virus.circus source code and technical info
virus.circus is a collaboration between elle mehrmand and micha cárdenas. It is an episodic alternate reality performance involving latex outfits, wearable electronics, lilypad arduinos, conductive fabric, conductive thread, a fabric pressure sensor sensors and an ultrasonic rangefinder to create live audio and to bridge virtual and physical spaces. The performances explore possible queer futures of latex sexuality amidst a speculative world of virus hysteria.
For photos of the electronics see the flickr set.
Recent episodes in the virus.circus series of performances involve using an ultrasonic rangefinder and a pressure sensor sewn to a lilypad arduino. [thanks to Hannah Perner-Wilson for the amazing pressure sensor instructable] The lilypad sends data over Xbee wireless tansmitters to a Puredata patch which creates a live audioscape from our voices, modulated based on the state of the rangefinder and a pressure sensor. This data is sent from Puredata out to a text file which is read by a modified version of the Second Life Viewer 2. This custom client reads the distance from the local file and updates the position in world of two objects which our avatars sit on, with custom animation overriders to replace the sit animations with the animations we have chosen. Since SL viewers can connect to Opensim and OSgrid, this patch should also work fine for moving Opensim avatars with arduino sensors.
Attached to this page you can find the pd patch and the Second Life Viewer 2 patch. I’ll also include them below. The pd patch is based on code from William Brent, Daniel Arias and Tom Erbe who ported Tom’s soundhack plugins to pd. This isn’t the cleanest patch, but it does allow you to control an avatar in Second Life from Pd through a local file, eliminating the overhead of using llHttpRequest which can add seconds of delay. This is a continuation of work I began thinking about with an earlier project, Becoming Dragon. The pd patch requires pd-extended, because it relies on its comport object. It reads data from two different comports, as in our performance one arduino was sewn into elle mehrmand’s latex outfit and attached to a pressure sensor, which transmitted to an arduino connected to a single usb port, and another arduino was sewn into my bra with the ultrasonic rangefinder attached. Images of these electronics are in the flickr set, but we’ll add more detail shots soon.
This video shows the Second Life avatar movement clearly, but I added averaging to make it smoother: http://vimeo.com/12219412
So as not to clog up this blog with code, see the attached patch (diff file) for the Second Life code, or see this wiki page:
http://banglabinexile.pbworks.com/viruscircus-source-code-and-technical-info
