bridell.com

Interactive mixed reality game by Animaatiokone Industries.

Kick Ass Kung-Fu is a mixed reality fighting game. You perform your real martial-arts type moves in front of a camera. On screen you see both yourself and your virtual opponents. Fight!

I’m particularly impressed by the way they managed to mix physical motion with game-like physics on screen (super high jumps, super fast moves, etc). It’s also really liberating to do this sort of gaming without having to strap on any type of sensors, glasses or other gadgets, and at the same time allow you to use any physical object as a weapon. There are some videos on the site below showing all the nifty features.

Further reading:

• kickasskungfu.net

A paranoid web spider searching for the devil on the Internet.

Digital art piece produced at the Interactive Institute Smart Studio by Thomas Broomé, Fredrik Bridell and Olof Bendt. (2001)

Hellhunt contains a web spider, a computer program that goes to one web page, downloads all the images on the page and remembers all the links leading out from that page. It uses a corner detection algorithm to detect corners in images, and then tries to match those corners with the pattern of an inverted pentagram, a five-pointed star with two points on top, considered to be a symbol of evil. If it finds it, the image is saved along with a copy of the image with the pentagram filled in. In some versions the image is also printed out, and an e-mail is automatically sent to the owner of the page, saying that we have detected that they are posting satanic material on the web, and would they please be so kind as to remove it.

This piece (conceived by Thomas Broomé) was originally part of a larger exhibition called Lords of Legacy, shown at Art Node in Stockholm (2001). I did a lot of the programming (in Lingo, the curious programming language used in Macromedia Director).

Out there:
thomasbroome.com

Catch virtual snow with your shadow

Interactive art piece by artist Sachiko Hayashi produced at the Interactive Institute in the context of the Man Machine exhibition (2005). Developed by Sachiko Hayashi, Fredrik Bridell and Olof Bendt.

In this piece, images of falling snow flakes are projected onto a projection screen. The visitor is invited to step in front of the screen, so that the visitor blocks the projection and casts a shadow on the screen. When a visitor’s shadow falls on a snow flake (as when you are holding up your hand and the snow “falls” on your hand), the snow flake vanishes.

There are different types of snow flakes. Some of the contain sounds (made by invited sound artists), and some of them contain interview clips featuring people telling you about their experiences of snow.

To let you in on the secret of the magic, there’s a video camera that watches the back of the projection screen. The projector and camera are aligned so that a certain pixel on the projected image appears on a certain (predictable) pixel on the camera image. This way it is a relatively simple task to grab a frame from the camera and look at the pixels around the areas where the snow flakes are. If they come back as almost black, somebody’s blocking the image. The snow flake is removed, and the sound is released. Other than figuring this out I also actually made it, using Macromedia Director and the Myron WebCamXtra.

See also:

• Flurry Project, at Interactive Institute
• Sachiko Hayashi, e-garde.net
• Myron WebCamXtra