TjaMeu: 2008

zondag 2 november 2008

Mac OSX iSight Screensavers

The Latest iMac is a perfect replacement for a television set. Just stick a tiny USB TV-reciever in it's back and you're ready to go! You can even mount it on a wall using a vesa-adapter you can buy at the Apple store. With Itunes and FrontRow you've got yourself an almost perfect mediacenter. (Install perian for the missing videocodecs and subtitle support in Quicktime.)

But what do we use as a screensaver? After a long google search the conclusion is pretty simple: most screensavers are ugly!

It's pretty strange that there are hardly any screensavers that use the built in iSight camera and microphone. Luckily Apple makes it pretty easy and fun to create your own screensavers with Quartz Composer (a part of the developer tools you can download for free from Apple.)

I made two screensavers so far:

- SoundSight
It basically makes a mirror of your iMac which vibrates to the sound picked up by the microphone.
- SlitCam
Part of my ongoing experiment in building a digital slitcam

You can download them here:
Mac OSX SoundSight Screensaver
Mac OSX SlitCam Screensaver

They only work on a Mac with a built in iSight camera.
To install them copy the files to your "~\Library\Screen Savers" folder.

maandag 20 oktober 2008

Bob Ross

There are a lot of people on Flickr fidling around with tonemapped HDR pictures. The interesting fact is that all the results are pretty kitsch. So after playing around with the technique the conclusion is: Bob Ross would have loved it!!!

So what's so special about these images you might ask. Well basically this technique eliminates the need to choose a correct exposure. By taking a number of exposures (7 are used her) you gather enough information to include all the data in the highlights and all the data in the shadows. All this data is combined in a 32-bit High Dynamic Range Image and then tonemapped back to the good old 8-bit range our monitors can display. The tonal range of the original 32-bits image gets compressed. This means that all the highlights and shadows are being preserved. My guess is that in a couple of years all consumer camera's will work this way and every picture that will be taken after 2011 or so will look like a Bob Ross painting.. Nice thing to look forward to!!