It's very interesting to hear that you have transferred a work from
laserdisk to a digital medium.

I have also recently done this (as well as migrating all my old analogue
video recordings of early digital animations to digital) with a 1990 work
(Alchemy) that employed two synched laserdisk playback units controlled by a
custom built light sensor and a small Mac computer (one of the earlier
models). This was developed by Jochem Vos at Academy Minerva, Groningen.

http://hosted.simonbiggs.easynet.co.uk/installations/alchemy/alchemy.htm

Ironically the way we originally got the sensor to work was to emulate a
mouse. The light sensor consisted of two light sensors and the order in
which they were triggered allowed us to read the direction of movement of
whatever was between the light source and the sensor. Today this is how an
optical mouse works. This was then used to shift the playback of the two
laserdisks either forwards or backwards through a series of animated
sections or chapters. Not terribly interactive and quite linear (you could
go backwards and forwards) but that was sort of the point.

Now all the video is digital and what was orginally presented on two PAL
video screens happily fits on a single standard XGA display, side by side
and in vertical format (in the original work the two screens were turned
sideways so as to be in a portrait format). The programming of the work in
its new format was trivial (perhaps 30 minutes work) and it is
cross-platform. It makes very little demand on the system and soon I will
put it up on my website as an online piece. Will this be a new piece or an
old piece? How should I date it?

The thing here is that something that took many months work, with state of
the art systems back in the late 1980's, to produce and which then had to be
rendered to laserdisk as those state of the art systems were unable to
animate the imagery and interact with viewers in realtime can now run in RAM
in realtime on any standard PC or Mac.

The light sensor interface can also be replicated either using a mouse or
other standard input device or can use a simple to put together camera
tracking system (using Cyclops, Myron or TrackThemColoursPro). If a user has
a webcam running they could potentially control the internet version by
waving their hand in front of the camera (if I was to impliment the
emulation of the sensor, which I probably will not as it would be unlikely
to work across platforms).

The pity is that due to data storage limitations of the time I did not keep
all the original digital data. As I recorded material I would bin it to free
up hard drive space for the next tape-dump. I only have this digital version
of an analogue recording. I do have all the old code for the work, but
without all the bitmaps associated with it that is fairly useless. I also do
not have an appropriate workstation to read the code and manipulate the
framestores commonly used in the 80's.

Best

Simon


On 06.09.06 00:03, Matthew Biederman wrote:

> These were transferred from a laserdisc and custom hardware and
> software display system, and installed on an entirely digitally based
> system.  (in a nutshell anyway :)  New software was written, we re-
> digitized footage from early digital beta film transfers, and
> upgraded mechanical parts and haptic interfaces as well.  All of
> these projects have taught me allot on the process of "upgrade" or
> emulation.  I was lucky enough to be able to work very closely with
> Michael and his original programmer on all of these projects, who
> both provided me with allot of the early code and notes that were
> used when building the projects originally.


Simon Biggs

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Research Professor, Edinburgh College of Art

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