Dra’Wii’ng Jackson Pollock is one of my favorite projects I’ve worked on at ITP. It was my final for ‘Intro to Physical Computing’ taught by Tom Igoe. It was showcased in a few places – The ITP Winter Show 2008, CHI 2009 Conference, Gizmodo, Abc News, and NY1. Here is a demo of the project.

Dra’Wii’ng Jackson Pollock will now be in the ITP Book 2.0 for which Si Heun Cho and I wrote a couple of how to’s. Without further ado, here they are!

A. How to use the Wii Remote in Processing

1. What you’ll need
Mac OS X*, Darwiinremote, Processing, Wii Remote, Infrared LEDs (or just a strong light bulb)
* You can also do this on a PC, but you would need to find an appropriate replacement for Darwiinremote.

2. Set up Processing
First, download Processing if you haven’t already done so from http://processing.org/.

3. Set up DarwiinRemote
Next, download DarwiinRemote with IR Sensor support from http://code.google.com/p/darwiinosc/downloads/list.

DarwiinRemote is an application for Mac OS X v10.4 or above which receives data from the Wii Remote through BlueTooth to a Mac. The computer needs to have Bluetooth enabled in order to use the program.

4. Getting data from Darwiinremote to Processing
When you download Darwiinremote, it comes with a folder called “wiiControllerOSC” which contains two processing files. If you open the two files you’ll see that the one called “wiiController” is the class which gets the data from darwiinremote and the one called “wiiControllerOSC” is an example of how to use the data. The WiiController class was a little buggy and was missing IR sensor data, so we posted an error-free version of the class here: http://code.google.com/p/dra-wii-ng-jacksonpollock/.

5. Using the data from the Wii Remote
Open the wiiControllerOSC class in Processing and modify it for your own purposes.

6. Running your file
When you run your Processing sketch, make sure Bluetooth is on and discoverable. Darwiinremote should be running in order for the data to be received from the Wii Remote through Bluetooth and sent to Processing.

Tip: Sometimes after connecting the Wii Remote, the device will still appear as connected under System Preferences/Bluetooth. Make sure you remove the device in this menu so that it will work again.

B. Printing from Processing (by touching a Wii Button)


1. In Processing
In the wiiControllerOSC class, listen for a button press on the Wii Remote to send a message using the OscP5 library. You can find more details on this library at http://www.sojamo.de/libraries/oscP5/. Here is a snippet of the code used for Drawiing Jackson Pollock to do this. It saves the frame in Processing as an image that will be printed later.

if (wiiController.buttonOne){
saveFrame();
saveFrame(“fileToPrint.tif”);
OscMessage myMessage = new OscMessage(“/print”);
OscP5.flush(myMessage, myRemoteLocation);
}
2. In Max/MSP
Use Max/MSP/ to receive the message and call an AppleScript called “print.scpt” in order to print the file “fileToPrint.tif”.

3. AppleScript
Here is the AppleScript used :

tell application “Preview”
print “Users:siheuncho:Desktop:pollock_wii_02:fileToPrint.tif”
end tell–do shell script “rm ~/Desktop/pollock_wii_02/fileToPrint.tif”