One of the visual highlights of the Botanical Gardens gig was the use of video feedback for a large section of the dance piece. However, unlike most feedback systems, ours had to have a slower flow than you can typically get, and had to be able to self-stimulate when a dancer entered the visual area.
The system we came up with - which we dubbed "pixel glide" - was a combination of a few techniques that turned out to give good (if still somewhat uncontrollable) results. A camera fed the current image into a Jitter-based patch that provided some brightness, contrast and saturation adjustments (which I could perform from the central computer). From there, it went into a jit.slide object to slow things down a bit. The result was mixed (at about 75% to 25%) with a highly contrasted image of the sculpture's rough surface. This was then sent to the projector to complete the loop (since the camera was pointed at the projection surface).
The sculpture-texture was dark enough that the areas unoccupied by dancers offered little in the way of feedback action - the jit.slide and the low-light saw to that. However, when a dancer entered the area and was illuminated by some of the highlights of the texture, the system would kick into speed and begin flaming, roiling and twisting. Some of the activity was based on the location of the camera (on a platform about 4' high, mounted on a tripod so it was about 8' in the air), the offset of that location from the projection location, and any zoom and panning that we did. Some of the panels flamed straight up, others twisted in an arc and others created filmstrip-like image feedback along the length of the projection area.
It was a highlight, and people seems to love it. I'm sure I'll be using this one a lot more...
[ddg]
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