I’ll be giving a presentation at the next Tiny Army meeting (Jan 4 2012, Phoenix Art Institute) about using the XBox Kinect for real-time animation.
I’m still sorting out details, but I have three goals. One is to show some sweet demos. I know for sure I’ll be demoing Animata but I also hope to show real-time interaction with Google Sketch-Up using some Ruby code I’ve been working on.
I also want to spend some time on the in’s and out’s of using Animata; it’s really amazing software, but it has some quirks, so I’ll try to give some pointers on getting started while avoiding some possible annoyances.
Finally I hope to show how there has been an ever-expanding realm of tools, both hardware and software, that allows for non- (or less-) technical people to create serious (or not so serious) art with computers, software, and assorted hardware. Part of this is OSC (Open Sound Control), which can act as a sort of glue protocol among various inputs and outputs, but there’s also Processing, JRuby + Monkeybars, Wii controllers, Arduino, and more.
I do not plan on this being an especially technical talk (e.g. while I may be running custom software I am not going to be showing code or anything like that) but I do hope to show that there are all sorts of things one can do without needing to be particularly geeky, and to hopeful get more artists involved with, or at least aware of, a slew of available technology.
BTW, I’m more than happy to answer technical questions if people have them, either during or after the talk. It’s just that this isn’t meant to be a code-y presentation per se.