B&S Enforcement Agent App

April 12, 2023 in Design

Bristow & Sutor is a UK-based enforcement agency that specialises in debt recovery and enforcement services. They work with a range of clients, including local authorities, magistrates' courts, and private sector organisation, to recover outstanding debts such as council tax arrears, parking fines, and commercial rent arrears. This project involved envisioning a new mobile app design for enforcement agents on the field while retaining the functionalities present in the legacy mobile app and migrating existing ones from the web application

InfoTrax® FlexCloud Developer Portal

May 25, 2022 in Design, Research

InfoTrax® Systems, a trusted global name in the Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) software, is an industry leading provider of backend operations systems and online distributor tools for the Direct Sales industry. In order to target diverse clientele and simplify propriety codebase, Infotrax decided to ship their services to their customers as subscription-based APIs instead of their legacy full-stack solutions.

Trails of 'Yakshagana'

October 21, 2021 in Installation, Art

"Trails of a Yakshagana" is a video that captures the essence of a solo Yakshagana performance. The visually appealing video creates a rhythmic experience for the viewers as they follow the dancer's movements. The video, which lasts for 2.5 minutes and loops continuously, uses the power of a computer's graphical processing unit (GPU) to create a motion trail of the performance. Inspired by the traditional dance form of Yakshagana from the coastal Karnataka region, the video gives a modern glimpse of its Navras.

Project 'Expo'-Ring

November 30, 2020 in Installation

As a part of my internship at Pavilions & Interiors Pvt. Ltd., my colleague Srinivas and me, conceptualised an interactive installation which would serve as a touch point for visitors present in an exposition area. Following post describes the process of the same.

Project Haze

November 19, 2019 in Design, Art

Project Haze is a site-specific immersive mixed-media installation that tries to invoke the feeling of 'lightness' among its users.

The installation, which works both a day as well as a night installation, takes inspiration from Gaston Bachelard's 'Poetics of Air' and explores the notion of using mist to create a 'ganzfeld effect'. In such a situation, the audience gets separated from their surroundings and immersed in a uniform stimulation field of sound, light, and touch. The result is a heightened sensory perception of all the senses and the flow of individual imagination.

The day installation relies on sunlight and wind to create movement in the mist which seems to immerse from the ground and fly upwards lifting the observer with them. The cool sensation of minute water droplets steals the heat from the sun, leaving a cooling sensation with them, the lack of obstacles allows them to play and explore the 'materiality of the cloud'. The viewer also has a chance to spot a circular rainbow against the sun, which seems to participate in their movement adding more delight to the experience.

During the night, the artist uses projection mapping to introduce volume to an otherwise invisible installation which again reinforces the principles of sensorial engagement, freedom in seclusion, and the materiality of mist with its audience.

Motion and Code: Explorations

July 16, 2019 in Art, Programming

For a long time, I have been interesting in capturing the style of Italian master and other icons in visual art history in code and displaying it as a live camera view. It would be interesting to see the world with the eyes of these masters and will open a window into understanding Modern art for a lot of people. Below are 4 examples of such works, but more are underway.

3D printing: Chess pieces

December 12, 2018 in Design, Game

Earlier this year, I tried my hands on the 3D modelling software by Autodesk, Fusion 360. I self assigned myself to create some custom 3D chess pieces with the software. I only had one constraint. None of my chess pieces will have any curved surface. The exercise let me to create the following chess pieces. I tried to maintain the basic shape of the chess pieces and slowly extrude and removed cuboid out of them to add more details.

After nearly 107 iterations I finalised the form of these chess pieces and decided to 3D print the rook. Following is how the 3D print turned out. I intend to get this all 3D printed and create a chess set out of it.

“We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”

— F. T. Marinetti, The Founding & Manifesto of Futurism

Kinetic Sculpture: Readings on Motion, Speed, Blur

November 23, 2018 in Design

In 1909, the futurist poet Marinetti in their manifesto expressed a call for the celebration of speed, youth and aggression. Since then, artists like Duchamp, Muybridge, Balla and others have tried to closely imitate the sense of motion in their works. Their works reflected the beauty of graceful movements of human and animal body, ana a better understanding, ergo, representation of it. Their illustrations were modest derivations of ‘chrono’ (time) photography. Their photographs, paintings, etc attempted to eliminate the phenomenon of smooth pursuit of the eye; incorporated the depiction of visual frames or after images (lags), giving the illusion of movement in an otherwise static piece. Additionally, the object of interest may have been peaked by invention of the motion camera at the same time. No wonder there are fundamental similarities between the works of the photographs of Éntienne Jules Marey like the Running Man and Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.

Despite their initial mistrust, the Futurists came to embrace photography with infectious enthusiasm (read more).

Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 — Marcel Duchamp's *Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2*

Éntienne Jules Marey's Running Soldier — Éntienne Jules Marey's *Running Soldier*

OBSERVATIONS OF OBJECT AND CAMERA

As objects in a scene move, an image of that scene must represent an integration of all positions of those objects, as well as the camera's viewpoint, over the period of exposure determined by the shutter speed. In such an image, any object moving with respect to the camera will look blurred or smeared along the direction of relative motion. This smearing may occur on an object that is moving or on a static background if the camera is moving. In a film or television image, this looks natural because the human eye behaves in much the same way.

Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, Giacomo Balla, 1912

Without this simulated effect each frame shows a perfect instant in time (analogous to a camera with an infinitely fast shutter), with zero motion blur. This is why a video game with a frame rate of 25-30 frames per second will seem staggered, while natural motion filmed at the same frame rate appears rather more continuous. Many modern video games feature motion blur, especially vehicle simulation games.

There are two main methods used in video games to achieve motion blur: cheaper full-screen effects, which typically only take camera movement (and sometimes how fast the camera is moving in 3-D Space to create a radial blur) into mind, and more "selective" or "per-object" motion blur, which typically uses a shader to create a velocity buffer to mark motion intensity for a motion blurring effect to be applied to or uses a shader to perform geometry extrusion.

When an animal's eye is in motion, the image will suffer from motion blur, resulting in an inability to resolve details. To cope with this, humans generally alternate between saccades (quick eye movements) and fixation (focusing on a single point). Saccadic masking makes motion blur during a saccade invisible. Similarly, smooth pursuit allows the eye to track a target in rapid motion, eliminating motion blur of that target instead of the scene.

The motion blur due to camera movement can be broken down into four distinct types of motion:

Rotation, so that the image sweeps across the sensor. This is dependent on focal length - will be strongest with telephoto or longer focal lengths, and less noticeable with short or wide-angle lenses.
Rotation about the lens axis, so that the image twists on the sensor. This is unaffected by focal length (but can still be reduced by a faster shutter speed).
Sideways or vertical sliding motion. For the same subject magnification, this is unaffected by focal length. Hence if a wide-angle lens is used close to the subject, to give the same framing as a telephoto lens far from the subject, the amount of blur is the same.
Back and forth motion towards or away from the subject. Only really important at macro distances, not a problem for a distant subject with a tele-lens, but could be a problem for close ups, regardless of focal length.

INITIAL IDEAS

When I was working as the member of the photography team at my undergraduate college, we were introduced to the idea of motion blur techniques using the photos of extreme sports like racing cars and ski shots. Since then I have always associated speed with cars and sports. And if one looks at the history of automobile industry, engine upgrade has led to increasing fast passenger vehicles being driven on the streets. Hence, this thought extrapolated to the idea of a future, where the boundaries of vehicular speed would have extended beyond human perception and the highways will look like a carnival of neon trail lights. So, the question was how to represent this idea as a sculpture?

Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913

Dynamism of an Automobile, 1911

The idea was nothing new and I eventually realized that. In fact the futurist painter Luigi Russolo had already made an artwork named Dynamism of an Automobile, 1911 on similar lines. Similarly the motion of a human was captured in a sculpture by Italian artist Umberto Boccioni. These artworks inspired me to create a small scale wire-frame model of a Ferrari 480 F1 car’s and draw tangential lines across its surface, much like the drawing shown above. The result was not as impressive as I had hoped but lots of things were to be taken forward!

COMPUTER VISION AND MOTION BLUR

As a former computer science engineer, I sometimes crave to exercise my coding skills. And this idea of motion blur was something I wanted to capture on my device. How would the world look like if our brain did not perform saccadic masking and defragmentation. Things would be followed by their past self, fast motions would be impossible to see and reality would be a dizzy experience. These ideas were easy to describe and visualize mentally, but I decided to use to programming to better visualize it. Below is a clip of the visualization implemented in Processing. This can be easily installed on an Android device.

ZEOTROPE AND MOTION BLUR

The effect of motion and blur are the fundamental building blocks of motion pictures. One of the earliest example of this is a zeotrope. The artifact has a nostalgic and playful feel to it and I selected it as a medium to develop my concept of ‘futuristic high-speed world’ in its lines. I wanted to give my audience a feel of this world but did not want the experience to be overwhelming. It had to be completely under their control.

Hence came the idea of this ‘zeotropic umbrella’ like structure, made with reflective acrylic components, in which a user could enter and rotate (speed variable and controllable) using a regulator. The reflections would bounce between the surfaces of the installation and maybe induce the feel of standing in the middle of a kaleidoscope. It might sound dangerous to stand under this installation, and the alternative was to place a 360˚ camera and create a VR experience out of the same.

“The first step in solving a problem is to recognize that it does exist.”

— Zig Ziglar

Fabric of Truth

October 21, 2018 in Art

In the pursuit of truth, one often gets exposed to their own biases and prejudices. This is especially true in today’s time when everyone of us is bombarded with information constantly through our online news and WhatsApp forwards. The identification and verification of true news from fake one is a serious issue that concerns everyone of us. For the technologically unaware population, this issue takes new forms of evil. The blind belief in the information from the internet and an absence of critical reasoning establishes a trust ‘network’ that is very difficult to break and open for exploitations. Such exploitations, whether for political or monitory gain, lead to rampant unrest and spoil the underlying fabric of our society. Fabric of Truth aims to invoke a sense of responsibility and awareness among the audience by making them realise that in today’s world ‘seeing is not believing’.

Fabric of Truth lets its audience uncover various interpretations and meanings of truth, both in its absolute and contemporary forms. It also critiques those who use their ‘words of truth’ to mould the innocent mind of masses.

PROCESS

The process involved the construction of a semi-transparent screen to project our interaction on, writing the program for the interaction and mapping the skewed output on the screen. The tools used by us was Processing 3 and Kinect2 for programming and depth sensing and MadMapper for projection mapping.

Our interaction depended critically on the tension of the screen and hence we had to hang weights (metal poles along a groove) at the bottom of the screen. This also ensured a uniformity in the force that was applied on the screen. Please find pictures below.

We highly recommend MadMapper for projection mapping related projects. We initially went for the free version of vpt8 on Mac and soon realised that the software was buggy and had a shitty interface. Compared to that a rental version of MadMapper for 1month comes for around ₹3000 (~43 dollars) and is totally worth using and learning.

INTERACTION

The fabric presented with an excellent opportunity to physically warp the projection surface and interact with it in a more tactile way. The screen served as a border through which physical things could not pass but also served as a corridor for the light to fall and express itself to the onlookers. The second image is the final interaction. I admit its not very pretty and needs more design interventions.

WhatsApp Video 2018-11-16 at 2.35.17 PM.gif

The technical implementation of this project are discussed here.
Special thanks to Ajay Wagela, Dr Jignesh Khakhar.

Fingerprints of a City

March 27, 2018 in Storytelling, Psychology, Anthropology

In his book, The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch attempted to break down the global form of the cityscape into many components like a path, an edge, a district, a node and a landmark. While these concepts help one in the describing the spatial arrangement of a city, it is sufficiently static in describing its rapidly changing identities. These identities change with time, occasion and context of the user. Hence, our attempt was to develop a more persona-based approach in envisioning a city.

Our fictional narrative revolves around the life of a detective who tries to track down a local drug cartel and in the process gets acquainted with the area near Nehru Bridge, Ahmedabad.

Kinetic Sculpture : Replication

January 07, 2018 in Art, Design

The outputs of the second week of Kinetic Sculpture under the guidance of Prof. Ranjit Konkar, Dr. Jignesh Khakhar and Prof. Vivekanand Yengaldas.
Team: Shafali Jain & Sarwesh Shah
Sculpture inspiration: Anne Lily

Kinetic Sculpture : Introduction

November 08, 2017 in Design

Course overview and explorations in Week 1 of module Kinetic Sculpture.
Mentor: Prof Ranjit Konkar
Team: Sarwesh Shah, Shafali Jain

Design Process: 2-wheeler parking in NID Gandhinagar campus

November 01, 2017 in Design

Course name: Design Process

Mentors:
Juhi Pandey, Balaji Rangaraja

Authors:
Ananya Biswas, Ashish Dubey, Raonak Lakra,
Sarwesh Shah, Suminder Singh, Suruchi Soren

A BITSian's Life

May 19, 2017 in Art, Photography

Campus life at BITS Pilani is different from other Indian colleges. This project tried at capture the various moods I experienced here in a duration of 4 years.

Cloud computing

Late night Buzz

A normal day!!

Reading has it's benefits

A BITSian's dream

Ratio problems

The calm before the storm

Post-siesta

Oye! Aaj tut hai!!! 😛

Courtesy:
Panel partner - Vishal Chundawat
Juniors - Saket Nihal, Kshitij Kant
Seniors - Tanay Upadhyay, Anirudh Pathak, Sandy, Prankur

Deadpool sketch

May 19, 2017 in Art

Ink drip effect

Inspired by the sketching of Kerby Rosanes, i tried to make the illustration of Deadpool on my Moleskine using pencil colours and black marker pen.

First illustration on my Moleskine.
Mediums are pens and Stabilo pencil colours.

V for Vendetta

April 06, 2017 in Art

One of my favourite movie character from the intensely engaging movie, V for Vendetta. The dialogues and plot of movie make it a remarkable movie to add to your watchlist.

“Remember, remember, the Fifth of November, the Gunpowder Treason and Plot. I know of no reason why the Gunpowder Treason should ever be forgot…”

— V

“[V proceeds to kill all fingermen with his knives before they manage to reload]
Creedy: [desperately shooting at the approaching V] Die! Die! Why won’t you die?... Why won’t you die?
V: Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea, Mr. Creedy. And ideas are bulletproof.”

Childhood Sketches

March 28, 2017 in Art

Some of my favorite pencil sketches of childhood when I took drawing classes.

Medium:
Black 4B lead pencils, A4/A3 paper

Camera vs Pencil

December 28, 2016 in Art

Camera vs Pencil, the Duality project:
As a part of my college's cultural fest, Oasis, these photos were presented along with others in the photography club exhibition.

Credits:
Illustration: Rohit Pamnani
Editing: Shwetabh Sameer, Prabhat Gupta

Oct 13, 2024

I co-created a Chrome Extension using ChatGPT

My AI research demanded a more efficient way to capture video screenshots. To solve this, I developed a Chrome extension that automates the process. With ChatGPT as my coding mentor, I brought this tool to life, publishing it on the Chrome store for others to use. This project not only sharpened my programming skills but also deepened my understanding of AI's potential in software development. It's been incredibly rewarding to see my creation streamline my workflow and assist fellow researchers.

Jan 26, 2022

The Tale of Two Viruses

This is the story of the two deadliest beings on the planet. It is about how these two different species have commonalities and how each they cling and adapt for a chance of survival. This narrative is a result of discussions around the Covid-19 pandemic 😷 and around Climate Crisis 🌪, two of the most vicious, urgent, and anxiety-spiking topics of the past decade. Both of them are pivoted around mankind, hinged on our intelligence as a species: on how we can successfully ward off these dangers and continue to grow.

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