Image manipulations is something I can see being very useful in the camera-based brief we are working towards. There is much that can be done by simply changing the video or picture feed from a camera to alter the way the audience sees the surrounding space, or indeed themselves.

It is this that I’ve been looking at and learning the ropes of in the Processing environment.

We started by simply loading in images to be displayed on the canvas, but then quickly progressed beyond that and started altering the images and then displaying this altered form. This was achieved through loading the picture and then creating an array of the colour value of each pixel in the image. This information can then be used in many different creative ways. A simple manipulation that I achieved was to, using for loops, loop through the array and take the colour value at certain intervals. These values could then be used as the fill value for rectangles which were drawn to the screen at corresponding intervals. This can be used to make the image look blockier, and is essentially a simple filter applied to the image. The colours of the pixels can also be offset or randomised slightly so as to put different tints on the image.

I then animated the image by each frame randomising the colours of the rectangles a small amount and offsetting the location they were drawn on the x-axis slightly each frame. This created a sort of blurred ‘shimmering’ quality to the image, whilst still appearing ‘blocky’.

sketch_appleimgproc

In all, there are a wide variety of things that could be done with an image when it can be broken down into its individual pixels like this, and this knowledge could potentially open up an array of possibilities for the interactive video project.