While tinkering around with a few friends at ‘Nerd Club ‘, we decided to each come up with a project using an ESP32 microcontroller. And so began many months of exploring what could be done with these little boards. The first challenge was to get one powered up, connected to a few sensors and a…
We were asked to help develop a new skill-based game called the £10k Hat-Trick. The game is a take on the pub classics, beer pong, shuffleboard and darts. Completing each round wins the player £10k! At Solarflare I developed the code that runs the game states on a large screen to guide players through the…
Solarflare was approached by Metallic to create a fun, interactive game for Nike’s launch of their new clothing range, Nocta. I had previously used a technique where a laser pointer dot is tracked using just a webcam, and by carefully tuning the camera sensitivity settings, the camera could be made to only see the reflected…
I managed to borrow a LaserCube from Ed, a small portable laser projector and after getting it working (it was an older model) I wanted a fun project to show off its coolness. Inspired by a video I saw somewhere, where they had aligned a laser and a projector that makes the most of both…
Tinkering around with the amazing T3D 3D textures in Touchdesigner. Followed a couple of tutorials on how to implement reaction diffusion in 3D. using a spinning seed object to source the reaction. Loved experimenting with the 3D textures, takes all the 2D image manipulation and applies it to a volume which can then be skinned…
Launch Rockets A fun little project, retro 8bit inspired, animated intro to Solarflare’s Launch (Labs) page. Created in Cables.gl ( I seem to alternate between projects in TouchDesigner and Cables) Cables doesn’t seem to have a concept of persistent particles, so I found a node that someone had created to store their positions between frames…
Experimenting with Touchdesigner and Curl Noise, a mathematical function which can be used to drive a particle system and create organic, turbulent-looking movement. Experimented with a couple of ways to create the effect in TD. There’s something hypnotic about the motion, like artificial life. I Created the first version by following this tutorial Then a…
This was a fun little project combining realtime AI generative images and a 2D fluid simulation with a touch screen. Tapping and dragging on the touchscreen, using this point as the input to the fluid simulation. Then, feeding the resulting images to an image2image Stream-Diffusion image generator from Dotsimulate. A range of different prompts can…
As part of a Solarflare project, we needed to visualise an AI, a large language model, “thinking” when users asked it a question. I came up with a fun point cloud simulation developed using cables.gl and an image to instanced points workflow. The location of the points could be manipulated using a wide range of…
Solarflare was asked to come up with a way to enhance guests’ experience as they entered an event through a tropical garden. We came up with the idea of turning the plants into sensors which would trigger audio and video projection mapping as guests approached and touched them. Using the Biotron from Playtronica which detects…
My second collaboration with artist Jimmy C, to reinterpret one of his paintings of a skull into AR. We worked on this project a few years ago, back when the HTC Vive was the best VR headset and it needed cabling back to a high-end PC to render the graphics. Originally developed in Touchdesigner. We…
A recommendation from a friend and an interesting chat over a coffee led to a collaboration with artist Jonathan Huxley to explore emergent behaviour and whether his paintings of stylised figures in crowds could be simulated on a computer. Jonathan’s paintings of abstract people have a natural behavioural quality to them which to Jonathan just…
This project is a return to my fascination with single line drawings and a chat with Ed who was looking for interesting artwork to showcase the Terrapen plotter he was building. A single line drawing algorithm tries to draw a picture without taking the pen off the paper, by scribbling back and forth with a…
Combining Augmented Reality with a traditional Masked Ball, this was the concept that Solarflare Studio collaborated on with Head of House. Could we create a system where guests would be able to see each other dressed in fantastic augmented masks as they freely walked around…? After some initial ideas sessions, we settled on the Magic…
For the last year, I have collaborated on a multi-user VR-audio-performance project. During the performance, Leslie Dreere movements are used to drive generative VR visuals and an audio soundtrack. Up to 4 viewers can watch in VR, each with a unique perspective on Leslies performance. I developed the VR and multi-user communications using Unity which…
Glitch art made with Cables.gl as part of a POC around making art accessible. Using touch, voice, or movement triggers the glitch effect. Had lots of fun trying out loads of different glitch effects and mixing them all together.
For the Dubai Expo 2020 we faced the challenge of creating a wide range of 3D content for a volumetric display made from hundreds of LED rods. As no authoring system existed for this type of display, I created an authoring and pre-visualisation system in TouchDesigner. 3D animations were created in TD to support each…
More experiments with Cables.gl This time trying to create an interactive element for Solarflare Studios home page. This is my largest and most complex node graph yet. I managed to implement a particle system with persistent storage for the position, velocity, etc using a circular graph wiring, despite Cables not really supporting this. Try the…
Audio-reactive project using cables.gl a node-based visual programming environment for WebGL. Really fun to use, similar to Touch Designer but you can publish your creations straight to the web. This needs a fairly decent graphics card to get full framerate. The plugin for the live version below seems to have a glitch with the audio….
A little project for SolarFlare Labs around the Covid pandemic, to track an QR code and overlay an AR animation, playing with the black pixels in the QR code. Coded everything in Javascript and used AFrame for the AR tracking. Modelled the various shapes that the pixels form into using Blender and used the vertex…
Creation of an interactive WebGL background for the Digital Sanctuary of the Helsinki Fashion Week website. We were approached to help create part of this new fashion initiative, and through the course of various discussions, settled on using three.js and JavaScript to code the 3D interactive page. The main element, the orb or stimulato,r used…
Another simple but fun SparkAR filter to blur the live camera image based on the strength of the audio detected. The blur splits the image into RGB and shifts the colours different amounts similar to the chromatic aberration lens effect. SparkAR patch graph editor is a bit like using TouchDesigner and a nice way of…
Creating beautiful sculptures derived from the state of a person’s mind. The MindSculpture data visualisations use a combination of accelerometer sensor readings for movement and pulse sensors for heart rate. These are captured from a users wearable or smartphone using a logging app. This data is then processed in OpenOffice Calc to smooth, combine axis,…
A quick project in response to the current Coronavirus pandemic to visualise social distancing. Using TouchDesigner for the visuals and TSPS to track blobs and send position over OSG. Posted on LinkedIn as part of the Solarflare Studio Labs work. Love using TouchDesigner, it’s so nice to work with!
Trying to create a single-line portrait for the Processing day event in Bournemouth. I wanted a project that the public could engage with and which could be used with a plotter, which some of the others are building. Stumbled across some single-line drawings on Pinterest and thought that would be good to try and draw…
TouchDesigner generative real-time audio-reactive ident visual for Inition. Looking to advance my TouchDesigner skills, I embarked on creating a new real-time ident generator for the latest Inition branding, a very minimal-looking network of lines and polygons. Using a particle system, a Python script finds each point’s nearest neighbours in 3D space. These are then linked…
Created using a particle system of metaballs with just touching field strengths. Meshed, decimated heavily, wrote a Python script to subdivide all the separate objects and spherify them a little. Nice SSS material and depth of field camera. Glowing filament lights were created by tracing the paths of a turbulent particle system movement, then an emissive…
Quick bit of background… Jimmy C contacted us to see if we were interested in collaborating on a project. After an initial chat we came up with a couple of ideas, one of which was to try and recreate version of Jimmy’s painting style in realtime so that individuals could see themselves transformed. I spent…
So my contribution to this project asides from coming up with the creative/technical idea and helping win it, was to code the image processing part. But I get ahead of myself… We were approached by Westfield about a 3D scanning project for Mr Porter clothing range. After the first meeting, we persuaded them it would…