blacklog

… 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:

I just posted picture number 5000 in PictureXS. This gives me the opportunity to write about something that is not directly related to PictureXS or the web. The picture belongs to a collection of screenshots I have been taking of the ongoing PLW interactive graphics experiment called oGFx (for now) that Kyle and I have been working on. It combines Cocoa, CoreImage, Python, Quartz2D, OpenGL and GLSL to deliver a true interpreted graphics programming environment with direct access to the GPU. Dynamic texture mapping, procedural geometry, and programmable shader customization are the building blocks we are using to make interactive graphics programming feel less like a sandbox, and bring it closer to the true nature of computer graphics.

The following pictures are sections of screenshots taken during tonight’s testing session. We will be updating the screenshot gallery here on a regular basis. We might also come up with a gallery of movies soon.

“you can create great things despite ANY existing circumstances”, Richard Baily, 1953-2006

[Quick update note: I just noticed today (August 15th 07) that ImageSavant (Baily's gallery website) is back online]

Last night I stayed in the lab until 2:23 am, working on OpenGL stuff with Kyle. Vertex programs, shaders, and all this other things I can’t quite grasp yet. But something about the black limbo traditionally used in an empty NSopenGL view and the digital color nature of my primitive OpenGL scenes somehow started reminding me of a few related Computer Graphics references I have collected from the web over the years. I don’t remember when I first read about Computer Graphics pioneer Richard Baily and Spore, perhaps searching the web for renderings of attractors, but I remember very well the awe I felt when I first browsed through the galleries in his website ImageSavant (I know, it’s down). I think I remember the Spore source code available for download there, but I’m not sure. When I clicked on my bookmark this morning to pay a visit, I found a dead link, and after 20 more seconds of google search, I realized Baily died a little more than 1 year ago, following after his mentor Jules Engel (1915-2003), who died 4 years ago. A generous man that offered full resolution snapshots and movies of his work in his website, he was regarded by some as one of the few that could remain an artist true to themselves, and still conduct a fruitful relationship with the Hollywood media machine.

One of those people I was looking forward to meet one day.

The Center for Visual Music Payed him a tribute here, and this is a link to an article the futurist filmmaker Rene Daalder wrote about him.

These are some pictures of his work with Spore. You should try to imagine them in motion, as if you were a solar system scale creature, surfing through the star clouds in spacetime. A good example of his work in motion is his depiction of the synaptic planet Solaris, featured in the 2002 unfortunate remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s (1932-1986) science fiction classic from 1972, based on the book written in 1961 by recently deceased polish cult writer Stanislav Lem (1921-2006).