I Vomit Rainbows

I hadn’t been updating my blog as much as I should have. I’ve actually been doing lots of fun art stuff this spring, so I wanted to post about some of them.

Eliot’s Birthday! Me and my friends went over-the-top with strange and sometimes edible art projects. First, Erin (readiness) and I made hacker cupcakes out of fondant. It’s the first time that either of us had messed with it. First we sketched out wii-style heads of our friends:

Then we cut shapes out, either freestyling with a knife, or using cookie cutters, and ended up with these:

Dave’s idea was to make Eliot some Laser Boob Cupcakes, based on a business card design he’d been using lately. We took two cupcakes and jammed laser pointers into them, with the “on” buttons taped permanently to “on.” Then, I covered the cupcakes in pink icing and added some red around the center.

Which brings us to the last art project. Jeans Top Hat (though it looks like a Dr. Suess hat). This hat is in response to a twitter. It took me 2 hrs to make, out of jeans, a grocery bag, duct tape, a clothes hanger, and safety pins.

from sweetums:
Things that should be denim: jeans. Things that shouldn’t: everything else. #denimbustiersrsly?!

Careful what you twitter around your birthday.

More pics and the hacker drinkup party at Rick’s Tavern are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinguino/sets/72157623602392806/

Chris (cnelson) showed me a video about augmented reality cookies, and I knew that had to be the next baking project. The premise behind this is to hold a cookie with a special mark on it, and a webcam would render a shape over the cookie, even if you rotated it. We were going to make it so that when you bit into a cookie, you’d get a silly mustache on your face.

Of course, I waited til last minute to make the dough, and was trying to measure out 1cm tall chunks at 2am. But the bigger problem was that the dough was defrosting fast as I was trying to build the cookies, and I was worried that it wouldn’t be smooth enough to scan.

But the cookie block did look fine the next day, and sliced easily. We laid them onto cookie sheets and baked them. In Chris’s sunny computer room, they did scan. However, the program was having problems with the contrast. Next time, add more blue and red food coloring, as well as more melted chocolate, to give your cookies more contrast.

Chris was in charge of making the code work with the cookies. He used Processing and NyARToolkit to make that happen.

I also made some onigiri rice balls with the trigger shape cut out, and some quick California rolls. The rolls didn’t trigger the software, but the riceballs did. We showcased these at Hacker Drinkup 100, at Rick’s Tavern.

I drew a bunch of mustaches that would display randomly. Here is what your options were:

Screenshots from Chris’s App: http://id.cnelson.org/augmented-stache

Eliot’s Blog Post: http://www.robotskirts.com/2010/05/27/augmented-reality-mustaches/

My Flickr Set of Hacker Drinkup 100: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinguino/sets/72157624155168304/

I think we’re a bit obsessed with augmented reality now, so expect more cool stuff from us soon!