I made this applet to visualize the Munsell color space in 3d. The cool thing about the Munsell system is that it’s modeled after human color perception. You can read more about it on wikipedia.

The vertical axis shows value (how dark or light a color is). Hues (the name of the color, eg. red, green) are laid out in a circle and chroma or saturation (how much punch a color has) gets stronger the further a color is from the center.

You can rotate the camera by moving the mouse left/right and up/down and zoom with the arrow keys.

Notice the funny shape of the color system. This is because of the way our eye perceives color. For example the most saturated blue that we can see is a dark color, while the most saturated yellow is in the light end of the spectrum.

You can also compare the gamut or range of colors of the Munsell book (subtractive mixing) to the range of a computer monitor (RGB additive mixing). Click the left mouse button to switch between the two.

This is the first time I’ve used Processing and I love it. It’s very easy to learn and extremely powerful.

In comes the pig, out goes the sausage. Yummm…

Little Hungarians learn by watching.

life drawing 02 14 2009

Here’s a screenshot of the photoshop swatches. Colors are organized by value and saturation.

yellow ochre, cadmium red, ultramarine digital palette

Humanimation is an art installation where people can replace frames in a cg animated sequence with their own images. The setup consists of a green screen and a projection screen. Here’s how it works:

The user stands in front of the green screen. The projection screen shows a live video feed of the user, it’s like standing in front of a really expensive high tech mirror (projector, camera, computer, drywall and green paint ~$3000.) The system composites a pose of the animation over the live video. The user matches the pose and the computer captures an image. After some image processing (green screen removal and transformations) the image of the user is inserted into the animation sequence.

As more and more images are captured from users, the cg stick figure animation turns into a cool live action stop motion animation with real human actors.

This project was not only exciting because of developing software using live image data, but I also got a chance to hang drywall and build a green screen setup in the basement (you see, one of the benefits of moving out of LA is that now our house has a basement.)

Here are some photos of the setup (I bet your basement doesn’t look like this):

humanimation setup 1

humanimation setup 2

The cg animation sequence:

The same animation sequence with humans:

Thanks to George Valavanis for the music and to the following humans for the images: Andrew Gard, Beth Vargas, Dan Enright, Joe Botsch, Kate Holowchik, Katrina Davis, Mark Mullaney and Vsevolod Khibkin.

After living and working in Los Angeles for nearly ten years there was a need for change; to get out of the Rat Race. So my expecting wife and I packed up our belongings and headed East to New England.

The “trip 3271” project was created during this cross-country trip. Driving across the United States with our three dogs in a restored 1965 Airstream trailer, we shot 3271 frames of the journey, one photo every minute, using a digital camera rigged up to the dash. The works are meant to present the viewer with this five day experience.

I’ve developed a java program to composite the photos into the images above. Digital prints are available for purchase, please contact me for pricing.

The movie is unedited, every photo is exposed for 1/12 sec in the order it was taken. There is a high definition version for projection at shows and galleries.

Music by George Valavanis.

I’m also switching from drupal to wordpress. Drupal is way too powerful for a personal blog (what I really mean is that it’s extremely user unfriendly.) You can read more about my experience here.