The one thing us Brits love to talk about is the weather. So keeping with the tradition I just thought I would have a little rant about the fact it is dark already and very cold! Darkness before 5pm really throws my whole concept of time and it irritates me. If finding employment wasn’t hard enough, my days of sunshine are now over too. If only we could hibernate like most animals do or migrate like birds to a country where they actually see the light of day.

You know Winter is officially here when the fleece blanket is dug out from the back of the cupboard and your daily intake of tea and chocolate biscuits increases. Let’s be grateful for Kit Kat’s and Tetley tea

I like this…

I have recently been researching around the creative uses of Twitter in preparation for the Digital Art and Technology workshops I am due to deliver in the next few months. Reading the Media Guardian online today I came across a blog post called The fall of the Berlin wall in digital media. An interesting post which discusses the important role of digital media in today’s celebration of the fall of the Berlin wall.

It is interesting that much of the mainstream press have left their historical medium behind for their online coverage, as each have chosen the format which is best for a story.

The Berlin Twitterwall supported by Reporters without Borders displays Twitter messages which are using the hashtag #fotw on a virtual East Side Gallery. The aim of the project is to share thoughts on the fall of the wall as well as to focus on “which walls still have to come down to make our wold a better place”. The wall currently hosts 6.015 tweets!!

Most users seem to be posting the link to the virtual Berlin wall and not their thoughts and feelings which is a shame as the content is not that interesting but I really like the design and concept. It has the talk-ability factor and seems to be appearing in many different tweets today on a global scale. The use of mobile media and social platforms to cover today’s celebration demonstrates the new innovative possibilities available within journalism.

Having graduated this year i have spent the last few months working part time in a bar and seeking employment within the digital media sector. This process has been very long and somewhat unsuccessful so far, hence the continuous search…

I am keen to kick start a career in online content creation after a fantastic and rewarding placement year in London at Virgin Radio. Finding my dream job is proving to be somewhat of a challenge - no surprise there. I am keeping my options open and have recently been offered a freelance contract back at the university to deliver all Digital Art and Technology workshops for Aimhigher.

My other passion is for creative learning and with a broad range of experiences working with young people i would be foolish to not explore possible opportunities. On that note it would be a good time to mention my recent interview at TR2 based in Plymouth for the role of a Creative Learning Assistant. I find out next week…although it is not my first preference it would be my ‘get out of jail’ card from my current pocket money job.

So that’s the update. I haven’t decided yet how i would like my site to progress, it currently hosts all my research and findings for what was my undergraduate study which may one day be of use again…or not. I plan to continue to blog and hopefully build up an archive of writing and findings to be used as part of my portfolio. Wish me luck..

MirroID is an installation piece, which aims to interact with those who look into the ‘mirror’. Inspired by the work of Francis Galton it uses real time face recognition and the process of composite photography to generate a snapshot of identity within a public space.

The project itself is an experiment, which aims to investigate the relationship between the camera, reflection and identity. The experience of looking into the ‘mirror’ aims to raise social and cultural questions surrounding the use of facial recognition technologies within public spaces.

In case you are wondering - The left hand side of the screen is the live web cam feed and the right is the composite snapshot.

After a review of my project today, it has been suggested i look into face recognition using AS3. I have found some cool posts but it looks quite complex for a beginner. However i am willing to have a go. I have found a source that uses real time face recognition to capture a snapshot of just the face. If i could implement this into my project it would be much better. Here is a demonstration video.

Realtime Face Detection in Flash from squidder on Vimeo

You can play here: http://robmccardle.glueserv.co.uk/facecam/v1/

Source code thanks to Squidder: http://www.squidder.com/2009/02/26/realtime-face-detection-in-flash/

This got me thinking about how these pictures may be composited on top of one another. I took a few images from the FlickrBooth set on Flickr and then played with them in Photoshop using the hard light blend mode to get an idea of what it may look like. I cropped each photo similar to how the recognition works and made then all the same size.

I have been playing around with BlendMode and the filters in Flash to find out which one gives me the best result. I aim to generate composite snapshots of people across time so the layered bitmaps need to overlay one another, similar to using layers in Photoshop. Below there are some screen grabs from my project. BlendMode.HARDLIGHT has currently proven to be the best filter.

The last couple of days have been tough, with lots of help from Kseniya I have managed to learn some AS3. My project now:

1. Pulls in a live web cam feed to the stage.

2. Detects motion.

3. If motion is detected it takes a snapshot.

4. It then applies BlendMode.HARDLIGHT to the captured bitmap. This is so the snapshots can be layered to create a time-based image.

5. An array determines how many are layered at one time. I have currently set it to three.

I now have different variables - tolerance, filters and number of bitmaps - to experiment with. The foundations seem to be in place but it’s not quite complete.