In December of last year we created a Christmas themed interactive installation in our Hanbury St window. If you stood in front of the window, it would grab your face and in realtime it would place this on a random illustrated Christmas character. All of this behind the scenes trickery of face tracking was created by Joel Gethin Lewis who explained it was all possible because of a free, open source software called openFrameworks.

openFrameworks is really a way for creatives and artists to get computers to help them realise their visions. You still need to be able to program and write code but it hides lots of the complicated parts and opens a much simpler interface to programming –  If you need face tracking you just ‘plug in’ that part of the system and so on.

openFrameworks is developed and maintained by Zachary Lieberman and Theo Watson and the other inspiring facet is the community that is there to share code, improve the software, give advice, form partnerships and collaborate.

In a nod back to the community, Joel and Wieden+Kennedy are open sourcing the Christmas Card Making Machine and perhaps this Christmas there might be more inventive and entertaining uses of the code.

Download the source.

openFrameworks teaser

For those interesing in learning more about creative coding then also take a look at the excellent Processing, initiated by Casey Reas and Ben Fry.

There is also a fantastic TED talk by Golan Levin who has used OpenFrameworks in many of his pieces.