After confirming the creative direction, we will explore the technical fields that may be involved. We have researched related installation art, various projection art, and software and hardware involved in installation art to test the feasibility and adaptability of our plan. Fortunately, in our first group class with Christopher Fry, he gave us many reference opinions and provided many examples of artists on projection art and interactive installations (see more). Researching on these cases, we are looking for technologies to be applied to these cases, and we will find ways to apply them to our projects in the future. However, we found that most of these projects are relatively large-scale public welfare or commercial projects involving many people, and the software and technology used are mostly commercial software that considers efficiency and collaborative work, which caused us a lot of trouble. Therefore, we turned to looking for software that has similar functions to the commercial software and can help us achieve similar results. Fortunately, the Internet still maintains a considerable degree of openness. We have found several software for projection creation, device creation, and sensor linkage, including TouchDesign supported by Derivative, Video Trigger suggested by Chris, free open-source project MapMap. If necessary, we will also consider the paid creation software MadMapper (with powerful special effects and a good creation platform).
TouchDesign is a comprehensive creation support software that can help creators create real-time 3D model interaction, projection art, efficient collaboration, light and shadow art, VR interaction, and other devices that need to interact with reality. Although this software is only a widely used commercial software, it is very fortunate that it is entirely free for creation, which means that for us, there is no need to spend high rental costs on this software. At the same time, it can get extensive community support.
Video Trigger is a very easy-to-use visual recognition and visual tracking software. Its most significant advantage is that it is free and easy to use. For our group, we will rent camera equipment for experiments with this software in the future. The only regret is that this software works intelligently on Mac OS, which means that you cannot use this software as a Windows user.
Mapmap is an open-source projected content positioning software that can help creators quickly arrange and locate projected content in real-time. I believe this software will be of great help to the work efficiency of our project later and will greatly increase the compatibility of our project with projection equipment.
Madmapper is a potent commercial projection art creation tool. This software has similar functions to Touchdesigner, but the special effects are more powerful, and its UI interface is more modern and easier to use, which is very helpful for beginners. The greatly reduced threshold for use is actually very attractive to our team, but the software usage fee is too high. If it is not necessary, our team members agreed that they would not use it after discussion.
Although they may have higher learning costs, we also plan to select the most efficient parts of their software to apply to our projects in the future software.