Monday, May 26, 2008

Twas the night before Studio...

Ok so yesterday i went to bunnings and bought some polly pipe to make the L shape device to go above the frame and look directly down at people as they use our frame. I drilled some holes in it so the cable could be run up the middle of it so it didn't look messy and brought some black spray paint to make it the same colour as our cloth around the frame work. The only foreseeable problem i could think of was the vise grip that the polly pipe was hot glued to then griped to the frame spiny handle thing would get in the way of the projection. But it would only be a small shadow and probably wouldn't matter.

I get to class This morning and find out that Tim cant figure out how to add the animal code and sounds to the activity code I've finished a while back. And it had been decided that the code i have been working on would no longer be used and we would use the 'percent of activity = percent blurred' code we were working early on. This made me a little annoyed since my part of the assignment had been pretty much tossed to one side the day before it was due and the thing i made yesterday useless. So i hoped to continue to finish the code i had started just incase Tim's way didnt work since that code is slightly less reliable hence me doing the code i did, i check online at umart for a 5m firewire cable so it would be long enough for the camera (because there was none to hire out). Saw they were in stock and went to umart to pick up my purchase, after 10mins in line they call my number only to find that they were really out of stock *sigh* so i gave up on making a back up plan for the code and hoped Tim could implement everything in time for class tomorrow.

At this late stage coding is really only a one person job so i went about trying to make myself useful in other ways. I typed up a few paragraphs for the poster that Jo is printing out and helped Jo do testing with the frame. Also i realised that the frame we had built it too large for the door, and window so that anything we did with the mirror and projector would have to be recreated once we take the frame apart and move it into the Lecture room. We didnt have much success filling the frame with the projection but after talking with bonney on the phone came up with some possible solutions which didn't overly work. So we are just gonna have the projection in a majority of the frame with some places being black. The code all works now with the animals and sounds so its just a matter of getting to class tomorrow and hoping that we get the frame, camera, projector and flash all working somewhere in the right direction.

Saturday, May 24, 2008

Last minute scrambles

Frame

On Tuesday I was told to bring $40 for the frame work that still needed to be built which I was still slightly against but as long as it got done I didn’t mind spending the money. I got to class on Tuesday to find that we still didn’t have the materials needed and that Tim, Jo, and I were going back to my train station to pick up my car and buy the materials. This would have been nice to know before class so I could have just driven to class and save us a lot of trouble. After getting back to class around 3pm my cold had got the best of me and I left Jo and Bonnie to construct the frame. Before going home though I went upstairs and procured a mac mini and eyesight (compute and webcam) for us to use over the coming week.

Coding

Tim was having trouble integrating the activity code in with the audio and video of the animals, so we organized to get together today (Saturday) and we got it working up to the point of adding the real images and audio which we are yet to obtain off other group members. In the absence of the necessary material to complete the coding we did user tests by mounting the camera and the approximate height that our mirror will be and pointing it on a downward angle to test if our theory worked.

Unfortunately for us it didn’t, it was reading peoples upper body movement as a person walking away and the blur jumped around randomly. Instead of recoding it another way we found that if we mounted the camera directly above the area we want people to walk through there is significantly less interference and will work for our final project. So tomorrow I am going to Bunnings to try and find some wood or metal material that we can use in a L shape to mount the camera above our user. We are meeting up on Monday to finish off the code and frame and with a lot of luck will have a working prototype for class on Tuesday.

Saturday, May 17, 2008

Code update

So I went to Uni on Thursday and gave the Web cam and code to Tim. I tested the code to see if it was having the same problems as I was at home and it was. The sound worked inside the FLA but not when u ran the .swf I thought maybe it didn't like mp3's so i changed it to .wav but still no luck. I then tried using the export button hoping their was more advanced setting but lucked out again. So will be asking for help in class on Tuesday.

Since I've done the code on the physical interactions Tim will be doing the coding on getting the different animals to come up.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

WORKING CODE!!!!

We met with dekker on tuesday after class and he got our blur filter to work, which we were very happy with. This left us with two ways of implementing our idea, work with the activity levels making the blur whci we got working on tuesday after dekker left but is unreliable and breaks easily when interacting with it. or try and get the activity lines to work.

On wednesday i met with nathan Hoad and through colaborating with him successfully implemented the Lines idea (which we had almost working for 3weeks except for the blur part) we also added volume control. So as it stands the picture frame image is blured with no sound, and as a person walks close and hits a new activity line the blue decreases and the volume increase to reveal the hide image and audio. then as you was away it returns to its previous state.

When i got home though the swf audio no longer worked, but when i ran the swf from inside the fla the audio worked which is a bit concerning. I am heading to class today to try it on the macs, because it was created on XP and my home PC is Vista, So im hoping its just vista being crap and works on xp and macs

Internet is also playing up at home so i will email everyone a copy when i get to class, Tim had been unable to fully work with the code from home because he hasnt got a webcam, so i've borrowed an old one from my house mate and am meeting him today to give it too him. I tried to find drivers for him but was unsuccessful, which is stupid considering its a known brand 'Logitech' and i was able to find, download and install drivers to make my eyetoy work as a webcam in 2mins. That is life anyway i'll keep you posted since we only have 2 weeks to go.

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Update since my last post.

Been awhile since my last post so I thought I’d better play catch up. I installed flash and had a play around with some code but didn’t come up with anything useful. Michael added me on msn later that night and sent me some code that proved our concept by blurring a picture based on how much activity was in frame, but it wasn’t what we were after for our interaction.

I organized at meeting with Nathan Hoad on the 4^th may to help me with the code. On the 2nd of May at midday I got a SMS saying we had a group meeting at 1pm. After a few confused SMS’s back and forth it was found that Julia thought Jo had SMS’d me and Tim and vise versa. I was at work at the time and unable to attend but they organized rolls for us for the presentation for the following Tuesday. Earlier in the week I said I was ok with doing the group task of the 100-200word write up by myself and that was the task I was given for the following week with Tim Jo and Julia doing a poster each.

On the Sunday I got together with Nathan and we started to work out how to do the coding. It was our original idea to take a percent of the image being taken up and convert that to a blur amount. I found out that the activity levels only really read movement from the edge of your body and not all of you so my way of thinking was impossible. What we did is set up a series of lines with each line having multiple activity hit points to capture the activity. As a person hit a new line the amount of blur would change. This was good in theory and we got the lines with hit point set up to the point of adding the blur. But it was getting late and we were unable to apply a working blur to our theory, but luckily we had the proof of concept blur FLA that Michael sent me earlier in the week.

We got together Tuesday morning at about 8am and worked on our presentation which looked good on paper but when it came to presenting came across very boring and am worried that our concept didn’t come through as well as we might have hoped. I organized with Dekker to send him my code so see if he can see why or our blur wasn’t working but as far as he could see the variable we set wasn’t returning a number and was unsure what we actually wanted to do with the code. So I told him to leave it and organized to meet him this Tuesday the 13^th to try and explain it better in person and hopefully get our blur working.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Class tues 22nd

Over the week I was asked to find a spotlight and get the white cotton cloth we needed for the backing of the picture frame. After a quick Google i found my nearest store, bought the cloth and brought it, a glue gun, stanley knife and staple gun to uni in preparation for finishing off the photo frame.

We went to class which started painfully late and afterwards i quickly went and got my swipe card needed to help in the workshop. The four of us all helped apply the cloth to the frame which took us a few hrs to staple and add supports so it wouldn't fall apart. I needed 15mins afterwards to meet up with some people and agreed to meet Tim in a lab to start work on some of the coding. When i got to the labs i couldn't find Tim and after a phone call, asking around if people have seen him and aimlessly going from lab to lab several times i gave up. I did find Michael though and got this details and will contact him tonight when he gets home to get that link for the fading code he mentioned a few weeks back.

Jo also bought a copy of flash CS3 so I've headed home to install that and try to grasp the code that has already been done and work on adding to it for the presentation next week.

Thursday Art Gallery

Visited the art gallery and during the week a group blog was created by Jo to show our progress. Both the findings of the art gallery and our group blog can be found at

http://bettathaneveryone.wordpress.com/

Class Tuesday 15th

We get to class on tuesday and sometime in the last day Tim has sent me the code that him and Michael did on the weekend, but i was unable to open it in Flash proffesional 8 because it said it was a unknow file format. I found out that it was because it was created in Flash CS3 and would not open in any version before it. So i am unable to look at the code and try and figure out how i can help future improve and add to the code. I said i can get a copy of CS3 in the coming week and then be able to start helping with the code. Michael also informs us of code he is aware of that makes a image blur similar to what we are looking for and said he will send us a link at some point.

At this point we were still using an eye toy as the camera so i bought a photo frame and eye toy into class to go with our presentation to show our concept, but found that with the code that they have done any camera can be used so we look at finding a small webcam instead. Julia has cut the wood to size for the frame and varnished it looking very snazzy.

group meeting friday 11th april

We met up at uni today to discuss how we were going to go about our project of the virtual mirror. We decided that we are going to go with the idea of a image that is blurry and the close you get the more clearer the image becomes.

It is decided that Jo and Julia will do the physical frame and Tim and I will do the coding, i offered to meet Tim tomorrow (saturday) to try and get motion sensing to work from the code i found at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/webcam_motion.html which has a step by step tutorial on how to do it. But Tim informs me he is meeting with Michael from our class tomorrow to look at code that he has already implemented in a similar fashion. I asked if he would like me to come with and he said it should be find and we would meet on Tuesday to go over the code. Julia and Jo were meeting on the weekend to go to bunnings to pick up material and I for the time had nothing to do.

Sunday, April 6, 2008

Group notes from Thursday

Notes from Group Meeting

Sections for Written Assignment

§ Background survey – Tyson (400+ words)

§ Audience – Tim (300+ words)

§ Experience – Tim (400+ words)

§ Constraints – Jo (400+ words)

§ Project Plan – Julia (500+ words)

o Milestones and deliverables

o Roles and responsibilities

Topics for Presentation:

§ Ideas for the mirror representations – Sketches. (JULIA)

§ Technology (JULIA)

§ How we think it will work – role pay .(TIM)

§ How it relates to the theme (TIM)

§ Target audience/ where it would be (TYSON)

§ We know it can be done because of other projects (TYSON)

§ Constraints (JO)

§ Our roles (JO)

Where it would be:

§ Homes

§ Art galleries

§ Public places, ie Queen Street Mall

Target Audience

§ People who use mirrors

§ Kids (for the cartoon reflection option)

§ Families

§ Art Students

Constraints

§ Time limit

§ Our knowledge in the technology we need to use, eg – coding.

§ The technology itself, eg – eye toy being able to do what we want it to.

Our Roles

§ Coders x 2 – Tyson and Tim

§ Graphic Designers – Jo/Julia (need to pick)

§ Flash – Tim

§ Physical Construction – Jo/Julia (need to pick)

Frame – made of wood. (Random)

Braingstorming on Tuesday

Technology

· Pressure pads

· Wiimotes

· Eyetoy

Ideas

Games

Throwing game light sensors

· Throw a ball at multiple targets on a screen

Virtual golf using wiimote

· Use the wiimote as the club and hit an invisible ball. LED lights light up the path the ball would have taken.

· Possible a 3D version to watch on screen.

· Problems with multiple putts?

· LEDs hard to do?

· Physics problems?

Dancing Game

· Make sensor mats for a DDR style game.

· Include wiimotes for hand gestures and foot movement.

Water fountain

· Only works when people walk by

Pictures

· Voice recognition that shows pictures of what you said

· Might have to narrow it down to a category of words

· Need big databases

Location

· Find items through tagging them with RFID , something with Bluetooth?

Virtual Mirror

· Different people

· Random people/characters

· Person in photo gets further away the closer you get to the picture, and moves forward the further back you get

o Problems with multiple people?

o Good theme/interesting to interact with

· Picture is black this you approach. The closer you get to the image the more it is revealed

· Two monitors cover the upper and low torso height and hung in front of a mirror. And a person walks by it changes their shirt and pants to a comic style bikini top and bottom, or kilt and police shirt.

o Problem with people being different heights

· 2D easier to do

· Work with Eyetoy

· Won’t be able to sense people turning around.

· Possibility of using hand gestures and body movement

Coding

o Flash

o Processing - maybe

Saturday, March 15, 2008

Physical computing

Introduction

This review is on accelerometers and theirs uses as a technology in physical computing. It will cover how they work, and the possible applications that it may have. We will also look at projects that are already out there and look at some of the technologies out there that are already using them.

About

An accelerometer is a device for measuring the acceleration and gravity it experiences. It uses 3 axis sensors to detect the magnitude and direction of the acceleration. This device can use one or several axis at the same time depending on what is needed. It can be used for sensing inclines, vibrations and shock giving it many applications. It is amazingly small at 4mx4mx1.5m, low power consumption, a 10,000g shock survival, and excellent temperature stability makes it very robust.

Current projects

Phones
There are several areas that are just exploring accelerometers the biggest being phones. Nokia, Ipod Touch, Sony Ericsson are all finding intuitive ways to incorporate them into their designs. Things from: Shaking you phone to open a SMS then shaking it again and it closing the message and locking your phone. Flipping the phone upside down to put a phone on silent and changing the angle of a picture based on which way you are holding it. Also there is an application that lets you shake the phone in various directions to scroll through menus and make selections.

Click here to watch Video

Nintendo

The second big industry taking advantage of accelerometers is Nintendo. Everyone has Seem the new will console that adds physics movement of the controls. This allows people to use real actions to on virtual games. They have created games that mimic real sports such as bowling, tennis and baseball. And replace typical button press actions like turning left and right or jumping into a movement of the controller. This has been the rebirth of Nintendo and a totally different direction than its competitors.

Safety

Car manufacturers use a type of accelerometer to sense when to deploy the air bags in cars. This is a example of the accelerometer being used on only one axis.

The Future

The games industry has nowhere to go but up with the introduction of accelerometers. This could be the technology used for mimicing human actions inside 3D simulated worlds, leaving behind game controls forever. The next hand held game could have more physical controls. 3D modeling using real movement from people, plants and animals. surgeries could be done with machines that mimic a surgeons hands;the possibilities are endless.