My last post was ten days ago. Not so coincidentally, ten days ago I met with Luna of Fauxcialites and agreed to do a last minute build for the upcoming Korrupt party. In retrospect, I never want to agree to have such an impossible turn around time again, but also, I am really glad that I did it.

Brief Synopsis of Device: A 3 foot disc that can hold up to 1000 pounds, and rotates 360 degrees on its center access, is placed in front of a white photo background. People pose, while being rotated on the disc, at several positions. The images are then displayed in sequence, creating a non-accurate, but fun animation of the people. This sequence of people at the party posing is projected in near real time at the party.

The key lesson learned was that if a party has booze, music, and people that want to have a good time, it will be incredibly resilient. Parties survive horrible events all the time and keep going, so it is ok to try something out, and if it sucks, the party can still be amazing, just nobody will be using your interaction. This is really good news for me, since I had been more precarious about what I was installing at parties, because I was worried that I could potentially ruin them.

Fortunately, the installation did not suck, but was very loved. I had some major help from people putting it all together, literally in the case of the spinning device. My software was a near disaster, and I ended up only using half of it (see below.) Instead, I put the images together by hand.

For the coding side, I was using JAVA to grab the images from one folder, perform a series of photo editing manipulations using IMAGE MAGICK, rename the images a random string, and add these images to an XML file with a specific node name for that group. The first problem occurred when I was transferring to my laptop and discovered that it is too old for Image Magick, so I had to use photoshop actions which takes much longer. Had I installed on my laptop earlier, this would not have been a problem, since JAVA can handle its own image manipulations, but alas … time was the enemy on this. The second problem was that for some reason, JAVA was corrupting about 1 out of every 20 of the images when it renamed and moved them. This is likely due to my craptop. Again, I did not test this out in time to be able to bug shoot. Flash handles this pretty nicely. However, for SOME reason I’m still not sure why - not all of my images were being transmitted from my laptop to the mac mini running the projection.

I was really disappointed with myself for not having put the software together in time in a functional manner. However, from the ashes, I have developed a new process for creating interactive parties. Essentially, it is a variant of the Dr. Pausch’s gold spike lesson, where you make sure the most crucial parts of the software are done first, and then build around them. In my case, the interactions with large groups of drunken people in a noisy environment is the crucial part. I can’t really test that out, without actually being at a party. However, I can build a wizard of oz simulation, and test that out. A wizard of oz for this project would have been as simple as taking photos of somebody turning around, and then building a flash swf to see what it looks like. HAD I done the wizard of oz in this instance, I would have learned a hell of a lot about how the process of imagery would be going, and would have had a system that I could rely upon if my software failed, as it did.