glovePIE

Glove Programmable Input Emulator 

Super cool application.   I've been meaning to download and try out glovePIE for a long time.   I did pick up a $15 Essential Reality P5 Glove from Wall Mart when they dumped them a few years ago. However it's the Wii Remote support that has been driving the interest in glovePIE lately, and it drove my interest as well.

My use of the Wii remote on my PC is still pretty flaky, probably due to Bluetooth being generally flaky transport :(

But I'm very impressed with the feature set of GlovePIE, in fact it almost matches a tool concept that I worked on many years ago at the end of my real interest in VR.  That concept being scriptable IO routing hub.

I've used PD, and PERL scripts to achieve this, and certainly PD fits the bill pretty well, but GlovePIE with support for MIDI, OSC, and numerous game controlers seems to do most of what I'm looking for and more. And has a different mindset than PD; it's really foucused on routing input.

The thing that is the most interesting to me is to to get unique input from multiple mice or multiple keyboards.  That is something that I have not though possible or seen done before, even thoguh I've considered it and looked for solutions myself.  I've toyed with the idea of using a hacked up keyboard as a really cheap source of a lot of button inputs, but the problem is that it competes with using a keyboard in the normal way.  GlovePIE opens that hacking avenue in a new way.

Imagine a robot that has an on board laptop, (common enough, I've got my home brew version), but instead of using a micro controller interface board to track some wheel encoders, just mount a couple of USB mice on the wheels and hook them up via USB. 

You could use ball mice and crack it open and use the encoders included, but you could just use a couple of optical mice and plunk them right on the wheel hub without opening them up at all.
While blocking the input of those mice from being sent to windows, and still sending the laptop touch pad to windows so the laptop still worked as usual.
Then I'll go ahead and use the mice buttons as bumber inputs too.
I'm definatly going to try putting this train of though into practice and I'll report back on it's success, and weather it turns out to be any cheaper or easier than other mechanisms.

I don't see support for reading or writing to a com port, or a way to communicate directly with say Flash.   But with OSC and some other translators you can build a transport mechanism for those as well, which has been my current solution.  The support for Joysticks, Mice, and Keyboards is clearly the strong point.

The scripting language is so flexible that you could write in just about any familiar syntax you like, it's actually a bit confusing how flexible it is partucularly when reading examples.

At any rate the author Carl Kenner recommends the use of a couple of familiar and useful tools in conjunction with GlovePIE specifically: PPJoy and MIDI Yoke.

To that I would add FLOSC to communicate OSC to Flash, and something like Serial Proxy aka Serproxy, which is meant to get Serial to Flash, though what I'm really looking for is serial to OSC.

That Serial-> OSC feature is still missing, which is certanly needed sometimes.  In fact I see a project for it here. 

But for now I have some PD and PERL scripts to handle Serial <-> OSC <-> flash; and they are still needed in the mix.
I've got a PERL server that I use to route Serial and OSC to and from Flash that perhaps I should package up and make available again, I have released it in the past, as FlashNOW, but that was without the Serial and OSC routing which is still a little messy.

 Anyway let me know if you have any alternative solutions to the IO routing, or anything that you need and just can't find the translator for.

I'm expect everyone is familiar with the Johnny Lee Wii projects.

And most have probably also seen the Foldable Display Simulation video.

However if anyone has not seen them yet, follow the links they are worth seeing.  In fact it's been on my to do list to try and do some object tracking / projection tracking for some time.   And the foldable display video shows it working surprisingly well, and projecting on some of the surfaces that we have found most fun and interesting in our theatrical work (Fans and Umbrellas).

Anyway the upshot is that I got myself a wii remote and am starting to play around.   I'm working with Kate Brehm on a show (do you copy) with a lot of hand held movable screens that it would be great to track in this way.

I'm also interested in using the tracking in conjunction with some tablet PC's that I have used on stage as movable screens.

Anyway so far nothing of my own to show, I'm just exploring the tools and demos out there for the Wii.  But I just wanted to point out the Foldable Display demo, and get started posting about tracking.  I'll try and post some reviews of the software I try out, and some comparison of using the Wii for tracking vs EyesWeb and the eyes actor in Isadora.  There are many other options of course but those are the ones I have used in the past and that should do for some breadth to start with.
I do also have a P5 glove with some hardware IR tracking that I may bust out for comparison as well, and the Sony EVI D30 with built in color tracking, but neither seem right for this use or exactly comparable.

International Culture Lab
       Theater Production Blog
     

Translating the Story

International Culture Lab’s production of Outside Inn had
traveled through many incarnations to its Off-Broadway premiere. The
University of Pittsburgh, ICL and Theater Rampe Stuttgart originally
commissioned playwright Andreas Jungwirth to create a text to serve as
a vehicle to explore cultural difference among the collaborators and
their respective countries. From its conception, the project called for
four bilingual actors to perform the play in both languages on both
continents. Outside Inn rehearsed and previewed at the
University of Pittsburgh in September 2007, where it played two German
and three English language performances. It then traveled to Stuttgart,
Germany, where it played at Theater Rampe Stuttgart in the month of
October 2007, including five performances in English and one impromptu
mixed-language performance. This mixed-language version was further
rehearsed and then returned to Stuttgart July 1-5, 2008, as part of the
first annual American Days, sponsored by the German-American Center
there “to further improve and intensify the transatlantic dialog.” 
Throughout the project, language evolved into a dominant creative
element that drove and shaped character development, rhythm and tone,
and actor/audience relationship.

Audience members who had seen the same actors play in two languages
had commented on how different the characters seem in one language or
the other. The actors, in turn, noticed differences in the ways their
characters responded to the same narrative circumstances depending upon
the language they were using.

As we moved toward the New York leg of Outside Inn
then, we wanted to interrogate in a more detailed and experimental
manner the role language plays in rendering the story of our
contemporary lives. The generous in-kind equipment loan from Digital Performance Institute
made this possible. We redesigned the set and decided to use projection
to reexamine, among other things, the role and use of supertitles. Need
they be only functional? Can they be used to tell a greater story? Can
a foreign language be part of the soundscape of a production and
thereby ‘translate’ culture not just words?

The main element of the set was a 14-foot-long 10-foot-high
structure which was both literally and figuratively a wall, with the
capital case text letters W A L L stenciled and
constructed into the design. This WALL served both as entrance/exit and
projection site for text and images. Two projectors mounted in the grid
halved the projection area. This binary helped serve our expanded
deliberation on and experimentation with translation. The original
German/English duality from the initial stages of the project was
minimized in the mostly English-language New York production. Here, the
German language was employed as Brechtian device that underlined the
twofold spoken/visual rendering of text and story.

In our multi-layered, digital age of information, communication has
become a complex juggling act. We are able to “text” or “talk” to the
whole of the world from the palm of our hand, but the process of
“translating” – intention, emotion, culture – has become more
challenging than ever in a globalized world.

The projection of stock market ticker crawl and current news
stories were interlaced with the characters’ representations of their
personal narratives. Which is the real or true story? Or perhaps more
correctly, which is the realest or truest representation of the story?
The representation of text or image on the literal W A L L
was used not only to emphasize or complement the story the
character/actor was telling, but also to counter and negate, thereby
adding a deeper second layer onto the main narrative. The lives of the
characters were as fictional or real as “Kalowski,” the unseen
arch-capitalist that dominated all their choices.

Coincidently, the same financial system that dictated the
characters’ actions and personal relationships in the play, was
imploding in real time in all the headlines during the October 2008 run
of the New York production.

As all current news stories suggest, the US and the world are
conscious of having reached some kind of historical precipice in the
capitalistic system. The globalized economy no longer allows simple
nation-to-nation agreements and “translations” of wealth and resources.
Just as the communists were the only ones who could screw up communism,
only the capitalists could ruin capitalism. Some will argue that
capitalism has now entered the same undead zone in which Soviet-style
communism has existed in the two decades since the fall of the Berlin
Wall.

 Photo Credit: Stephanie Mayer-Staley

ITP Winter Show 2008

Dec 17, 18 2008 5-9PM
ITP
721 Broadway, 4th Floor

A two-day festival of interactive sight, sound and technology from the student artists and innovators at ITP.

220 student - technologists, theorists,
engineers, designers, and artists show off the fuits of thier labor and thier technological visions.

Bound to be fun, confusing, see you there.

If you've got some spare bandwith and plenty of memory for your browser click on the postcard to the left.

 the most interesitng part is the color shape effects in the white area as you scale the image down, at certain scale you see the averaged shape of a portrate apear quite strongly.