There are some really great photos up now at http://www.nuagevert.org please go check it out!

Last fall I was contacted by Heiko Hansen (of HeHe) regarding using the EasyLase USB on the Mac. I must say I was quite intrigued when I found out that he was working on Nuage Vert, a visualization of energy usage in Helsinki. The project uses the cloud of emissions from the Salmisaari power plant as a canvas to demonstrate how much energy is in use by the city.

photo credit HeHe

The project is going on display February 22-29 in Helsinki. I encourage you to go check it out more in depth at www.nuagevert.org.

For the project, I ended up creating a Java wrapper for the libEasyLase driver for OS X. It is now possible to get laser output on the EasyLase USB from inside a Java app on the Mac. Please contact me if you’re interested using this.

In my final project for my photography class this semester I had intended to take very wide angle pictures of spaces to evoke a feeling of emptiness and desolateness around the university. As the project progressed, I found it had turned in to something else; extremely wide angle and stitched photos. The process produced high resolution images which allowed me to print them very large. The image “beautifulcourtyard” seems to reflect the original intent most accurately.

Prints covering the entire floor of my apartment

They were put together with Adobe Photoshop CS3; Realviz stitcher provided unsatisfactory results.

The “big” versions I’ve put up for viewing in the gallery are 33% scaled versions of the originals. The originals are impressively large, which yielded the interesting prints. Well, they’re not wall sized or anything, but they’re the first time I’ve printed this large.

One more round of photos coming after I get back to school and scan the black & white film project.

My proceeding Fall 2007 semester entailed a photography course. In light of all the photos I took, I’ve here made several of my favourite photos available for your viewing pleasure right here on my website. They’re all available in the gallery section, as well as this post. These are all from the first project, I intend to post more photos in the future. Happy 2008.

I would very much appreciate some comments; critical ones equally as much as praise.

After a bit of work over Thanksgiving break, I was able to get the laser projecting Asteroids well enough to play. I apologize for the quality of the photos, but we were really interested in doing it BIG, so the beam was dim and my camera didn’t capture it especially well.

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I was happy to see a number of ACM folk braved the extreme cold weather to play Asteroids on exterior walls at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, an excellent venue which I intend on visiting again next Friday, when my good friend Erik will be playing Cello in the last orchestra concert of the semester.

This whole event turned out to be a quite a success with a Hot Cocoa + Helvetica reception afterwards, despite the fact that the software is still mostly a quick hack. I look forward to further development of additional laserware on the Mac.

Now just to write the real optimization code to make it work well… : )

So, the status of “LaserMAME” has always been kind of up in the air. Links to one associated site, NightLase laserMAME, are currently down. There was that excellent video that circulated the net under the filename lasermameNTSC.mpeg, but I don’t really even know who created that. I’ve played Asteroids in color on a Pangolin system, so I’m not sure if that was a complete clone or what–(ask me about that story sometime in person)–and finally, there has been some discussion on the LaserFreak and Pangolin Forums that seemed as if there was some question about who did the work and who has the rights to LaserMAME. I think a system was even commercialized and available for rental at some point.

Frankly, I’m not really interested in getting in to those politics. But one recent event got me–uhm…motivated–to enter the arena of playing classic vector games on a laser projector. It seems like a most natural thing to do and looks completely awesome. Even the high end graphics people at SIGGRAPH this year loved the ultimate saturation and archaic wireframe visuals generated by a laser projector playing vector games from ‘79 and the 80’s.

When Paul Debevec introduced the Electronic Theater showing we were fortunate enough to have at the NCSA building on November 8th, he excitedly highlighted the laser enabled MAME setup that they had installed when first showing these videos in San Diego. I was excited to hear this and even more pleased when he put up the photo of the renown laserists and others involved with getting the system working; Steve Heminover (who I’ve been lucky enough to meet), Matt Polak, and others.

I have an extreme amount of respect for the people involved here. They’re the world’s experts on laser display, and the production quality was fantastic, but I must admit through the whole video demo, I was thinking, “Hey, it can’t be that hard–everything is already in vector format. What’s the big deal.”

So last night after we got some ice cream at Cold Stone, despa and I got to coding. It took a good 2 or 3 hours to get MacMAME to compile. After that, in another couple of hours we hacked up a prototype of laserMAME using the EasyLaseUSB on Mac OS X. I know we’ve got the math wrong (we didn’t know the range of the x and y coords–and the documentation is temporarily unavailable on the MAME website), but we got Asteroids working with some display bugs.

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I think another couple of nights of hacking could make it really beautiful.

I apologize for the poor quality of the projection, images, and video, but I was so excited we got something working, I wanted to publish right away. I expect we’ll have much better results before, say, March 2008. More to come.

I’m happy to report I’m the proud new owner of a Canon PowerShot SD850 IS. It is so much fun to take photos with this camera. I’m going to be happy to use it while working on the final project in my photography class this semester. Here’s a sneak preview of what to expect: