For my Sensing Machines final, I created a slit-scan using 360 video that was then mapped onto a three dimensional sphere. I created this using OpenFrameworks.

Inspiration

Slit-scans are created by extracting thin slices from a sequence of video frames and then concatenated into a new image, producing a slit-scan. I wanted to use live video from my webcam in order to create static images with a time warped phenomena - one image, at different points in time.

I thought this would be an interesting way to explore time and motion together in an interactive way. What does time look like and can we visualize this in interesting ways? I also thought this would be a good exercise to understand the basics of image and video pixels better and how manipulating them can produce various effects.

Process

Instead of using my webcam as the video input, I wanted to play around with 360 video cameras. I thought it would be fun to play around with a non traditional webcam and an excuse to finally learn how to use a 360 video camera. I broke the project down into small steps before finally combining everything together.

Part 1: Simple Slit-Scan

The first part was building a simple slit-scan using my webcam. I wanted to take from one column of pixels coming from my webcam which would then be put together to form a slit-scan image. I did this 30 frames per second.

Part 2: Building a 3D Sphere

Now that I had my slit-scan, I wanted to be able to map that onto a three dimensional sphere that I could rotate and adjust the size. In a separate sketch, I created a simple 3D sphere:

This was done using ofEasycam and ofEnableDepthTest in order to draw my sphere. Once this was done, I then needed to add a Video grabber to input video from my webcam.

Then I had to make my video input into a texture that could then be wrapped around the sphere:

Part 3: Combining 360 Video Slit Scan & 3D Sphere

I added a switch case in order to toggle between the normal slit-scan and the one mapped on the 3D sphere. I also hid the cursor for better documentation.

I also found it to be a fun tool to make abstract looking art...