Last month we had a little teaser of Psychadelic Fluids, as CDM reader Memo was preparing to install the project (as part of a crew put together by Seeper) at the massive Glastonbury festival in the UK.
Well, the festival is over now, and Memo has followed up with a video documenting the project, and some more technical details on his site:
Glastonbury 2008 – Pi Interactive Installation from evan on Vimeo.
The biggest challenge in creating an application of this scale was to structure and optimize it in a way so it could analyze upto 6 camera feeds, and run at a large enough resolution to cover the entire tent. A multiple computer approach was out of the question due to the complications of synchronising a fluid simulation across multiple PC’s, so the decision was made to go with a multi-threaded app running on an 8-core Mac Pro. The motion estimation was split into 6 threads (one for each camera), the fluid solver ran in its own thread, and the particles (glitter & orb) ran in another thread – all of these threads ran in parallel. Once all threads were finished processing their data for one frame, they exchanged their results ready for processing for the next frame (camera motion fed into fluid solver ready for next frame, fluid currents fed into particles ready for next frame etc.). This approach allowed everything to run in parallel with smooth framerates of 30fps.
Tech aside, the crowd definitely seemed to like it.
More information @ memo.tv. Photos on Flickr.