Happy Holidays from Tellart

If you can see this, then you might need a Flash Player upgrade or you need to install Flash Player if it's missing. Get Flash Player from Adobe.

Try it yourself:

1. Download this PDF, then print it. We recommend printing on heavy cardstock.2. Cut out the eight different cards3. Plug in your webcam. Skip this if your webcam is part of your computer
4. Click here to play!

What is going on here?
That was recorded live, including the falling snowflakes. Flash can “see” the pattern on each card–depending on the pattern, the computer plays a different note. The result is that you can use pieces of paper like instruments.

How did we make it?
We put this together using FLARToolkit and Papervision3D.

Read on for more of the technical details.

FLARToolkit is a Flash port by Saqoosha of the computer vision package known as ARToolkit . You can learn more about what ARToolkit is and how it works over at Washington University’s home page for the project.

We were playing with the native Windows version of ARToolkit in the studio back in 2001 and could hardly contain our collective glee a couple weeks ago when a Tellarter dug up Boffswana’s demo of the new system running in Flash. We’d like to thank Saqoosha, Tarotaro.org and Boffswana for sharing their wonderful AS3 classes, and the Papervision crew.

Sometimes it’s a good exercise in paying attention to try to figure out how something strange, like a computer, sees the world.

Download the source code here (GPL)

Peace,
Tellart