Since the Spring of 2004 I've had the opportunity to work with Professor Sha Xin Wei and the crew at Georgia Tech's Topological Media Lab (TML). There I teamed up with Computer Science PhD student Delphine Nain to work on the next generation of Calligraphic Video.

We implemented physics-based fluid modeling in the lingua franca of the TML: Cycling 74's Max/MSP/Jitter applications. We started by porting a Navier-Stokes fluid equations solver from C to Jitter. The result is fast, realistic, and real-time smoke and water effects. Combined with motion tracking and other image processing techniques, our simulations enable natural and engaging gestural play with video as structured light.

The result of the work was shown as fluids, an interactive installation set up for IDT Demo Day (Spring 2004) and for The Last Supper, a one-night event that completely transformed Georgia Tech's ordinarily desolate Third Street tunnel into a vibrant interactive experience.

Calligraphic video was featured in the spring of 2004 in The Last Supper, a one-night event that completely transformed an ordinarily bleak urban tunnel on the Georgia Tech campus into a vibrant interactive experience. In November 2004, calligraphic video instruments were also the technical foundation of Membrane, an experiment in social thickening developed by the international art group sponge. Membrane was featured at the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival (V2_:DEAF04) in Rotterdam.

Our latest work accepts velocity fields on a lattice spanning the entire video frame. Full documentation of Calligraphic Video work, including an image and QuickTime movie gallery, is available at the TML's Calligraphic Video page.

The following QuickTime movie shows the smoke effect created with an early version of our fluids-based calligraphic video effects. The movie captured keyboard & mouse-based interaction: shift-clicking added smoke density (emanating from the ball-like object); click-dragging the mouse moved the source and perturbed the medium.