VVVV at a Workshop with Jonathan OHear

In Nov 2022, I attended a workshop with Jonathan OHear at Attakalari. This was an interesting workshop for me, as it had been a long time since I had sat down to learn something new. In this case something entirely outside my comfort zone - VVVV 


On each day Jonathan introduced us to byte sized concepts in lighting and coding, in what I as an educator, found was a well thought out and manageable lesson plan. 

We learnt how to program an ESP32 variant that had wifi and bluetooth as well as a battery pack(added by the support team Transmedia at Attakalri)


The workshop culminated in a show where we showcased our projects for the public.

This was pretty much my first time doing any electronics in over a decade, was pleasantly surprised with how simple things had gotten. 
We learnt to control DMX lights as well as LEDs and use sensor inputs from everything  from motion sensors to brain scanning devices.


I however opted to use a webcam(modified for infrared) to track a person's movement and use that to manipulate a 3d model that would generate particles, based on the movement.
Heres what that looked like:

Unfortunately I dont have any pictures or footage from the final day, but it was pretty much what you see above. The 3d model I used as the base object that would be the emitter of particles, was a 3d scan of my desk at SMI.

Desk at Work by Chaitanya Krishnan on Sketchfab

This is the patch I eventually had.. 

heres a primer:

For anyone who may need this in future heres the setup I got working - DOWNLOAD
Have added a dampner to delay/soften the movement and color transitions.
Used the mesh from a 3d scan of my office desk as the emitter.

Heres a forum thread that was a big help to me.


On the last day we put on a little show for the public, allowing them to witness and interact with our creations.

This is the happy group on day 1 - 

Hope to run into them again!