Kaiju is a Japanese word that means “strange beast,” but often translated in English as “monster”. ~ Wikipedia – Kaiju
This project aims to give users the ability to control the playback of public-domain segments of Japanese monster films using a foam model of a high-rise building. In the end the final installation should provide a glitchy/noisy media accompaniment to the violent interaction with the physical controller. Since the system revolves around playing media with flexible controls, puredata is a natural choice for a development environment since that is its specialty.
As a general first step, it helps to make a visual flowchart of the system to get an idea of what elements will be involved in bringing the project to life. Below is a simple chart of how the user input will pass through the system to become cut-up monster footage.
- (Click to Expand)
Looking at the chart, one can already see a few needed features that need to be explored and implemented:
- Understanding how to hook up a flex sensor and understand its input with an arduino.
- How to take that sensor input and output a formatted serial stream to the computer using puredata.
- How to map the sensor values from the arduino to a video/audio controller.
- How to play and control video in puredata.
- How to play and control audio in puredata.
- How to play video in full screen.
Over the next few blog posts, each of these issues will be researched and finally implemented.