lurkertech.com → MEZ

Table of Contents

• What is it?
• Who Made It? How Do I Get It?
• Footage
• Setup Details
• Outdoor Space Requirements
• Power Requirements
• Other Setup Notes

What is it?

MEZ is an interactive, live, real-time video art installation. When you walk up to MEZ, you see your own image on a video screen, processed as if you are in an impressionist painting, then a stained glass window, then a range of other surprising effects. The image updates continuously and much of the effect is determined by how you move, so you can dance and play with it for hours!

MEZ was inspired by the 'imp' and 'impression' still-image processing programs by Paul Haeberli of SGI (Silicon Graphics Incorporated). These programs were in turn inspired by impressionist painters, who built an image of a scene by picking certain important colors from the scene and making complete brush strokes with those colors.

Who Made It? How Do I Get It?

MEZ is custom software (OpenGL in C) written by Chris Pirazzi, who can be reached at mez@lurkertech.com. It runs on Windows PCs.

I have brought MEZ to the burning man festival every year since 2002 (where, for the past few years, it has lived at Camp Nose Fish in 3 o'clock plaza), and also shown it in Pai, a small village in the mountains of Northern Thailand where I have lived for several years.

MEZ is not currently available in any form (product or otherwise), but as I have poured many years of work into it, I am considering ways of packaging it (e.g. as a standalone performance program, a screen saver, a module for Max/MSP or jitter, an After Effects filter, or other). If you are interested in MEZ, please send me information about how you would like to use it and features/video formats/file formats/... which you would need.

Footage

MEZ is compelling because of its fine graphical detail and because of how it moves and evolves: therefore it is nearly impossible to capture on either photograph or video!

Here are some images of people enjoying MEZ (thanks to James Fleishman):

    

Here are some screen shots of MEZ processing a static image:

Here is a 7.3 MB QuickTime movie file which shows people enjoying MEZ at Burning Man 2003. It gives you a vague idea of the real-time aspect of MEZ. Even at 7.3 MB, the horribly blurry internet video movie doesn't even come close to the real thing, though! Many thanks to Tom Davis and Ellyn Bush for the original DV footage:

    Click for QuickTime movie.

Setup Details

The setup I normally use for MEZ consists of:

• an 8' wide rear-projection video screen
• a 2000 lumen video projector 10' behind the screen
• a desktop computer located near the projector
• a small video camera mounted on the video screen
• 2 bright, masked 4' flourescent lights (approximately 5000 lumens total) in front of the screen, to light the subjects

Outdoor Space Requirements

In the typical outdoor setup, the projector and computer are inside my Chevy S10 pickup for security, dust, and rain protection:

In this case, I need 18' behind the screen for the truck, and at least 8' in front of the screen for the lights and the dancing people! The lights must be about 4' in front of the screen for the camera angle and spill to work out correctly.

Elevation (one square is 1' x 1'):

This is a picture of the setup from Burning Man 2002:

Nowadays, my screen is an 8'x8' RP fastfold screen instead of that wooden monstrosity in the picture, and I raise the lights up 2' for better lighting of people's faces, but everything else is the same and the dimensions are roughly the same.

Power Requirements

Power requirements are about 1000 W:

projector	325 W
computer	225 W (it's a big one)
lights	160 W
cooling	fans 100 W ~
other	100 W

Other Setup Notes

• It's important to avoid light spill from either side onto the RP screen. My flourescent light stands mask off any light from spilling backwards onto the screen.

• Rear projection is kind of a necessity, otherwise subject being video'ed blocks the projector beam as they watch themselves. Typical front projection solutions don't work cuz the subject ends up crooking their neck.

• Although you can light the subject with incandescent lights or the typical bright camera-mounted halogen camera light, the color and general aesthetic appeal of what you get on the screen is remarkably better with daylight flourescent bulbs. The quality difference is so much that it's enough to justify the pain of masking this non-focused light source or fears that people don't like "seeing themselves" in flourescent light at night because it looks "unnatural."

• It seems relatively important for the subject light to be bright at face-level. At BM 2002 the lights went from ground to 4' off the ground and faces were unsatisfying. At BM 2003 they went from 2'-6' and it was mobetta.

• I used a security camera because it was small, could take the dust, and doesn't look expensive and stealable like a camcorder. X10-type cheap tiny cameras are right out -- not enough light sensitivity and colors are insufficient. DV-quality camcorders seem to be good too if you can secure/protect them.

• For the computer you will need a 2 GHz or faster machine with a card like the nVidia GeForce 4 Ti 4400 or better. In 2003, laptops still didn't quite have the right CPU/graphics speed so I had my big desktop box in my truck. Starting 2004 and on, I was happily able to take my laptop and save both power and pain.

• The computer will need to have a video input (onboard or as a PCI card) that supports Video for Windows. PCI cards are available from Osprey and other vendors in the price range. Some graphics cards have video-in onboard, but not all of them support Video for Windows or DirectShow.

  At this time, bringing DV video in over a firewire/1394 connector is NOT an option -- the problem is the video comes in compressed, and my software (or some software) would need to decompress it first, which burns CPU cycles I'd rather use for my effects. Admittedly, with today's computers there is spare CPU, but I haven't gotten around to coding that in.

  Note: I am seeking a good USB uncompressed video input dongle! The Osprey PCI card I used in my desktop system worked perfectly, but I cannot find a laptop solution that works in real-time. I have tried several USB 2.0-based composite/svideo input dongles from Belkin and Digivue. All the units claim they can do 640x480 at 30fps. None of them can, not through Video for Windows and not through DirectShow either. It doesn't matter what pixel format I choose. Not even the Y'CbCr based formats (which use up half the bandwidth) work! I think it is probably the kind of problem where I have to make a magical, undocumented software setting to make it go in real-time, but I have yet to find that setting and yet to reach any actual engineers at the dongle companies.

  Has anyone out there found an uncompressed video dongle that works, or tricks to make the Belkin or Digivue work? Please let me know!

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