I am going to lead a design and technology workshop at the Shanghai Art and Design Academy (SADA) this summer. I eventually decided to build the workshop on Project Mapping, because of the diverse design backgrounds of the participants and short turnaround time. After I decided on the direction of the design content and main learning outcomes, I went through all the examples I made in the past and updated them to work with the current tools and technology.
I kept most of the interaction and creative control based examples that were built with OSC, midi I/O, and Leapmotion, and retired all the Internet of Things ones that were built with Littlebits, Beedotte, IFTTT, and ESP8266 due to the scope of this workshop. There are no major changes in VPT 8, so most of the update works were on the Processing side.
Updating old examples or coming up with new ones is in itself a creative process. Discovering new affordance makes me fall in love with an old technology that I had worked with before all over again. I am excited to teach Projection Mapping in 2019 now! Among the new examples I created for this workshop, my current favorite is the INCENDIO example inspired by the wizardry world of Harry Potter. In this example, the user can set the projected surface on fire (animated fire!) with a magic wand. This is made possible with a commercial TV remote wand, an IR TV remote encoder, Processing, and VPT8.
Trying to design a stand that can hold the white cardboard cube I used for the workshop and an extension USB cable for the TV remote sensor dongle. On the stand side, the goal is to cover the least amount of the surface at the front. It turned into a dragon fish at the end, it was magic.
