Further Development Ideas

4D

Even though I have finished and submitted the project I still feel that I could develop the project further. I have a number of ideas with ways to improve the project or to extend it.

One idea would be to release the project as Open Source. This would allow anyone to contribute to the project, which would lead to the project developing in new and exciting ways. If the project was Open Source it would help with the porting of the application to other programming environments. For example, the application could be ported to Java or C# and then be used on mobile phones.

The second idea would be to create a community website which would include a forum and facilities for people to upload photographs and videos of them using the Lightscapes application. The forum would be used to provide feedback, bug reporting and to discuss development projects.

It would be interesting to see how people use the Lightscapes application, I'm sure some people will have more creative uses for it then I can imagine. It would be great to see if anyone uses it in the same was as Radiohead used the Velodyne Lidar system to produce the House of Cards video.

Website Live

4D

I've now finished producing the website for the project! The website will be used to showcase the project and also to offer downloads of the project. In the future I may release the project as Open Source, but at the moment I want to keep hold of the project to try and improve it before releasing it.

I've also tried getting the project to work on a mobile phone using Mobile Processing. However, Mobile Processing is quite underdeveloped and does not support OPEN GL or any high-level image manipulation. Therefore, I won't be able to develop a mobile version at the moment. It may be possible to port a version to Java, but at the moment I don't have the time to do this.

Anyway, you can check the website out here: Lightscapes website.

I may change the website in the future if I can afford to purchase the domain name for lightscapes.

Portable Application

4D

Today I took my laptop and the camera and walked around Portland Square capturing images. The walk gave me an idea to develop the application for mobile phones, so that you could download the application and use it to capture any environment. At the moment its quite clunky and awkward to carry around a laptop and camera to capture images, so it would be quite cool to have a portable application which could be used anywhere.

Installation Problems

4D

The installation has finished now, it's been up and running for around 18 hours. I've managed to capture over half a million still frames, however this causes me a huge problem! I have to try and transfer over 70gb of images from the Mac to my own computer, so that I can edit the images and use them for time-based studies.

Edit - Ok, so I've tried to transfer the images and it took 3 hours to transfer just over 10,000 images. Firstly, at this rate it will take around 150 hours to transfer all the files. Secondly, I don't even have 70gb of space on my laptop! So, I've decided to just take the 10,000 images and try to use them for some time-based visualisations. I am slightly disappointed to not be able to take all of the captured image, but there's not much I can do.

Portland Square Installation

4D

After 5 hours of hard work I have finally got my installation working in Portland Square! I had numerous problems trying to install the project, the main problem was to try and capture the video feed from a camera installed in Atrium B. However, as the camera was using a composite video input it was impossible to interface with the camera using Processing.

Therefore, we had to rig up a camera and point it towards a monitor that was displaying the camera feed. Not an ideal solution, but at least it works.




The camera was then connected to a Mac which had the project running. I had to edit the project quite a lot to get it running on a Mac as there were a few problems using OPEN GL. It has reduced the quality of the output, but I'm still pretty happy with the end result.



The Mac was then used to display the captured video onto the Plasma screen in Atrium C.




I'm now going to leave the application running for around 20 hours. I'm hoping I will capture the transformation of the space as the light changes throughout the day.