I’m happy to announce that “3 Dreams of Black”, a project I was working on for the last 5 months has been released last week.
“3 Dreams of Black” is an interactive music video directed by Chris Milk for Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi. It features a song from their latest album ROME, performed by Norah Jones. It’s part of the Chrome Experiments series and was created entirely with HTML5 and WebGL.
This is the second time I collaborated with North Kingdom. It was a big project, and other parties involved were the team from Google Creative Labs, including Aaron Koblin and Mrdoob as well as the teams from Mirada L.A. and Radical Media. I would like to take the occasion and say thanks to guys at North Kingdom for letting me be part of it. I have never been working with such talented group of people!
The project was a big challenge and an incredible learning experience. I intend to write a longer post with more details as soon as I get some time. Meanwhile go to ro.me and enjoy the show!
After that, be sure to check the tech page which features information on the technology we used and a very cool model viewer. You can download the entire code base from there too – the project is open source! Mirada prepared a great case study that is worth reading as well.
Last year I did a few training courses in London. I was quite fun, so this year I plan to do more. To start with, I’m preparing a new workshop about webgl.
I have worked with webgl from the beginning of this year. It’s completely different from Unity or Flash/Away3D, and I guess it doesn’t give the “immediate fun” feeling that Unity does when you approach it for the first time. Quite the contrary, the kind of old-school, C style API can be intimidating, and the scarcity of resources adds to the image of a unapproachable technology.
Fortunately, reality is not as bad as it seems. WebGL can be quite fun to play with as soon as you understand some basic rules. Furthermore, it is based on Open GL ES which is an established standard for 3D graphics on mobile devices (implemented both in Android and iOS). Getting to know WebGL is a good way to introduce yourself to these technologies as well.
I’ll be doing the webgl workshop as part of the Flash And The City conference in New York on June 9. The workshop will focus on how to build 3d content from scratch with Javascript and we will see some techniques for importing 3d models and animations right into your browser.
If you don’t want to miss the event, be sure to get your ticket today. The number of places is limited. Use discount code webGL and they get $50 off!
For the workshop make sure to bring your laptop with your favorite Javascript editor along with the latest version of Chrome or Firefox and prepare for some serious (and seriously fun!) 3d stuff.
See you in New York!
[Photo credit]
For the past 5 moths I have been working with North Kingdom on an interactive installation called Woodbot Pilots. I’m happy to announce that it had been launched last week!
It’s located at the Skellefteå Airport in Northern Sweden. If you happen to be in the area, make sure to check it out. However, as I imagine, it isn’t a location easily accessible to most of my readers, so I will be posting more pictures & videos as they appear.
UPDATE 28.01.2011 Here’s a video made by guys over at Interactive Institute in Umeå. The also published an article that you can read here.
Together with North Kingdom we are also working on a small website dedicated to the project. It will go live soon. In the meantime there’s a nice article from the opening ceremony in the local newspaper, Norran, where you can see Mr. Robert Lindberg, the director of Skellefteå Airport doing the first run.
Woodbot Pilots is a gestures controlled racing game. We display it on a huge 82″ HD touch screen (191 x 123 cm!) and a special 3D depth camera is used to read the gestures. The camera was developed by a company called Fotonic and is somehow similar to MS Kinect but has a bigger range (up to 7m) and is optimized for industrial environments.
The talented artists from Ars Thanea and North Kingdom created beautiful visuals and the sound engineers from Dinamhoe added a great soundtrack. The game itself was developed in the Unity3D engine. We connected the 3D camera using a C/C++ plugin developed by programmers over at Interactive Institute in Umeå who did a fantastic job – it runs very smoothly.
The game logic is implemented in C# – quite some code in there, even though the game concept is relatively simple. Thanks to a powerful graphic card (XFX Radeon HD 5870 1GB GDDR5) the thing runs at 60 FPS in full HD resolution which is quite amazing!
I will talk about the technical details in a future article. For the moment enjoy some pictures of the race track, and Happy Christmas everyone!
Also, make sure to check out this article on North Kingdom’s website – there are a lot of pictures of the installation itself.
This is just a quick post to let you know that I will be doing more Unity3D training sessions in London – on Nov 15th-16th and Nov 17th-18th 2010. There is still a couple of places left for both, so if you want to learn some cool 3D stuff, you can book it here, but hurry up – the last session was sold out.
On the post about the October session, I got a comment that my photo was not really related to the training, which was right – it’s just that I like this building. This time I used a screenshot from a game we are making during the session. Below, I post some more.
I’m proud to announce, that I will be running a 2 day training in London later this month. I will be teaching Unity3D, showing how to use the editor and how to work with various assets. I will be also giving an introduction to scripting in C# and hopefully we will be able to cover some features of the latest release of the editor.
Unity3D version 3 has been released only a few days ago. The new version is packed a tremendous amount of new and cool features. Great games & other projects are created with Unity3D every day, so there has never been a better moment to start learning it!
You can read all the details about the training on the LFPUG page, who is also the organizer of the session. Unfortunately, the tickets have been sold out. However, if you would like to learn some Unity3D, please contact me (bartek [at] everyday3d.com) or Tink (training [at] lfpug.com). We are pretty excited about the interest people are showing for this topic, so currently we are planning to run another session in London in November and there are still a few places left on the list.
I got a couple of requests to run such a training in other places, so hopefully I will be bringing some Unity3D goodness to other cities in Europe as well. I’m working out the details, and I’ll keep you posted. If you would be interested in hosting a Unity3D training session in your city, please let me know!
A few months ago, I had the pleasure to work with Luciano Foglia and Anrick Bregman on a visual experiment called Format Journey. The installation uses data – a series of images and a sound file – to modify the texture and the shape of a 3D object. Combined with a slight randomization it gives very nice and unpredictable results.
When we first talked about the project, the idea was to use either Flash or Processing, but I though that it’s a good occasion to try Unity3D (of course… :) To achieve the desired visual effect I needed a shader system that’s fast, flexible that and works with 3D. Unity’s ShaderLab seemed like a good option.
The material on the shape is transparent and is composed of a blurred version of an image applied as regular texture and the image itself applied as reflection. The images change over time, and are animated by scrolling UVs.
All the data for the installation is loaded dynamically, the application itself is just composed of some scripts that make it run, so the file is only 55KB! It’s controlled by an external configuration file that allows to define the source images and sounds. There are also quite a few other settings to tweak they way it works, ex. how transparent or how reflective the material should be.
One particular challenge was to make the shape react to the sound. To make this happen I needed to read the spectrum and Unity3D doesn’t offer access to sound data on the code level. One possible solution was to write a plugin that does that, the downside however is that it wouldn’t run in the web player.
I solved the problem by pre-processing the sound in a small Flash app. It dumps the spectrum data to a text file which is then loaded to Unity3D. When the application plays the sound file, it uses this data to check the values of the spectrum at any position in time. Simple, but does the job.
The installation is part of a project called Tango and Hawaii created by Anrick and Luciano. Be sure to check the live demo. It was originally presented at the Magdalena Festival in Maribor, Slovenia.
It was a new experience for me to work on an art piece was. It was very inspiring to see what Anrick and Luciano did with a tool I helped them to create. Thank you guys!
