Gen.u started early 2012 as an answer to my dissertation title:
"How to deliver an unique computer generated design based on an interactive user based experience".
Initial research was done in areas like Biometrics, Human-Computer Interaction, Generative Art and a personal journey, probably the most exciting so far, started where all the dots seemed to connect between each other....
The Journey
Further research in Biometrics help me analyse and compare few technologies and recognition systems in order to extract unique information from different individuals and decided to use fingerprint scanning as an affordable and effective approach to uniqueness.
When choosing and purchasing fingerprint readers, few came into consideration as they were easy to hack, Microsoft and Digital Persona are the main suppliers (Although Microsoft doesn't deliver to the UK).
Digital Persona provides the right UrU series fingerprint reader with Open Source drivers and a Linux SDK (Software Development Kit).
As drivers and SDK were only Linux supported, DualBooting my Mac Book was required...
All left to do was to start getting dirty with the coding part, something pretty challenging for a person with very very basic C++ knowledge like myself, but with some help from a very good friend of mine (David...You are the greatest!!) we managed to extract the position of the unique points from a fingerprint (minutiae point)
After managing the feature extraction from the fingerprint, I obtained unique information every time a finger was scanned...hooray !!! The last part was to transfer that information into processing. With some modifications of a good sketch (Thank you zenbullets)
With an Arduino board and a few pressure sensors, I built an installation which will create interactive experiences to an audience and will reward them with a generative art design based on their unique fingerprint.