Carte Noire Intensity

Interactive window installation for Carte Noire Intensity, produced by AllofUs and Work Club.

The 5m wide window display presented a digital reflection of people at Westfield Stratford, captured in full HD. This everyday scene was then augmented and transformed using motion tracking, realtime effects and generative visuals & sound effects.

A film crew spent two days onsite filming the public to create a video piece based on the interactive experience.

The software was developed using openFrameworks. Video was captured from a hi-res security camera at a full-HD resolution of 1080p at 30fps using a Blackmagic Intensity Pro PCIe card. Video was converted from YUV to RGB using ofxBlackMagicGrabber. Motion in the scene was detected and analysed using openCV, specifically blob tracking and optical flow algorithms. This input, along with colour analysis and proximity was used to allow users to interact with various realtime, generative effects. These effects included motion blur, generative ribbon-like trails that augment and complement the ambient scenery, rain drops, 3D video texture warping and fragmentation and various lighting effects.

Several GLSL shaders were used, often in tandem, to achieve interactive effects such as blurring and light refraction and also to modify the source video levels and achieve realtime tweaking of contrast, saturation, brightness and gamma. The latter was pulled out into a separate addon and is available on github: ofxPSLevels.

During development, several individual prototypes were created, iterated and eventually combined to create the final software.

The window also featured interactive sounds created by Owen of Repeat to Fade. The installation ran 24/7 for 7 days.

A nice bi-product of the HD textures and multiple FBOs and shaders was the complex glitches that were generated during the development process. These can be seen in the images below.

More images on flickr.