Continuing on the theme of playing with camera input, I thought it might be interesting to do a live ‘halftone screen’ style effect. The video input is broken into a grid of line segments with line thickness is based on brightness, palette is greyscale. More versions of this to come. Click my ugly mug to check it out.

Working on sliced up video for the VideoVuMeter reminded me of some videos I had seen a while back that demonstrated time distorted videos. The most remarkable examples are from the Khronos Projector research group, who have done many studies into the concept. One of the simplest implementations of this idea is to give a temporal delay to the slices of video, which results in fun time twisting distortion effects. And though I’d seen After Effects pre-rendered videos of this effect, I hadn’t come across a realtime Flash version. So here’s my first crack at it. I recommend waving your arms around :)

Since I’ve never tried monkeying with computeSpectrum to analyze audio data, I figured that would be a fun place to start before launching into the Flash Player 10 dynamic audio APIs. I applied the ‘vumeter’ effect to a song’s music video, slicing the frames into vertical strips and shifting them based on the amplitude of the frequency. The shifting amount is variable based on mouse Y position. This looked nice when applied to videos with a main focal image and a plain background, on my wife’s suggestion I wound up using the song Colors by Utada Hikaru, Japan’s favorite Tetris playing pop star.