Welcome to the online portfolio & blog of Luke Chambers containing work and ramblings completed whilst studying Digital Art and Technology at the University of Plymouth.
This web site serves as a place where I can articulate my ideas and thought processes as well as show off previous work.
PROJECT: GALLERY VIEWER
Posted April 26, 2008 at 6:11 pm
Today I’ve been hunting for a good enough flash 3d rotating picture viewer that I could modify to show the paths. The effect I was wanting is one that shows the pictures coming towards you as if you are walking the path yourself at your computer. Heres a preview of how it works:
What I’m hoping to do is get this working with the website so as xml documents can be read in automatically using php. Should be good.
Tags: Project
Comments (0)PROJECT: TIMEDSPY & SHOZU
Posted April 24, 2008 at 2:23 pm
I’ve finally got TimedSpy and Shozu working on my old Nokia 6600 after playing about with the upload settings. They work quite nicely actually and provide a good solution for my image capture and upload problem. I simply set TimedSpy going, taking a photo every 5 seconds and once I’m done I stop it, load up ShoZu and select the images I want to upload. These then get uploaded to my server where I’ll be able to read them in using flash. Simple….I hope!
The nice thing about having this part of it separate from the main flash program means that it frees up a lot more of the CPU, so I shouldn’t get as many problems as I’ve been having with the actionscript getting stuck. Fingers crossed.
Tags: ProjectPROJECT: NEW HARDWARE & SOFTWARE ISSUES
Posted April 20, 2008 at 5:09 pm
So first things first, I’ve got a new phone; an O2 Xda Orbit 2 to be exact. The best part of this is everything is built in, so none of this external GPS receiver business anymore which is brilliant. Apart from that, its much faster than the Xda I was borrowing from Adam and has a lot more memory. Marvellous!
Secondly, software issues! At the moment I’m having a problem solving the whole issue of taking photos and getting them online so as to allow my project access to them along with gps data. So far I’ve found a piece of software called TimedSpy which will allow me to automatically take a photo every set interval and save it to the phone memory. The only problem being I can only use a Symbian based phone, which means using my old Nokia 6600, not what I want!
Not happy with this I decided to hunt for a similar piece of software that is Windows Mobile based. The nearest bit of software that I could find was called Pocket Camera but was developed for a smartphone. Un surprisingly it didn’t work. That got me thinking and after a looking into developing my own application for the platform I found an entry in the Windows Mobile Version 5.0 SDK for the camera API. After downloading it and borrowing a copy of Visual Studio as well as finding a very helpful video by a guy called Rory Blyth I found that I couldn’t control the taking of photos within the program. Instead the user would always be presented with a dialog in order to take the photo. I tired looking for ways around it but could find nothing.
This leaves me using the TimedSpy application. To upload the photos to the server I found a nifty bit of software called ShoZu. This allowed me to create my own site within my profile online that my phone can access. For this I just setup the connection with my FTP details to my web server which will allow me to upload directly, which is very handy! Luckily this also works on Symbian based phones too but this leaves me with a 2 phone setup and only I contract with an unlimited data plan, whoops! Will have to beg Adam to see if I can borrow his Sim.
Tags: ProjectDISSERTATION: DOWNLOAD
Posted at 3:59 pm
Finally got my dissertation finished and it is now available online. To download a copy please click here.
Tags: DissertationPROJECT: MEETING WITH MIKE
Posted April 16, 2008 at 2:52 pm
Had my first meeting with Mike today so I was just taking him through what my project involves as well as what I might put in my presentation. I hopefully communicated this over to him well enough for him to understand what I was going on about but he seemed to think it was a good idea.
He particularly liked the way I will record photos along these journeys, tieing these into the location, caching them if you will. Mike also showed my a couple of videos of Microsofts’ Photosynth. I could explain what it is but thought the Photosynth website summed it up nicely:
Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space.
Mike suggested it would be nice to view the journeys online through the photos taken on the journey, allowing them to fly towards you. These photos could be a collaborative collection taken from multiple users journeys and the online part would allow you see these, which I thought was a great idea.
Will post some more up soon.
Tags: ProjectPROJECT: LAST MEETING WITH CHRIS
Posted April 14, 2008 at 9:30 pm
Had my last project meeting with Chris (hes off to Edinburgh) last week and I was discussing the presentation with him as I’m still a little concerned with the critical context side of the project. I took some notes about what I might want to include in the presentation:
Sides to the project
- Technical platform - that provides an online solution compared to other offline solutions
- Cultural/Social - walking through paths of time, cameras becoming locative, the syncing of time and space
Bits and pieces to consider
- Deja Vu clips - separated real time from past events that converge
- Donnie Darko - crazy time spindles
- Mscapers
- Time taken away from space using Cartesian maps
- Maps have no clocks
- Clocks have no maps
- Photography is split from time
- Tom Tom - you can see yourself in space, but you can’t see other people
- Cinema that deals with the digital
- Look into the context behind memory and space - project deals with this heavily
- Hollywood is weak when it comes to space/time - my project can give that Deja Vu moment
- Look into Thrift - the unified model of time - railways - find an interesting angle
- Look into Barbara Adams work
I hope to expand this into an outline of what I will talk about on presentation day very soon.
Tags: ProjectDISSERTATION: NEARLY DONE
Posted at 8:59 pm
After handing in a draft and having some feedback on it from Joasia I’ve been working to get it all finished over the weekend. I’m hopefully finished now but my plan is to let people read over it and tweak it if necessary. Then its binding time, staples here I come!
Tags: DissertationNARRATIVE: ONE HUNDRED MILLION MILLION MOBILE POEMS
Posted at 8:48 pm
I’ve been so busy that I had completely forgotten to mention my finished narrative project! Anyway it takes Raymond Queneau’s One Hundred Thousand Billion Sonnets, translated by Bev Rowe, and allows you to experience these poems through a mobile device using GPS in Plymouth.
Its quite a simple piece allowing you to make your own path through Plymouth, passing through hot-spots along the way triggering a line of a poem, similar to how you would do in the book. These lines are assigned to positions around Plymouth, of which you can walk through and read the line.
To download and have a go yourself go here: One Hundred Million Million Mobile Poems
Tags: NarrativeSPACE: AUDIO JITTER FINISHED
Posted April 9, 2008 at 9:23 am
Finally got my space project finished up. It even has its own dedicated page, go check it out here.
Tags: SpaceSPACE: WORKING OUT LONG & LAT AMONGST OTHER THINGS
Posted March 13, 2008 at 7:51 pm
I was having trouble working out which way longitude and latitude ran across a map so I decided to create a little jpg to help illustrate it:
Using this I can hopefully work out the action-script I need for the flash application to control the binaural sounds.
I’ve also had a think about the locations for the recordings and have come up with:
- Mutley Plain
- Drake Circus Junction (old roundabout)
- Bottom of Armada Way (opposite the civic center)
These, I feel, will give a good variety of noise that should be distinguishable when you listen to it back through the jitter software. Talking about the application, I’ve started to piece it together now and should hopefully have a working prototype by next week, fingers crossed.
