June 12

Today was a very busy day on many fronts. We began by exploring live video input into Isadora. This is an area that I have had a lot of experience in working with the DVTS on the telematic productions we have developed at Bradley and with our collaborators. Isadora is now able to support 4 video feeds (THANK YOU MARK!) which makes the program much more robust. After we initiated the feeds we spend the morning exploring all the various effects you can generate using the video filters integrated into the program.

I am grateful to Mark and Dawn for adjusting the daily schedule by working on Video during the morning session as I had an appointment with Lauren Doll scheduled for the late morning. Lauren is a Broadway producer and the head of New Time Productions. She is currently producing this season's Tony Award-winning production of The Norman Conquests. Lauren had work with a great friend of Bradley University Theatre, Ben Mordecai, who produced August WIlson's work on Broadway. When Ben passed away in 2005, Lauren stepped in to produce Wilson's last work Radio Golf. Having met as college roommates, Ben was a close friend of my Dean, Jeff Huberman, and had been an Iben Lecturer at Bradley many times. My visit with Lauren was to discuss ways that we could fill the void of Ben's death and make new connections for our students interested in Producing and coming to NYC. It was a wonderful meeting full of possibilities. I thank Lauren for her time and look forward to continued conversations.

Back at the workshop, the afternoon was filled with exploring interactivity using a Wiimote, the hand controller for the Nintendo Wii gaming platform.

The Wiimote is a sophisticated device that has several accelerometers that sense the movement of the device and trasmit those patterns to a receiver either by inferred or bluetooth. From the diagram below you can see the physical actions the device can measure.



In this way, the Wiimote can serve as a Continuous Controllers when interfaced with Isadora, Additionally, each button can serve as a trigger.

To create the interface between the device and Isadora we used a third party program called OSCualtor. OSCulator is a software program based on the OSC protocol that links various controllers (Nintendo Wiimote or iPhone) to music and video software (Isadora, SuperCollider, Processing, Max/MSP or the Lemur multitouch controller.)

You connect the Wiimote to your computer via Bluetooth. Through OSCualtor, you assign each directional attribute and button on the device a specific channel in Isadora. Once that is done, you use an actor called OSC Listener in Isadora as the Continuous Controller to another actor. For example, you can link the Pitch of the Wiimote to the vertical position of a shape and as you move the Wiimote up and down the shape will move up and down. The short Quicktime below demos the the interaction.