By Wendy Ann Mansilla and Jordi Puig

Flick Flock at Piksel09, Bergen, Norway. Photo: Jona Hoier

During the exhibition of Flick Flock at Campus Party Brazil there was quite some interest expressed in the technologies we used to build Flick Flock, and how others can extend or customize Flick Flock to build their own installation or use it for their own personal projects.

What open source tools should we use?

The choice of software is important for a project with a limited production time. It is important to choose tools that can easily be integrated or implemented out of the box. Meaning, it important to consider the number of people in the community that are willing to support the development or implementation of the software (such that one will not build the software from scratch). We chose two main free and open source tools to help us build Flick Flock: Blender 3D for the graphical interface and Pure Data for the open computer vision software. In addition, to connect Blender 3D and Pure Data, we used Blendnik as an interface library.

Blender 3D was chosen not only because it is free but also because it’s such a great tool with a lot of functionality and plug-ins that didn’t require so much time to implement ourselves. It can easily implement high performance graphics such as OpenGL without cumbersome programming. Blender 3D also has the BGE (or Blender Game Engine) that we can easily interface with other software in real-time using python scripting.

With the Blendnik library, we were able to easily incorporate Open Sound Control (OSC) protocol to communicate among the technologies we used for the installation, such as computer vision, sound and the graphical interface. Blendnik uses object-oriented objects written in python to easily communicate with Blender. (more…)