GMU:Max and the World/Felix Geith: Difference between revisions

The patch of course is the heart of the whole installation. It processes the live video input from the Kinect, tracks the movement of the recipient visible on the video, connects the tracking data to the sound parameters and the spatialisation of the sounds. It also samples the sound material and routes the sound to the different speakers.

 

The patch opens in presentation mode by default, showing all the buttons, sliders and objects you need to run the installation. This gives us a much simpler interface to work on.

 

 

On the top left corner of the interface you can see tree screens (jit.pwindow). The one on the right shows the normal, unchanged RGB/infrared signal from the Kinect, the one in the middle shows the analysed signal and the "screen" on the left (actually a "pictslider" object) shows the position of the tracked person in the room. You can also use the pictslider object to simulate a tracked movement without having to connect a Kinect-Camera.

 

On the top right corner you can find a panel called "Kinect Control". This contains everything you need to control and adjust the Kinect and the video signal. At first you can turn on the Kinect with the toggle object saying "on/off". To adjust the position angle of the camera, use the "tilt"-object. To allow the signal flow from the Kinect, or to pause it, use the green and red buttons saying "open" and "close". The two yellow buttons let you choose if you also want to receive an RGB-signal or an infrared-signal. The normalisation adjusts how exact the Kinect signal tracking focusses on the nearest object. You can try around by changing the value. To change the normalisation back to default, you can the "Preset"-button.

 

 

In the bottom center, you see a big blue circle, visualising the position of the sounds in the room. On the bottom right you can find volume meters displaying the signal levels going to each speaker. Above that there's a red "mute"-button, in case you need to turn the master volume down as quickly as possible, and also a green "default"-button, that brings all the channel volume sliders back to their original value.

 

This interface is made for a setup of four speakers. In case you want to add more speakers, and to see their signal level, you would have to manually add more volume meters to the interface.

If you leave presentation mode, the main page of the patch is divided into two parts. At the top of the patch you can see a blue headline, containing all other subpatchers and explanations of those. You can see this as an index or table of contents. It also contains the mixer patcher (a "bpatcher") and a visualisation object that shows the position of the sounds in the room.