Link to Part 1

Location Based Mixed Reality WiFi Glitch Art



I've been really busy lately. Earlier this month, a hackerspace in Warsaw Poland published a guide to hacking an awesome device called the Zsun, a WiFi card reader that's been hacked to run OpenWrt. It costs $11 and has 64MB RAM, 16MB SPI Flash, and USB SD Card Reader and is perfect for converting into an AVALON node. http://imgur.com/a/XP6oX

When finished, it will receive power through USB and will seed it's own access point or connect with others nodes in a meshnet.



The vision I have for this art project is that the zsun listen to ambient WiFi signals around it and extract image data to retexture itself. We will need a script to process the images. We will use imagemagick for creating the textures for the leaves.



Basic stuff covered in https://hackaday.io/project/4423-stereo-vision-experiments



# Convert input image into a binary black and white stencil convert leaf.png matte:- | convert - stencil.png # Make black transparent (can also add fuzz) convert -transparent Black stencil.png mask.png

# Composite the mask over the background image convert mask.png -channel Black -separate +channel girl.png +swap -composite out.png Creating the Initial Scene in Blender

Creating a patch of land, the area could symbolize the signal range.



Mapping the textures onto a Japanese Maple 3D model.



< html > < head > < title > Japanese Maple </ title > </ head > < body > < FireBoxRoom > < Assets > < AssetObject id = "room_dae" src = "room.dae" /> < AssetObject id = "jap_maple_dae" src = "jap_maple.dae.gz" /> < AssetImage id = "black" src = "black.gif" tex_clamp = "true" /> </ Assets > < Room pos = "0 0 1" xdir = "1 0 0" ydir = "0 1 0" zdir = "0 0 1" skybox_down_id = "black" skybox_front_id = "black" skybox_left_id = "black" skybox_back_id = "black" skybox_right_id = "black" skybox_up_id = "black" > < Object id = "room_dae" js_id = "0" pos = "0 -1.6 -5" scale = "3.6 3.6 3.6" lighting = "false" cull_face = "none" collision_id = "room_dae" blend_src = "src_color" /> < Object id = "jap_maple_dae" js_id = "1" pos = "0 -1.6 -5" scale = "3.6 3.6 3.6" lighting = "false" collision_id = "maple_COLL" blend_src = "one" blend_dest = "zero" /> </ Room > </ FireBoxRoom > </ body > </ html >

Creating a simple Janus app

Link to default tree

This is already looking better than the basic Multiplayer VR sample in Project Tango store:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.johnnylee.multiplayervr&hl=en

Sourcing Textures

No offense to Johnny Lee, he is awesome and I've always been a great fan of his work! Lets build the Metaverse together :)

Web Scraping and Virtual Reality is a powerful combination to visualize data and use computers to create art. A good primer and my personal recommendation for those wishing to get into scraping is Web Scraping with Python. Not only is it a lot of fun, you'll obtain a deeper understanding of the internet and build up some very useful skills along the way.



# Pythonpy will evaluate any python expression from the command line. Install via: sudo pip install pythonpy # Make sure you also have BeautifulSoup installed sudo pip install beautifulsoup4 # scrape from imgur and then name images via sequence curl 'map(lambda _: _.attrs["src"].partition("//")[-1], bs4.BeautifulSoup(sys.stdin).findAll("img"))' | xargs -n1 wget >/dev/ null 2 >& 1 && ls | cat -n | while read n f; via: sudo pippythonpy# scrapeimgurname images via sequence curl http://imgur.com/ | py| xargs -n1 wget >/dev/>&&& ls | cat -n | whilen f; do mv "$f" "$n.jpg" ; done

The next step is to incorporate these images into our DOM.

To be continued..