Cave and Light
Whole process of the project step by step, please read the following texts to understand the idea.
Stage 1 - Scientific background
To create this project and develop an idea I needed to understand what is it brightness exactly, so i did a research and found this explanation:
Brightness / (relative) Luminance:
"Brightness is an attribute of our perception which is mainly influenced by a color's lightness. This is probably why brightness and lightness are often mixed up. Brightness is not a color property, if used "correctly".
For one color of specific hue the perception of brightness is also more intense, if we increase saturation. A higher level of saturation makes a color look brighter.
In relation to other colors the brightness intensity of a color is also influenced by its hue. We can then speak of (relative) luminance to refer to brightness."
taken from: http://www.workwithcolor.com/color-properties-definitions-0101.htm
So with this in mind I took the idea to make visible the idea of "Lightness" that is more comprehensible, but what is Lightness, well here is a little explanation.
Lightness:
- "Lightness is a color term commonly used by (digital / analog) imaging experts.
- Lightness is usually one property of three when used to determine a certain color and measured as percentage value.
- Lightness defines a range from dark (0%) to fully illuminated (100%). Any original hue has the average lightness level of 50%.
- A painter might say lightness is the range from fully shaded to fully tinted.
- You can lighten or darken a color by changing its lightness value."
taken from: http://www.workwithcolor.com/color-properties-definitions-0101.htm
Stage 2 - Practical approach
I went out to the Ilm park to take some footage and also find inspiration about what to do with the "lightness" idea; I was walking during the late afternoon and started to wondering why this big park has just a few lights in their walking paths, during the night you could not see anything is like if you were in a cavern.
Then I realize, how could be possible to discover an image or a landscape in the night, well you need a flashlight or a lighter to see what are your surroundings in the middle of the night, and so I try to recreate this in a simple way.
First experiments
Testing tint and HSB color mode
Playing and understanding tint values in Videos
Video test -click here.-
Source code -click here-
Testing a matrix displaying videos from 16, 8, 4, 2. with a changing tint according to the mouse position on the X axis
I tried different forms to display a lot of videos to see if my laptop was able to handle it, but mixing this with any kind of image processing code my machine was only capable to display 2 videos at the same time without any drop rate.
Video test - 16 videos at the same time -click here.-
Video test - 8 videos at the same time -click here.-
Video test - 4 videos at the same time -click here.-
Video test - 2 videos at the same time -click here.-
Source code -click here-
Playing with the pixels on the display video to find different results
I was trying to understand how to draw and get information of the pixels of an image or a video and how to apply it.
Source code -click here-
After experiment with videos I decided that it would be better for a good development of the idea to work with images because my laptop was not able to deal with videos, pixel processing image and movement recognition at the same time.
Stage 3 - Getting closer to the goal
Now I am dealing with images and my laptop works smoother, so I decided after understanding how to interact with pixels, learn to display it in a proper way, so in this second approach I am actually dealing with the brightness property, which in the following video and images behaves like lightness.
