post reality filter

        You know, for as much as i love music, i never really considered myself much of a music snob, or at least, not a genre snob anyway.  The whole idea of having to create millions of sub-genres in some feeble attempt to differentiate yourself from the next guy other than just having cool music always boggled my mind. Even worse, the music critics and journos who would always be coming up with new genres just to, i dunno, safeguard their idea of what a particular genre was or some such nonsense...For as much as i rail on game journalists, it's probably true of most media journalists.  The genre qualifier "post" always bothered me the most, what you can't think of a new genre name, so you just take the laziest path?  "Oh, this is what comes AFTER <genre>", in which case it might just be arrogance, i.e. really, wow, you think your music is that much different that you alone are going to define what comes next?  Wow alright then...

        Anyway, here's a fun little video experiment i knocked together in processing yesterday.  You can copy and paste  the code below into a sketch and run it, should be that simple.  Ohhh yes, you'll also need GSVideo, as I'm not using processing 1.5's native video.  After reading a few pages on what was required to get it working based on software that may or may not really exist anymore and also reading somewhere that p2 was going to move to GSVideo anyway, figured i might as well take the plunge.  It's a pretty friendly library overall...on the subject of laziness, gotta admit i probably could've captured a video of this, but didn't.  That's probably ok though, you should really run this yourself and see the effect, maybe play around with it a bit, see what you come up with...


Hello from videoland...

import codeanticode.gsvideo.*;

PVector gridStep = new PVector(16,8);
int gridX;
int gridY;
GSCapture vStream;

void setup()
{
  size(640, 480, P2D);
  frameRate(30);
  gridX = int(width / gridStep.x);
  gridY = int(height / gridStep.y);
  vStream = new GSCapture(this, width, height);
  vStream.start();
  background(0);
  noStroke();
}

void draw()
{ 
  if(vStream.available())
  {
    vStream.read();
    vStream.loadPixels();
    
    //Thanks, RoHS
    fill(0,0,0,8);           
    rectMode(CORNER);        
    rect(0,0,width,height);  
    
    for (int i = 0; i < gridX; i++)
    {
      for (int j = 0; j < gridY; j++)
      {
        int x = i*int(gridStep.x);
        int y = j*int(gridStep.y);
        int loc = (vStream.width - x - 1) + y*vStream.width;
      
        color col = color(red(vStream.pixels[loc]),green(vStream.pixels[loc]), blue(vStream.pixels[loc]), 32);
        float vradius = brightness(col)*0.1;
        
        fill(col);
        if(vradius<12.8)
        {
          ellipseMode(CENTER);
          ellipse(x, y, vradius,vradius);
        }
        else
        {
          rectMode(CENTER);
          rect(x,y,vradius,vradius);
        }
      }
    }
  }
}