ARJ » video analysis

Transformation on YouTube

alexarje — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 12:19:14 +0000

Victoria Johnson has posted a video of the performance of our piece Transformation on Youtube:

The video is from Victoria’s final performance as part of her research fellowship in the arts (PhD-equivalent), which happened Monday 28 March 2011 at the Norwegian Academy of Music.

As I wrote earlier this year:

Transformation a piece where we are using video analysis to control sound selection and spatialisation. We have been developing the setup and piece during the last couple of years, and performed variations of the piece at MIC, the Opera house and at the music academy last year.

Multiple USB webcams working at the same time

alexarje — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 08:05:42 +0000

After working happily with FW-products for many years, the recent trend of disappearing FW-ports have made me look for USB-based solutions. For hard drives the switch has been easy, and I also recently got my first USB-based sound card. The hardest part has been to figure out how to handle video cameras.

I have been using various Unibrain cameras for years, and have gotten used to the simplicity of being able to hook up multiple cameras to one computer. Last year when I tried hooking up multiple USB-based webcams to a computer (Windows, since they didn’t work on OSX at all), only one could work at a time. I was therefore pleasantly surprised when I found that Logitech’s QuickCam Vision Pro for Mac actually works well on OSX, and you can even have several of them running at the same time (see screenshot)! Now the only problem is the auto-focus and auto-contrast which tend to cause problems in video analysis (particularly when doing background subtraction).

Open lab

alexarje — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:13:16 +0000

We have slowly been moving into our new lab spaces over the last weeks. The official opening of the labs is scheduled for Friday 26 September, but we had a pre-opening “Open lab” for the new music students last week, and here are some of the pictures research coordinator Anne Cathrine Wesnes shot during the presentation.

Here I am telling the students a little about our new research group, and showing the main room:

Showing some realtime video analysis tools, including motion history images and motiongrams:

Demonstrating our new Optitrack motion capture system:

Kristian Nymoen showing the “self-playing piano”, a Disklavier controlled by the movements of two Polhemus electromagnetic trackers.