SVEN (Surveillance Video Entertainment Network)

All video portions of the project were done in Max/Jitter.

SVEN humorously detects "rock stars" from among unsuspecting pedestrians. When it finds one, it turns the "boring" surveillance video in which they appear into a music video. A custom computer vision application on a separate machine was written by Vincent Rabaud. That app sent UDP data to the Max machine regarding the person's position, body segmentation (head, torso, etc.), descriptive features (hair, clothes, etc.), and facial expression. The Max (Jitter) patch used this data to find the best match to a rock star in a custom database and applied position-specific effects to the video to mimic the original music video in which the actual rock star had appeared.

The Max patch was written mainly by Wojciech Kosma with contributions from Cristyn Magnus and Amy Alexander. Marilia Maschion was production assistant for the project. Amy Alexander directed the project and wrote additional software utilities for the system.