Plug in a camera and use Spatial Scanner to turn your video-projector into a 2d scanner. Click on the surface inside the corners and the arrows move the whole surface pixel by pixel, and for the surface’s very handy scale and rotation buttons, the arrows again provide incremental help. No weird menu bottlenecks, it’s just there in front of you. For example, click-dragging the corner of each surface to skew it in a direction isn’t too remarkable, but by pressing the left, right, up and down arrows on a keyboard, that corner is nudged in tiny increments – perfect for tiny alignment adjustments. There’s a lovely level of refinement to the Madmapper interface – it’s simple, but it works as you’d expect, and sometimes better. Below, zooming into the interface, first the triple screen map, then a closer view of the map for the industrial machine. Within that, there’s a careful attention to detail which makes the mapping process as seamless and non-complicated as possible. On the right side we can see what our textures look like, the shape of the surfaces they are going onto, or textures and surface side by side.
In the left hand column, we get the ability to choose our source material textures ( real-time video from other software via Syphon, or images and movies drag and dropped into the column ). That purity of focus is immediately evident in the spartan split-screen interface. Below, the madmap used for the triple projector image up top. It’s a recipe which seems to serve it well, although means the application can at times seem undercooked when looking around for functions you’d expect in video software, that they’ve decided are best dealt with elsewhere. This avoids unnecessarily cluttering or slowing down the application, and allows Madmapper to focus purely on techniques for aligning textures onto surfaces.
This approach presumes the textures have been created elsewhere, or are being created elsewhere in real-time and piped into Madmapper.
)Īt its simplest – Madmapper is software for mapping textures to surfaces. (Above image: Madmapper makes easy work of industrial machinery at Cockatoo Island, during preparations for the Underbelly festival. Although we’ve long held the ability to use software for custom tailoring projections to suit specific shapes, Madmapper seems to have struck a chord because it arguably makes the process easier and more intuitive than anything else before it. Increasingly we expect to see pixels sliding around us in three dimensional space – dripping down heritage building facades, climbing across weird geometric clusters surrounding a sound system, illuminating the edges of random urban infrastructure. Video it would seem, is slipping from the screen into the world around it.