Coding With Cards And Doves

Fantastic. So, Zachary Lieberman has this deal called Open Sourcery, where he has the magician Mago Julian conjure up tricks that are backed by stunts overlaid on a projector. The magic is that the projector is hooked up to a camera which captures the objects used during the tricks. His code then intercedes in the trick.

So you end up with stuff like: coins appearing to shrink (instead of simply vanishing) and cards which animate like a flipbook when shuffled.

Seriously, you’ve got to see the cards shuffling bit. On the cards, you see a little stick figure pull out the secret card. See here. (Oh and the code and a win32 build is right there on his site.)

Oh, I love this crazy bit from his interview on wm$na:

An amazing thing that happened was that Mago Julián and Punkie (his wife and partner in the act) started completely hacking the software. They would take different bugs or problems and flip them into remarkable tricks. Every day I would come to the workshop and Julián would be like, “We have to show you this!” The last trick, for example, when Julián reveals the card through a magic eye was completely based on bugs in the rendering. I cringed the first time he showed me (as a programmer I hate to see those bugs) but the cringe quickly became a huge laugh.

From the same guy, an equally compelling little event: Drawn, in which kids draw their own figures on a tablet and the software then animates the little creature right there.