~600 people came to visit us during the Design Montréal Open House on May 2 [from noon to 5 p.m.]. We showcased work produced during the past year including our interactive table prototype.

Using physical cards and fingers, visitors were able to view and manipulate selected works from our portfolios. Each card corresponded to a specific group of works. Once a card was placed on the table, visitors were able to move, zoom and rotate a variety of portfolio images and videos from a specific project.

A lot of this was done using open sources resources, such as reacTIVision for the tracking of fiducial markers attached onto the cards, as well as for multi-touch finger tracking. Here is the complete list : reacTIVision, TUIO, Flash AS3 TUIO Client, Hype framework and Udp flashlc bridge.

We already have a new version of this project up and running as an Air2.0 application allowing us to use UDPConnector, and therefore removing the Udp flashlc bridge from the pipeline. This application is also being moved to c++ using openFrameworks.

As part of the finale for the Think Again Remix Conference in Toronto, Ontario on October 3rd, we created, a 23 minute live visualization to kick off the evening.

Projected onto a 16:3 screen (~12m per 3m) and running in real time, this visualization called A Window into Each Other consisted of over 360 portrait pictures taken of the conference participants two nights before.

The purpose of A Window into Each Other was to present the conference participants, who have all recently transitioned from student to alumni, a new way of perceiving themselves as a national alumni network and to understand that they are more than the sum of their parts.

A Window into Each Other was shown in two parts: 1) as the participants were entering and settling down in the presentation hall of BMO Learning Centre, the first 20 minutes of the visualization gradually built in intensity showing more and more of the portraits; 2) once the audience was completely focused on the screens, a more sequenced and timed 3D abstraction of the previous section was launched. The idea was to push the audience’s notions of interconnectivity and identity.

More photos here and more videos here.

Credits:
Conception and Design – Hugues Bruyere et Amanda French
Dev – Hugues Bruyere [Built with openFrameworks]
Sound – Christian Olsen
Photo/Portraits – Melanie Provencher and Trine Mikkelsen

Presence [a.k.a Soft n’ Silky] will be shown at FILE 10 NURBS PROTO 4KT – Electronic Language International Festival – hosted at Galeria de Arte do SESI, until the 20th of September. Thanks to the FILE festival people for everything. This trip was in part made possible by the Canada Council for the Arts from whom I obtained a travel grant.

Photos by Mario Ladeira.

It was nice to see again Paula, Ricardo and of course Daniel and Samuel. I would have loved to stay longer in São Paulo, but I think I made the best of my 6 days there.  I met some amazing people and had the chance to see behind the scenes of some great projects. I did not have time to see a lot of the city, but I still got a sense of the size of it.

I also got my hand on the two last catalogues of FILE Festival. These catalogues include Presence [aka Soft n' Silky] I presented at FILE Rio 2009 and currently running at FILE 10 Nurbs in São Paulo.

Here are some photos of FILE Rio from a friend of mine, Rodrigo Torres.

Until the 19th of April, Presence [a.k.a Soft n’ Silky] will be shown at FILE RIO 2009 – Electronic Language International Festival. – hosted at the Oi Futuro Cultural Center. Our trip to Rio was great. The FILE people were amazing. They put together a really nice exhibition with some really interesting works.

This photo is by adnanref_alm. You can see more photos of this event here.

Here is a small video of the tests before the opening. The video quality is not great.  I was too busy running around …but there is always next time (like Sao Paulo?).

Here is an other video that was shown on Globo [a tv news program in Brazil] as well a post on MTV BR

For this exhibition the project was ported from processing to openFrameworks.

Credits:
Installation by Hugues Bruyère with Elie Zananiri. Conceptual framework
“Performative Surface: Double Sided Interaction” by Hugues Bruyère and Thierry Giles.
Processing version of “Exhaust” by Ryan Alexander.

Dpt. won two prizes at this year’s Grafika Awards. Congrats guys !