Beautiful Interactive Image Feedback Experiments in Processing

It was a quiet evening at Konstellation Labs. The labs crew this evening (aka Thomas and Peter) were playing around with Processing for the very first time. What started out as harmless Processing test drive experiment, ended up as a crazy beautiful image feedback monster! This is the story about how it all went down.

Our first rough idea was to capture realtime input from a webcam, do some processing and turn it into a visual representation using the Processing 3D drawing capabilities. We implemented a simple light-intensity-to-z-depth algorithm which gave the captured 2D images a pretty nice 3D feel and rotated the 3D image according to light intensities.

Peter was writing the Processing sketch on a MacBook (with an internal webcam) connected to an external display. We accidentally tried pointing the webcam at the on-screen 3D output. It instantly gave the most crazy beautiful feedback images! Even more cool was to place different different objects between the webcam and the screen.

We have uploaded a Mac version of our Processing sketch. It’s a lot of fun and we would love to see what amazing images you can synthesize! For us this is certainly only the beginning of an adventure into the twisted world of interactive image feedback.