• Description

• Inspirations
• Favorites
• OpenFrameworks
• Past BBC Events
• Others

• Project Brain

• Research
• Books
• BBC
• Technical

• Requirements

• Development
• Prototype 01
• Prototype 02

• Outcome
• Summary
• Prototype 03
• My Brain

• Further Development
• Technical
• BBC Submission

• Critical Commentary
• Initial Thoughts
• Tron Inspiration
• Problems Encountered
• Afterthoughts

• References

• About

I knew from the time I studied the code of the Animatron that I would be using OpenCv for my project. It’s a programming library written in C++ that covers the most important computer vision algorithms. At the beginning I started writing C++ code in Visual Studio 2008 and tried to get OpenCv running with it.

That proved more difficult than I thought though, so I was more than happy to swap over to openFrameworks and Code::Blocks when I found out about them. OpenFrameworks is a programming library by Zach Lieberman, Theodore Watson and Arturo Castro together with help from the OF community.

At the time I also knew about the Processing library written in Java but by recommendation of the Programming Interactivity book by Josua Noble, I decided to use openFrameworks. So, I was coding in C++ in the IDE called Code::Blocks. When I was working on my MacBook I used XCode to work on my projects. Another programming language I considered was Max/Jitter but due to it not being free to use, I decided against it.

I used several addons to openFrameworks for my work. Some are listed below. Especially the last one was heavily adapted to change the code to my needs, like adding random colours for example.

• ofxOpenCv - which integrates some essential functions of the OpenCv library
• ofxVectorMath - for my drawing vectors etc
• ofxBox2d - for the physics engine
• ofxContourUtil - for my contour customisation
• ofxCvBlobTracker - for the history of blobs

To download the newest versions of addons or code examples I used TortoiseSVN, a subversion program. I used Fraps to capture the example videos of my prototypes and I uploaded them to Vimeo, from where I could easily embed them in my website. The website itself is built using Indexhibit, a content management system with a very simplistic design. Another program I used was Wordle, to create the front page image for my website.

Most of my research and reading has been documented in a program called the Personal Brain. It’s a mind mapping application but I also think it’s quite similar to a visual database maybe. I’ve put all of my thoughts in there and I have created a dump of it and you can find it in the menu to the left.