Iamascope by Sidney Fels
I had the chance to experience this screen while visiting the Power House Museum in Sydney, Australia. I contacted the PH new media curator to get some more info on the piece, and I was pleasantly surprised to find out it was by a Canadian artist from UBC. See below for some info and links to video clips.
Artist Sidney Fels about Iamascope:
“This interactive art piece explores this view of ourselves with a multi-media experience using an interactive piece called the Iamascope. The Iamascope uses a video camera lens as the eye of a kaleidoscope and projects a kaleidoscopic image of the performer onto a large screen. A vision subsystem is coupled to the electronic eye to control musical tones using a sustain algorithm.”
“Once inside the Iamascope, participants can gesture, dance, sing and speak to control and choreograph the imagery and music in real-time. Both the audience and the performer experience a rich aesthetic interactive experience.”
Technical description: The Iamascope currently uses a firewire camera attached to an Apple G5 Computer running the Iamascope code. The code is written in a combination of C and Tcl/Tk using OpenGL. As well, the music synthesizer used here is based on SimpleSynth and the video capture code for the Mac is based on open source code called SeeSaw. The video data is placed in texture memory where it is mapped using mirror reflections onto the geometry.
Excerpted from:
http://research.it.uts.edu.au/creative/betaspace/iamascope.html
Further info on Iamascope and Sidney Fels, Human Communication Technologies Laboratory at the University of British Columbia:
http://hct.ece.ubc.ca/research/iamascope/#abstract
Video clips online:
Intro to how Iamascope works:
http://hct.ece.ubc.ca/videos/Iamascope/isintro.avi
Demo: http://hct.ece.ubc.ca/videos/Iamascope/isPerf1.avi
Helen