New Glocal Camera Hack kits have been developed. Much like the originals, these kits are Arduino based camera triggers, but the mark 2 hack kit now contains an accelerometer and a light sensor to increase the possibilities of your photographic experiments. The camera can now be activated by a sudden bright light (for example, a door opening into a dark room), an absence of light (for example breaking a laser path), or by shakes, sudden movements, or tilt in axis.

By automating the firing of the camera, we can move away from images always being made at eye level. The use of these camera triggers allow us to capture images from new perspectives, and in new ways. By actually removing some human control from the equation, we open up possibilities for new and exciting images.

The kit is designed by artist Daniel Joliffe, and this download contains parts lists, assembly guides, schematics and everything you need to know in order to build one. Blank PCB’s are available from us,for free, so just contact us if you are intersted in one. Parts can obtained from Digikey or other online electronics vendors.

This screenshot from Glocal’s Motion Sequence Application (MSA) is an anonymous portrait of a tree in Holland Park – one of the many trees that were being showcased at Surrey’s Fusion Festival!

 Hello Glocal Blog Readers!

This Summer season has become an extremely prolific one for the info-crew at Glocal… 

In addition to the Canada Day festivities, the Glocal project was also represented by the Fusion Festival in Surrey (July 19-20, 2008), another Cultural Capitals of Canada initiative.

Computers in the tent were used to allow visitors to get creative with a web-cam. An additional computer provided access to the glocal website and blog so that visitors could see first hand how to download the software applications and contribute to the project.

Here are some more pictures from this culturally diverse summer blockbuster event…

Two ladies from a neighboring sponsor booth were quite keen to try out Glocal’s software applications.  Our applications were so enchanting, we lured many people working at other booths to see what Glocal was up to.  Every one we talked with was very impressed that our software applications were free for download.

One of those participants happened to be one of our immediate neighbors as she worked at the Chase booth next door.  You can see her co-workers in the background.  Just about every nearby participant decided to take their lunch break at our booth. 

Here is our volunteer Byron Peters launching our special Balloon Cam camera-kit. The Balloon Cam is made of 60 balloons and is lifting up a tiny digital video camera.  Byron has this special configuration on a leash so it cannot go far.  This Balloon Cam floated all across Holland Park and truly showed the demographic diversity of the Festival’s audience…from above!

Our summer student Erica Lapadat-Janzen (wearing the pink blouse) explains the Glocal project to some booth attendees while Byron Peters sets up his Balloon Cam for a re-launch.

 The re-launched Balloon Cam floats alongside the sky-train  bridge from Surrey Central to King George Station.

 Here, a family is enjoying learning more about the Glocal project and playing with our Motion Sequence Application on the main presentation monitor.  Yes, that little girl has her eyes closed but that was because she blinked.  It had nothing to do with our application (honest!).

Ready! Aim! Fire!  The boy in this family of booth participants treats our applications as if it were some sort of video game. This might be due to the success of our applications being as fun and engaging as any commercial entertainment system.  If it was not for the reflective glare off the screen, we would show you what we mean.

We would have had 10 times the amount of expected booth traffic if it was not for the fact that our booth was behind this fire-track for most of Saturday afternoon…sigh!  Audience members made diagonal bee-lines between main stages without seeing our booth along the way… double sigh!  Having said that, just about everyone who managed to find out hidden booth, was very enthusiastic about the project and took home our promotional handbill.

This particular festival had the largest Police presence per-capita that we had ever seen!  As you can see from the above picture, the Police had their own mobile prison-sized paddywagon (the one next to the white van)! We would have also taken a photo of the Police crew themselves since they had their own massive BBQ to the left of this wagon (behind our monitor) but we were too afraid to point anything at them…even a harmless camera!

This is what happens to a casual viewer after they have played with our Software Applications…heheheh!  Just kidding.  At least our Applications do not stunt your growth after prolonged usage.  There were many stilt-walkers going for a casual stroll throughout Holland Park for this ceremonious occasion.

You might need to zoom in to see the details of this photo but there were quite a few people doing historical re-enactments that were depicting classic Surrey events. We were quite amazed how interactive their monologues were and they seemed to remain immersed in their role-playing act for quite some time…now, imagine the interactive possibilities if  Glocal also wore period-era attire!  

Hacking your old digital camera just got easier! Last week we received 250 printed circuit boards – built to connect your digital camera to a sound sensor and an intervalometer (see our camera hack post for more details).

You can see a step-by-step GIF animation of the process here: trigger.gif (2.21MB)

We’ve packaged these custom-made Arduino-based boards boards together with the necessary parts so that you can assemble your own hacked digi-cam and take photos from brand new perspectives.

Since the hacked cameras are self-contained, they can be placed in virtually any location and can take shots from almost any angle – hands-free. So far, working with students at our Digital Summer Camp, we’ve prototyped bicycle cams, skateboard cams, hamster-ball cams, spray-paint cams, RC-cams, tree-cams – and more!

Want one? Here’s our first of a series of weekly photo challenges. We’ll pick some of our favourites submisions – they’ll be posted here and the artists will receive a FREE Camera Trigger Kit. Because this is our first photo challenge, we’re giving away 10 FREE KITS!

Instructions:

1) Take a photograph from a unique perspective. From beneath a car, on top of a bridge, underwater, in your sock drawer – we want to see your world from a new angle.

2) Upload the photo to Flickr and tag it with ‘glocalproject’ and ‘photochallenge’.

If your image is selected, we’ll mail you a camera kit right away. We’ll be giving all of our boards away over the next few months – so stay tuned!

Here’s a preliminary taste of one of the things we’ve been working on: the Glocal Camera trigger. This Arduino-based hack lets you take pictures by triggering your camera’s shutter on a time delay (every ten seconds, every 20, every ten minutes…), or by plain old sound: you make a noise and the camera takes a picture. We’ve been perfecting it and it is very sensitive- anything from a whisper to a loud sound will make it trigger the camera.

Our intention behind this is to come up with ways that the camera can be triggered from positions that are not connected to the body. If we aren’t holding the camera, imagine what kind of perspectives can be captured, and what unique situations might be documented.

We’ve asked our artist friend, Daniel Joliffe if he could come up with a circuit board design for this, one that makes for easy assembly and hacking. We’ll post that in a few weeks time, but for now, here is a zip file with the schematic in PDF and Eagle CAD formats, and the Arduino code too. And to whet your appetite for camera hacking, here are a few pictures of the first prototype.. (oh, and it fits in an Altoids tin).

glocal_camera_trigger_june26_08.zip (96k)