This is the Max/MSP patch designed to track light from audience cellphones. The patch takes real time video feeds from a Sony DVXR camera that was connected to our macbook running the patch by firewire.
Basically we are trying to find light blobs in the dark studio from the seating section. The main section within this patch for CV would be on the left side of the patch. Based on where your environment is you would either want the mode to turn 'on' or 'off'. Default is set to 'off', we actually ended up turning mode 'on'.
So how these audience decisions worked was basically if you raised your cellphone you voted 'Yes', if 'No' then your cellphone was down. These votes done through polls in between scenes. For this performance we only had 2. The polls would be compared from one to another by how many people participated in the first poll. So say 10 people participated in the first poll, then the second poll would require 10 people to bring a consensus of 100% 'yes', otherwise if only 4 people raised their cellphones in second poll, then it would mean 40% 'yes' but 60% in favor of 'no'. So very basic max patching here, and this the messy portion in the middle, we compare 2 values to find the greatest one, then whatever else is detected from CV is divided by that greatest value.
So you might be thinking why track cellphones right? Even when interfacing them into our performance was so simple. We just thought it was a easy way to bring audience interaction into the performance, and having every audience member participate. Originally the idea was giving out 6 slider controllers, which wasn't practical.
This patch was never fully tested or implemented because we never had the millions of audience members who came to see us. No, just joking, really we only needed a few more than 2, more like 10 to 20. During the performance when the audience members raised their cellphones, all that light emitting from their lcd's caused a very large radiance from all the cellphones together, which the camera and patch would've easily detected. But when just 2 people raised their cellphones during testing it wouldn't quite work, and we had to use flashlights pointed at the camera for the patch to detect us. At one point we were even thinking of handing out flash lights to the audience, but thank god we didn't do that, all those flash lights at the camera would've ruined the lense and sensor of our camera.
A lot of thanks to the Max/MSP community on this.
There are 2 externals we needed to grab, one was the OSC externals from CNMAT, and CV.Jit by Pelletier. I've provided the links here if interested:
http://jmpelletier.com/cvjit/
So here is the compressed form of the patch:
So here is the compressed form of the patch:
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