matt.beghin

LED display is becoming more and more popular, good (energy saving) and bad (manufacturing of led is very polluting and life time is generally bad). Anyway, I’ve be suggested to work on a 3D LED Display project. The LEDs are generally used for 2D displays, like a video screeb, but LED tubes or transparent LED screens makes it easy to go for 3D. We can find good examples over the web:

G-Lec Led displays with content rendered specially for this display, as a 2D video made of 10 sub pictures that would be mapped to each 2D plan:

This one is minimalist, not really video but a good example:

The best I found is the one from Visual Drugstore also using GLec Leds. In this setup there are two different ways to feed the system. In both case, the end result is one 2D picture composed of one sub-picture for each 2D plan.
Case 1: the picture has be preproduced with a 3D software, rendering one 2D video for each plan and recomposing it in a wide 2D picture
Case 2: a vj software is producing a 2D picture that makes the first sub-pictures, a time-slice effect will feed the other pictures. It works fine. But from what I know, the setup of this was a bit heavy compared to what I could do in a few hours coding an effect for arKaos, or even a FreeFrame effect (FFGL or standard FF) which would work with various softwares.
Here it is:

http://www.visualdrugstore.com/news/?p=1348

So, driving a 3D display is not new,but it’s rare, so there are many things that have not been done yet. I’ve been thinking of two things: making an effect for arKaos softs to create the time-slice effect, and create a flash library to display 3D objects in a set of 2D sub-pictures on a wide picture. This could lead in an easy way to create animations, and audio-reactive animations of 3D objects in the scene and seding it to the screen through the LED Output of arKaos MediaMaster.

So I investigated both ideas and get it working. To see it working I made a setup on my laptop with WYSIWYG (cast-lighting visualization software) and arKaos MediaMaster, connected through ArtNet DMX protocol (DMX through ethernet). In WYSIWYG I made a setup of 12×12x12 leds.

Demo I did using the time-slice effect (sorry it’s not that visible…):

3D Led display demo from matt beghin on Vimeo.

I’ll post more if the project goes on…

I’ve been developping some Flash animations for using in GrandVJ, but it is compatible with NuVJ and MediaMaster as well. It’s not using ActionScript3. I did some experiments with AS3 and it works much better and allows you to avoid using some tricks to force Flash to redraw each time arKaos soft requests a new frame I’ll post some later on.

These animations are using the beat and audio variables (EQ, audio level etc.) transmitted by arKaos to the flash. These variables are used in the ActionScript code to animate various elements. Possibilities are endless. While I hate Adobe Flash user interface and I don’t like some behaviors in Flash ActionScript with variable types etc, I enjoy the possibilities it offers.

Here is a demo with VU meters and some EQs:

And here are lots of different animations. Some are not very exciting like this but nice when compositing with other visuals.

Download here:

AudioFlashCollection4ArKaos(www.mattbeghin.net)