blacklog

you gotta love those normals!

I built a qbert style staircase with 2700 icons from the tiny icon factory. The icons are good building blocks to experiment with potential strategies to build virtual architectures for populating the e15 environment in the future. Complex shapes are also good to test different illumination models. Lights, materials and all that. We want to have a good control over all these resources to use them as tools to paint different subsets of large collections of data in interesting ways. The icons, for example, have names, and these names can be used to define the material of each icon. This would help to sort them visually.

All the icons in the following illustration are painted the same way, with a slightly tealish ambient color, a redish diffuse and a white and subtle specular (and infinitely faraway parallel light rays), but I could think of changing the material of all the Popeyes to spinach green, and then it would be easy to spot where the Popeyes are in the qbert staircase.

… and you can swim in it.

More Blood. La sangre!

The one thing I most remembered about the Tron movie was the motorcycle race where the trails of the bikes would become solid walls you could crash into. Solid time. Tangible history. Cool.

Inspired by the likes of Jules Marey, Eadweard Muybridge, Marcel Duchamp, Norman McLaren and Doc Edgerton, last night I used Kyle’s new image loading implementation in oGFx to fetch a 10000 frame long video loop and map it over a time progression of 500 quads. Where Muybridge was taking a single picture for each time slice, and Edgetron and Marey where exposing a collection of successive instants on the same piece of film to freeze motion, what I found most interesting of having a progression of video frames inside an interactive digital graphics environment was that I could arrange them as I pleased, and I could navigate inside of them, running over time. The motion picture was running on the first quad in front of me, and the quad behind was running the same movie just one frame behind, and the next one two frames behind, and so on, and I could look at the ghostly motion of all of them chasing each other just by turning on a semi transparent blending mode, that would let me jump inside to explore the dynamic tunnel defined by them, the three dimensional spacetime of the flat movie screen.

Oh, by the way, picture number 6000 in PictureXS is one of the screenshots I took during the video time extrusion session. I also wrote a note on the E15 blog about this, using it as an opportunity to explain about the relationship between E15 and oGFx.

After having an incredible response from the audience when presenting E15 at the Flash Forward conference two fridays ago with John, we decided to start the E15 blog to report on the status of the E15 project. A good explanation of what the project is about can be found here. Please let us know if you have any questions.

The following is a screenshot of Buza’s navigation on his own multiple webpage layout: