Creating animations for Stereoscope

We wanted as many people as possible to participate in creating amazing animations for Stereoscope. We understood Stereoscope as an artistic platform that enabled others to do fancy things with it instead of just doing everything on our own and achieving only 10% of what is possible. By joining forces with the public we were able to provide much more interesting content for everybody.

Looking at the mere size of Stereoscope it was obvious that most people would want to automatically and programmatically generate animations using existing tools or a self-created tool chain of their choice. To do that, we had set up a number of options.

The Virtual Matrix

Stereoscope was pretty special in regard to its pixel layout. The Toronto City Hall features two towers: the West Tower with 22 windows on each floor with the facade being broken up in two areas with 7 floors in the lower and 8 floors in the upper part. The East Tower is slightly larger, featuring 30 windows per floor with 9 consecutive floors in the lower and 12 floors in the upper part. In total, the building features 960 windows facing inwards.

As each tower is visually split up in two, we thought of the whole area as being four separate screens that together formed a compound display. But we honored the space in between: we came up with the idea of a Virtual Matrix that covers a much bigger area than could actually be seen. The whole virtual matrix is 96 x 32 pixels wide.

The four screens are located within this virtual matrix at positions that correspond to the actual physical location on the two towers. That way you could create a huge picture or animation that spanned all four screens. Some parts weren't seen as they were located between the towers. But if an animation panned and zoomed, moved and morphed, the image slowly moved around the visible area, creating the impression of a much bigger display than there actually was. The four screens themselves formed windows looking at the actual image.

Here is a reference sheet documenting the exact position of the four screens within the Virtual Matrix:

Download: Blinkenlights Stereoscope Virtual Matrix Reference Sheet (PDF)

Why did we leave so much space to the left and to the right of the screens? The answer is simple: imagine the Virtual Matrix as a projection of a cylinder standing right inside the building. The left edge then touches the right edge, effectively creating an infinite matrix. So to rotate things around the building you just shifted your image on the matrix to the left (or to the right respectively) and reinserted every column on the other side once it got pushed out.

Directly generating or converting your material

If you wrote your own generator software or format converter, you targeted the Blinkenlights Movies format that represents animations in a rather simple and mostly self-explanatory XML-based format. Once you could convert your data to our movie format, you were done.

Stereoscope Creation Tools (for Mac OS X)

If you worked on a Mac, you could leverage our Stereoscope Creation Tools which include the Stereoscope Simulator QC (a stripped down version of the Stereoscope Simulator for Mac OS X which provides a realistic 3D impression), the Stereoscope Player (to playback Blinkenlights Movies for Stereoscope) and a copy of the Stereoscope Paint application (see below).

In addition to these three applications the tools provide plug-ins for the Quartz Composer animation program that comes with Mac OS X Leopard (10.5). With these plugins, Quartz Composer could be used to create beautiful animations, send them to the simulator program and instantly convert the results to the Blinkenlights Movies format for submission and playback on Stereoscope.

Download: Stereoscope Creation Tools for Mac OS X (14.6 MB) [md5 a328fd1eb450f3e566e07c30e958c1c8]

Please refer to the enclosed "Getting Started" document for detailed instructions how to use and setup the Creation Tool Suite.

Stereoscope Paint

Stereoscope Paint Screenshot Stereoscope Paint is a simple animation tool that allows you to create simple animations by painting pictures pixel by pixel and by adding frames one by one. Stereoscope Paint runs both on Mac OS X and Windows computers. Finished movies were saved to a Blinkenlights Movie file and submitted to us using our web form.

As the lower levels of the building were partly obscured, only the two upper parts (the upper screens as we called them) could be targeted. You had to choose which side to target. The smaller screen suited simpler animations and the bigger one stuff that needed more pixels.

Download Stereoscope Paint:

• Stereoscope Paint for Mac OS X
• Stereoscope Paint for Windows
• Sample animations for Stereoscope Paint

Blinkenlights Library for Processing

Processing Logo Another valuable tool to create animations for Stereoscope was the Blinkenlights Library for the programming language Processing. This library extends Processing to be able to stream animations to the Blinkenlights Simulator and to write Blinkenlights Movies.

Download: Blinkenlights Library for Processing (1 MB)

Read the enclosed README document for detailed instructions on how to use this library. Thanks to Robin Senior for his contribution who also maintains a copy of the documentation online.