Update

I'm delighted to announce that my "Gold" installation has been selected to be shown at the Tent London exhibition as part of the London Design Festival. 24-27th September 2009, at the Truman Brewery, London, UK. Stay tuned for more information.

The video below is an early demo of the installation.

“Gold” is an interactive installation which explores our obsession with super-stardom, and the extravagance that accompanies it. Through a ‘magic mirror’, revel in a world of excess where you are the super-star. Shower in glittery gold, experience almost omnipotent powers as you materialize, morph and dematerialize into pure sparkling gold dust. Immortalize yourself as a shimmering golden statue, before you collapse and fade away.

The installation uses custom software written with openFrameworks and the OpenCV computer vision library. The software analyzes the video feed from infra-red cameras in real-time and generates 1080p HD output using OpenGL.

An iPhone adaptation of this can be found here

Source code for the particle system in this demo (minus the fancy effects) can be found at http://memo.tv/vertex_arrays_vbos_and_point_sprites_with_openframeworks
This demonstrates how to use VBOs, Vertex Arrays and Point Sprites.