Maya Gurantz and Ellen Sebastian Chang came up with this incredible idea and with financial backing from The Great Wall of Oakland they assembled the audio and visual technical team of Matthew Eben Jones, Logan Jhonston, and myself, Matthew Curtis Childers.
The goal of the project was to connect two contrasting neighborhoods of Oakland through a live video portal. Basically it was a live Skype call that would remain on for a few hours every night. Anytime it was running Oakland residents in the separate neighborhoods could stop to see and communicate with each other in real time. One of the really cool things about this project is that we barely spent any money on the software side.
We used Skype to create the video connection, Syphoner ($30.00) to get the video feed from Skype to Quartz Composer, and then we used Quartz Composer (free if registered apple app developer) to projection map the video feed onto the store front windows.
We used Hamachi and VNC viewer in order to be able to log on to the two computers remotely and initiate the calls every night. We were also able to turn on the projectors remotely as well by connecting them to the computers through a serial cable and then executing action script.
Come back soon for a more in depth description of our technical set up. Until then please check out these articles written about the project.