Yen To See Distant Places
is part of an exhibition by the artists Nicole Heidtke and Stefan Baumberger that allows the audience to explore a customisable myriorama -- assembled by visitors in the Inspace exhibition space -- by looking through a telescope mounted in St. Andrew's Square park, in Edinburgh.
Responsibilities
My role in this project was to tackle engineering issues involved in realising the artistic vision of Stefan and Nicole. When I got involved, they were grappling with a number of unresolved technical challenges and were working to a tight deadline before the opening night.
Achievements
Working in a team of five, I wrote and tested the software application and back-end server that powered the telescope. I designed the application so that the myriorama would move in sync with the telescope's physical movement, which was tracked by an embedded gyroscopic sensor. I also created a mechanism for transmitting configurations of images created in exhibition space to ensure the telescope myriorama was updated.
To simplify the system and greatly improve performance, I wrote a computer script to pre-generate three thousand possible combinations of images. Additionally, I helped debug and test other parts of the system, including components which used machine vision algorithms to identify active myriorama cards.
Further information
Read more about the work on Nichole and Stefan's website .
Collaborators
Nicole Heidtke and Stefan Baumberger (~ in the fields collective), Dr Mariza Dima, Dr Mark Wright and Mark Daniels.
Technologies
Javascript, Python, PHP, Ajax, HTML5 accelerometer API and TUIO machine vision library.