I’ve uploaded some demo images generated with the aTileSaver class to my Flickr account. They show images at reduced size and at 100%. Make sure to look at the original sizes for the full effect.

As should be expected, OpenGL doesn’t give quite the crispness that a raytracer or similar production tool might yield, but the sheer resolution should be enough to compensate. I have uploaded a 6400 x 6400 pixel JPG (RandBox 0023) as an example, but annoyingly Flickr isn’t able to create a thumbnail for it because of the large size. Go directly to the original size for a closeup view.

Read the rest of this entry »

Forgot one Flickr stats tool: Group Trackr. It tracks membership numbers and pictures posted over time. It doesn’t need the massive amount of requests that would be needed to do the same for a user’s photostream. The results can be posted as a static image on web sites etc.

Here is the Processing Flickr group:

I’ve been monkeying around with Flickr tools. I’ve even been getting my hands dirty with phpFlickr, a library that implements the API in classic friendly PHP style.

The API is powerful and well thought out, but can also be frustrating. Multiple HTTP requests are needed to get certain pieces of information. I’m sure there are good reasons, saving bandwidth being the main one. I do wish there was more statistics functionality. As it stands there are only views, favorite and comment counts, with no history of activity.

Getting the view count requires authentication, which is slightly tricky but doable. More annoyingly, Flickr only yields the view count when using flickr.photos.getInfo, which gives detailed info on single images one at the time. The more light-weight flickr.people.getPublicPhotos would have been more convenient. One might wonder if Flickr wants to discourage stats applications.

Some tools for an easy Flickr life:

• phpFlickr is a slick and transparent PHP implementation of the API. There’s little to simplify the basic API, but it lends itself easily to adding some Flickr magic to any web application.
• FlickrAide is interesting but experimental. It provides statistics, information about contacts and other details that can’t be seen so easily from Flickr. It’s a little unstable, and probably heavy-handed on its interactions with Flickr. But it gives an idea of what could be done with statistics etc. PC only.
• Portable Flicka is a good backup tool, particularly if you have more than 1000 images in your account. I tend to backup high-res images on Flickr for easy retrieval, this makes it even easier. PC only.
• Flickr Leech is a web interface for wallowing in Flickr’s “interestingness”. Not for people who are already showing signs of Flickr addiction, but good for avoiding flicking through sets page by page.

More can be found on The Great Flickr Tools Collection.

Illuminations 1.1 at Club Transmediale

Illuminations 1.1 is a new version of the Illuminations piece I created for the AV.06 festival in Newcastle. It has only been shown once, and so it seemed like a good starting point when Jan Rohlf from Club Transmediale asked me to do the graphics for the festival’s printed materials.

First I tweaked the system, changing the color scheme and modifying parameter presets. Then I used Processing’s PDF output to generate one hundred vector originals for free use by the festival designers (Tine Gundelach & Chrish Klose). Daniel Shiffman’s Moviemaker library was used to generate prerendered videos for use on monitors.

Finally the system was updated for realtime projection using a dual-screen setup (2048×768 resolution, OpenGL). The projection setup at Maria am Ostbahnhof is impressive, featuring 12 projectors covering the entire main hall. The piece was shown running for two nights, except when the performing acts had their own video.

See more documentation on Unlekker (including animation) and Flickr.

I’m currently writing a monster application doing indexing of feeds from blogs, del.icio.us, Flickr, Digg etc. It’s been a bit of a learning curve, but using the excellent and comprehensive Rome library has made it a great deal easier than it might otherwise have been. Rome handles Atom feeds as well as the various confusing RSS variants.

Making sense of feeds is often tricky, as different publishers can use various tags in different ways, or even add their own by introducing custom namespaces. The use of namespaces (which Rome supports through a plugin system) is a promising way of adding custom information, but not without its problems.

Having completed indexing of Flickr, del.icio.us and plain vanilla feeds, I turned to Digg feeds. Imagine my surprise to find out that not only is their advertised namespace (http://digg.com/docs/diggrss/) in fact offline, but they don’t even use it properly in their main RSS feeds.

http://digg.com/rss/containerscience.xml correctly specifies xmlns:digg=”http://digg.com/docs/diggrss/”, but http://digg.com/rss/index.xml specifies xmlns:digg=”docs/diggrss/”. And that just happens to be their main RSS feed. I know it seems niggling to complain, but it messes with the Module I’ve written to handle their tags and seems a tad careless. Oh well, guess I’ll just skip that feed.

More information about Rome, Digg etc:

• Why does Digg not follow standard RSS? (blog post)
• Rome Wiki
• ROME in a Day: Parse and Publish Feeds in Java, excellent article about Rome and introductory techniques over on XML.com
• del.icio.us/garuda/flowofthings is a collection of links I’ve collected, with plenty of feed and blog programming stuff for Java.

Oldskool: Sketches 1994-1998)

I just posted a sequence of old sketches to Flickr, ranging from 1994 to 1998 and showing some of my earliest computational work. Actually, since I never drew or worked visually in any other non-computational way after age 12, it is also some of my earliest visual work of any kind.

While some of the images are deeply mired in the techno aesthetic I was so taken with at that time (after all, I had just turned 20 and these were the 1990’s), others point to the beginning of a generative approach. Some of the basic ideas about form and structure expressed in these pieces are still with me today (see Kugelstudie or Illuminations for proof).

These are some of my favorites:

• Boxgrid
• objsphere
• Particle
• postscript.red.lines
• punch.codes
• grid0-5.deformation

You can still see these pieces on my Evolutionzone web site as part of the historical section, but that design was done in 1996 and is painful to look at now. Seeing the images on their own in the pristine Flickr interface makes me look at them in a different way. It still feels a bit vulnerable to expose them to public viewing like this, but I figure it’s not a bad thing.

The 3D images were rendered in POV-Ray, my first ever visual tool.

An official Flickr geotagging solution: Flickr Map

A built-in official Flickr solution for geotagging has been rumored for a while now. With the launch of Flickr Map two days ago it’s a reality. Simply navigate over to flickr.com/map and start surfing.

Geotagging is done through the Organizr, which now has a new tab called “Map”. Pre-existing geotagged images aren’t automatically imported, you have to go into Organizr and request that your images be added. One truly great feature is the addition of a “Map” link on the pages for sets that have geotagged images. See a map of my recent New York photos for an example. This is probably the best way of looking at geotagged images right now, for reasons I’ll explain below.

Having a definitive supported solution should provide a big boost for geotagging, as well as make it a whole lot easier for the non-expert part of the community. But the implementation is still a matter of taste. The Flickr geotagger community is currently figuring out what to think:

Read the rest of this entry »

Satellite image of Sao Paulo from Google Earth

I recently returned from a week in Sao Paulo for the opening of the excellent Art.ficial Emotion 3.0 exhibition at Itau Cultural. Following my recent Flickr addiction I documented the show in a Flickr set, a lot of which is geotagged. It’s worth noting that Aemkei has released a new version of his excellent Flickr geotagging bookmarklet, which caches the previous location found and automatically adds a “see where this picture was taken” link to the photo description.

Another fun tool I’ve been experimenting with is Roblog’s Flickrfly. It is a script which will allow you to “fly” to the location of a geotagged image in Google Earth. Just add a simple link to your image description and Flickrfly takes care of the KML file, including overlaying a thumbnail of your photo on the Google Earth map. The image above was taken in Google Earth, and if you look at the original size on Flickr you will see 4 small thumbnails indicating different images and their actual location.

Do have a look at what Sao Paulo looks like from space, it’s a bit like watching cancer grow. And I liked it there.

Bonus geo links (see Toxi / TomC)

• Geotracing
• Google Earth KML specs (now in version 2.1)
• Battleship: Google Earth

Geotagged Flickr photos in Google Earth via Yuan.cc (maps.yuan.cc/kml.php)

Last year I picked up a cheap GPS unit just for fun, which I have since used to collect GPS traces that I have yet to use for anything useful. I find the whole idea of geotagging quite fascinating, but have never built any applications using it.

Currently I’m in Vienna as artist-in-residence at the MuseumsQuartier, and so I’ve been taking quite a few pictures and putting them on Flickr as documentation. By accident I have met the street artist Space Invader, who is currently here “invading” Vienna. He puts up space invader mosaics in public places, and then documents them in the form of a map. This activity mixes a lot of interesting topics: Urban space, street art, locative media, psychogeography etc. So of course I thought this was a perfect chance to put geotagging to the test.

So far my activities have been those of an end-user rather than a developer. I put pictures on Flickr and geotag them with this excellent bookmarklet. Almost all my Vienna pictures are geotagged, for examples see Invader #1 and Invader #2.

Once tagged, it would be useful to be able to browse these images in a geographical intergace. Yuan.cc is a home-brewed site that allows you to sign in to your Flickr account and see your geotagged pictures on Google Maps. If you “sync” your pictures they get added to the Yuan.cc database, in which case you can browse them with Google Earth. You will also be able to see all other pictures in the database at a given location, with thumbnails and links back to Flickr.

During my residency I hope to be able to document all the Invaders that get put up in Vienna, complete with geotags.

Relevant links:

• Flickr Geotagging discussion group
• Localize this bookmarklet for Flickr
• Yuan.cc
• Wikipedia: Geotagging

Karsten Schmidt aka Toxi: voxscape / skinmorph

It seems that the call for more Processing work on Flickr has been an unmitigated success, particularly after TomC added a Flickr badge to Processing Blogs. The Flickr Processing pool now sports 73 members and 277 images, the vast majority (approx 240+) of which have been posted in the last two weeks.

The images posted not only show off the diversity and creativity of different people, but also give sneak peeks at new work by certain people who notoriously create new work without ever documenting it on their web sites. The most severe case of this is perhaps Karsten Schmidt (aka Toxi), whose work is a constant inspiration yet is often difficult to come by. It’s therefore a joy to discover new sketches like the ones above being posted to the Processing Pool.

Keep it up, people! (That means you too, Karsten..)