February 3rd, 2007

Name of the project:

Disco Stu - dance with you!

Names of all group members:

Alexander Grinin took care of the web page. His second task was coding some java for the project.

Steffen Kirchhoff  animated Stu with about 80 moves and taught him dancing. 

Stephan Peitz created the web page, backgrounds and disco atmosphere.

Kim Phan made some research work for the project.

Our original project proposal and brief introduction describing what our project is, and the motivation behind the idea.

We decided to work with a visualization of music as this idea was supported by all of the members of our group. Then we thought what kind of interesting ideas should we have in order to get our project as good as possible. What should we start with? The way of making some movements with the help of basic geometry figures was something that we did not want to have as it looks just too simple. Then we decided to have a creature that will be able to play its little role in this project. And as this task is combined with music we thought it might be nice to make it in the disco style. Because disco is the place where the music is being played isn’t it? And in that very moment two of us got a brilliant character to suggest. Disco Stu! That guy is really what everybody needs to see when they hear some sounds playing. Our idea was that when the people see that Stu they could understand immediately what is going on. Technical idea was to map an input sound frequencies and volume on the movements of the Stu and the background color change where he was.

 A high-level list of tasks we accomplished for our project.


 We…

… had to split up our work in order to reach high efficiency.

… draw about 80 gif images in order to show the character’s moves.

… found out how to use the input and output sound channels.

… wrote about a couple of hundred lines of Java code for the application to run as it should.

… made a patch file in Quartz Composer that allows visualizing the input music.

…created, filled out and hosted a web page showing the results in real time.

Brief description of any specific problems/challenges we encountered.
 

We had a big sound processing problem at the begin of our work, because of the analog input. We handled it with the help of the 3,5mm jack cable making a loop from output to input channel and java script for filtering the noise.

Next one was the handling of the moves of the character. They were too fast. We had to write down an algorithm in java code in order to fix it.

We also had a bunch of little problems that made the project harder to do but interesting to work on. We guess we solved all of them.

Possibilities for future work.


We think that this work could be expanded and improved a little bit more. One can add some extra moves to the character or just rework it with Quartz Composer in order not to use the gif images for the moves.

 
List of references.


Website in the Internet: www.discostu.rulz.de

Links to our source code, Quartz Composer patches, etc...

Pictures of Stu(.gif files)

Us working on the project

Video of the project(Mac OS X only)

Project file(Quartz Composer)

Some disco music