A fantastic meetup and a great start to the year. We were at capacity with RSVPs on meetup.com, and must have only been a few no-shows as the room was rammed. It was great to see a mix of regular faces and new faces.

I started the evening with a welcome, a brief explaination of where the group came from, and then a group discussion about the trends/opportunities for creative coding in 2015. After a slight distraction talking about space elevators, it was interesting to hear opinions from the group. A common theme was JS for it’s flexibility and cross-platform/portability. Feel free to use the comments below to post your ideas of what trends and opportunities might be in 2015.

We were missing the guys from Primo.io this month, but looking forward to getting an update from them next month on where they’ve been!

The presentation for the first half of the programme was a demonstration by Richard Colson of his Air Painting project. This lead to some intersting discussion on comparisons between Processing and openFrameworks, and on the artist nature of interpreting gestures, and the artistic craft involved in coding. This was our meetup groups’ first full demo, with Kinect, cameras etc, so thanks again to Richard to persevering with the tech to make it work for us.

In the second half of the evening we had Nick Cheung presenting his projects for the first time. Nick presented a couple of impressive large-scale projects. It was really interesting to hear about the technical challenges and practicalities of implementing projects of this scale.

Then we had the open mic. In previous meetups people had jumped up to present things, but tonight no one came forward straight away. I think next time we’ll have a 5 min toilet break and hopefully people will be more forthcoming with open mic demos. In the end, I was persuaded (thanks Jonathon) to show some work in progress code for an instalation myself and Matt are working on for a party next week. If you’re interested the early version of the code is up on GitHub - it just takes the openCV facial recognition example from openFrameworks, and combines it with the videoGrabber example and uses it to overlay a mask on peoples faces. This then prompted more demos of facial recognition examples from the group. Culminating in Roman showing us Daito Manabe’s crazy work on electric stimulus generators.

The meeting ended at 10, and we relocated to the pub for further discussion. Thanks again to everyone who came along and has shown their support for this group. I’m exctied about 2015 and our future meetups. As always, drop me a line if you have anything you’d like to present or demonstrate. I’m looking for demonstrations of all kinds of projects, all technologies, and all levels including large instalations, and beginners first experiments.