encouraged strange behavior by the participants at the exhibition (I unfortunately don’t have any footage of) which was heavily influenced by the particle system. 

The feedback loop (in both projects) caused the participants to reevaluate (consciously or not) their local spatial environment with regard to both “real” space and the implied space of the digital environment. In both cases, I was quite surprised by the interest people took in this hybrid environment particularly how common social interactions were transformed by the hybrid environment. Taken as a pair (again unfortunately no footage for the second) this was quite evident.

Virtual Trajectories:

This project explored the virtual proximity of image on the internet. The sketch in this case would visit a news site’s homepage, then based on the available links, randomly select one as the next node to visit. With each visit to a node, the largest image on the page was downloaded and compiled into a super graphic which was the constantly evolving image displayed to the viewer. The juxtaposition of virtually adjacent images (meaning within just a click or two of each other) display were often surprising (if not jarring) and was intended to encourage the viewer to question ideas of image proximity in our contemporary environment. News sites were chosen because their content is constantly changing based on current events (or you might assume), so as the sketch traversed the site, shifts could be detected in the value a particular image might have for that particular news media based on prevalence of image. This sketch was particular challenging for me to write due to my lack of experience with regular expressions, and it was not until I had completed the sketch that I became aware of a preexisting Processing library specifically for link and image traversal. I have not posted the source here yet because I intend to revisit this work and fine-tune the algorithm based on these libraries.

All images compiled from CNN.com

Screen Capture 1

Screen Capture 2

Screen Capture 3

Roto Raster:

A (very) simple script that takes an image and translates it into rectangles (but could easily be anything) based on brightness and outputs the translation as a pdf or DXF. It was created for use in a project I am working on with 3FoldStudio. It’s based on Explode by Daniel Shiffman (check his new book), and was created for easy translation to vector files for a laser cutter,CNC, etc. The same could be done in a number of programs, but hopefully this one will eventually grow an interface to allow for easy web-use. This one could be easily modified to use color, different shapes, etc.

Image before

Image after vectorization

It’s been quite a while since I updated anything here. Rather than leave a (false) promise of coming posts  I decided to make a massive update post showing/describing work that I have completed in the last few (7? 8?) months. I would like to extend a special thank you to Courtney Miller-Bellairs who’s course “ARCHIndependent studies in visual media” was the driving force behind many of these experiments. Her interest in all types of media have influenced the wide range of digital/analogue/hybrid explorations which I will attempt to describe in this and the following posts (in chronological order).

Project #1 - LINE.

Line

What is a line? The technical definition of line differs greatly from the way line is often described in an architectural environment. This project explored these variations using several types of media. The final was print and ink on mylar.

Fantastic mechanical sculpture by Arthur Ganson at ted.com.

playful. rigorous. beautiful. animated.