Approach
This week I continued to teach myself projection mapping. I continued to follow the Isadora tutorials found on the Isadora website. I began the week by mapped shapes on to the same box as last week, but this time working in Isadora. After successfully recreating last week's design with three different colors on each side of the box, I began working towards projecting videos on the box. Working in After Effects, I created a video of color changing cubes with a pink grid. I then imported the rendered video from After Effects into Isadora and began laying the video on the different sides of the cube. After some struggles to achieve precise proportions from video to cube and unsatisfied with the quality of the projection I recruited the help of Jess. She gave many great tips and tricks to use inside of Isadora like how to properly mask and manipulate video files onto objects. Together we also messed with the projector in hopes to fix the quality of the video output, but we eventually switched out the projector for one with a finner pixel count. Once the projector was switched out the quality of the image looked clean and crisp. Using the helpful tips from Jess I began quick work of mapping the projection to the box. With the success of mapping a video to the box, I started adding other elements to the projection using Isadora. I quickly became comfortable using Isadora, even though there's still lots to understand about Isadora, I can get around the program and find tools with ease.
Likely Next Step
During the end of the week I began to think about what my likely next step would be. I first would like to try and add depth to the cube somehow. Then I had an engaging conversation with Taylor and together we looked back on my initial system design. The conversation went all over the place and Taylor gave me some things to think about like integrating interactivity to the projection mapping with motion capture and depth mapping cameras. Problems we came up with were how to get different softwares to talk to each other (Vicon and Motionbuilder talking to Isadora). An interesting research thread we also landed on was volumetric projection mapping, and how multiple projectors could work together and project on a moving object in space. So, my likely next step is working with dynamic projection mapping, and further researching how to get other programs to talk to Isadora.
Relevant Sources and Research
With the help of Taylor, I have accumulated some links and resources to look into for next week. I will also like to talk to Vita, Tory, Jess, and possibly Alex this week and ask how to get Isadora to talk to other programs like Vicon. From my motion capture class, Vita gets Vicon to talk to Motion Builder, and I don’t know how that is done, but I imagine looking into how Vicon talks to MotionBuilder could be helpful information.
Helpful links