My Thesis - Week 7

I've gotten to week 7 and this video is what I've to show for it. Please keep up to date with my thesis development here.

EyeStop by MIT's SENSEable Lab

How fantastic looking is this? This is a smart bus stop designed by the SENSEable Lab at MIT. The bus stop and information point provide a touch screen interface to access real-time information on desired routes, bus or public transport whereabout.



The bus stops and info points are going to be tested in Florence, Italy from this October. I'll be eager to see if these devices can combine aesthetic and functionality...and not be vanalised in the process. I really hope it works out because their concept work is gorgeous and their purpose is great.

The article from CNET can be read here.

NuFormer - 3D Urban Mapping

Projection on Buildings from NuFormer Digital Media on Vimeo.

This is some great 3D mapping by Dutch studio NuFormer. I came across this via Smashing Magazine and DivineCaroline. Could this kind of stuff become a permanent architectural component?

My Dissertation Progress!

You can track my dissertation progress here...

Dvein's F5 Teaser

Dvein: F5 Titles from F5 on Vimeo.

This is an incredible animation by Barcelona based DVein for the F5: Refresh, a creative gathering that took place in New York City on the 16th and 17th Arpil. DVein are also responsible for the visuals to Diesel's Liquid Space fashion show back in 2006. This is really amazing stuff.

TWEAK 2009

Hi everyone,
Limerick based interactive art and electronic music festival, TWEAK, is getting its second outting this September. You can follow the event on twitter here, the TWEAK facebook profile is here, the TWEAK blog can be found here and the official website is this one here.

New Muses

Etienne de Crecy live visuals from 2008. I think these are absolutely stunning. They remind of work by architect Pablo Valbuena whose work I also love. His stuff can be seen here...

Here's a video of his work...

AR FOOSBALL 2009

This is my 3rd Augmented Reality assignment for IET. We had to build an AR system that used a vision system with another interaction device. I used the Nintendo Wii controller with Goblin XNA to create an AR version of the classic foosball game. The game uses the accelerometer in the Wii controller to accurately simulate the spinning motion needed to control the players in the traditional game. Directional buttons on the Wii are used to slide the player from side to side.

The game uses Goblin XNA for the AR and graphics. Goblin provides C# wrappers for AR SDK ARTag and Newton Game Dynamics. The game was developed in Visual Studio 2008 using XNA 3.0 with Goblin. The Wii library is written by Brian Peek and can be found here. I'll definitely look to develop this further, I think...

Real-time Rendering #6

This is the final assignment for our real-time rendering class for IET. We were given 3D Studio Max files of Trinity College Dublin's front square which we had to export from 3DS and import into XNA. From there we had to apply the textures, light maps and apply some of our own custom shaders to the model. My video displays various shader including phong, greyscale, dynamic shadows in a addition to the textures and light maps. The project was developed in 3DS MAX and exported using Kw-xport. The code development was done in Visual Studio using the XNA game studio in C#.

Real-time Rendering #5

This is the 5th lab of our realtime rendering module. We had to create a torus from first priciples by using a parametric equation which can be found here. The scene displays a textured torus with a phong shader under a spot light. The project was developed in Visual Studio 2005 with XNA Game Studio and NVidia's FX Composer.

Havok Moving On?

This is an article which appeared in the Irish Times on Friday, February 13th. John Collins reports on the possibility that Havok, a now Intel owned physics engine company spun out of Trinity College Dublin, might move their operations abroad "due to the lack of talented software engineers in the country". This is of particular interest to me as I'm currently studying a game development MSc in Trinity. Collins interviewed Havok CEO, David O’Meara, who had some rather scathing words about the standard of physics software developers in Ireland, and especially Trinity.

"If we want a smart economy, it is the top 5 per cent of graduates that create the knowledge – we have to be worried about them, not the average student. If you get less than 350 points in the Leaving Cert, I would question if you have the cognitive ability to do engineering at third level." - O'Meara

The Leaving Certificate entry points for Computer Science are floating around the 350 mark, which I believe is what O'Meara is referring to in this case. The article can be read here...but it makes for pretty grim reading...

Real-time Rendering #4

This is our Realtime Rendering Lab #4 where we had to implement Phong and Blinn-Phong illumination shaders. I used XNA Game Studio with C# Visual Studio for development with NVidia's FX Composer 2.5. The clip shows the simple Gouraud illumination model, which displays no specular lobe as the Phong model does. I display the Phong model before optimising it for Blinn-Phong which characteristically displays a larger specular lobe. The final shot is a comparison between the Phong model against the Blinn-Phong.

Real-time Rendering Lab #3

This is the third lab from our Real-time Rendering module. Our goal was to take the height map material we used for the last lab, and develop further to make height maps for an environment terrain. In this case, we generated height maps, but also textures for the mesh model. I used T2 Texture Generation to generate height maps and textures. I developed the scene using Microsoft's XNA and Visual C# in Visual Studio 2005.

Interactive Entertainment Technology - Realtime Rendering

This is my result for our second Real-time Rendering lab. We had to create a plane mesh of triangles before applying simple pixel and vertex shaders. The project completed using Microsoft's XNA in Visual Studio 2005 and the .fx effects files were created with nVidia's FX Composer. I used Cos/Sin functions to get the wave action and the colours are based on the vertices' position in 3D space.

Interactive Entertainment Technology - Augmented Reality

This is the fruit of my labours for our first Augmented Reality assignment. The pitch was to develop a system that could tell the height of an object from a fixed single camera. I created a small environment and took specific measurements to allow me create a mathematical function to allow me to accurately map pixel space to physical space. The results are pretty accurate, but there's one change I do want to make to it when I get a chance. The measurements on the bottom of the video are actually supposed to be (mm) and (mtrs) as opposed to (cms) and (cms). The system was created using OpenCV in Visual Studio 2005.

The Onion's report on Latest Apple Release...

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

This is quality


UPDATE:
This is even funnier...someone who thinks its an actual product?
http://i42.tinypic.com/2na4syh.jpg

Siggraph 2009 - Visual Music

2009's Siggraph conference will be held in New Orleans between 3-7th August. This year The Computer Animation Festival will exhibit a "Visual Music" collection which invites submissions from both individual film makers and collaborations to showcase their audio/visual concoctions. Music and visuals have gone hand in hand since the dawn of cinema (a live pianist or musician would actually accompany the recorded film). Now, with the digitisation of music into various formats, its possible to visually and graphically represent the music or sound. I'll be waiting eagerly to see what the outcome of it is...

The siggraph Visual Music url is here

Autodesk Marketing Seminar and Stereoscopy in General

So while I didn't get tickets to This Happened #6 (cos they were booked up within 120 seconds or something), I DID manage to attend an Autodesk marketing seminar held in Dublin's Morgan Hotel on Fleet St on November 27th. The seminar, titled "Create Animate Integrate - Dublin", was presented by 3 three autodesk staff showing off new Autodesk tools for 3DS Max and Maya, but also took the opportunity to show off Toxic, their new compositing tool. They also took time to discuss their acquisition of XSI Softimage, which has been debated to quite an extent (I don't think it is good for the industry, but if Avid were in difficulty, then its good news that XSI was acquired rather than discontinued).

The main features autodesk were showing off was the support of STEREOSCOPY effects in their main titles. This really tickled my fancy. It goes without saying that these new effects exceed those that you might remember from the red/green cardboard glasses you got with comic books when younger. Without getting into too much detail on the technicalities, the resutls are really, really great. Jeffrey Katzenberg (Dreamworks) spoke about 3D cinema being as big a break through as colour, and it might well be. I got to see Tim Burton's 'A Nightmare Before Christmas in 3D' before Christmas and the steroscopy effects enhanced it, though the changes weren't INCREDIBLE, but that's because it wasn't originally shot for 3D (it was only shot with one camera, not two). What DID look great were the trailers of Disney/Pixar's 'Bolt' and especially their 'Monsters Vs Aliens'. I'd love to get the chance to develop a 3d/stereoscopy installation or environment using projectors of multiple surfaces. With stereoscopy, I think a really incredible experience could be created...pity people don't happen to have 3D glasses in their breast pocket...

Sharpie and JCDecaux

I came across this interactive billboard on Design You Trust and the post was submitted by adamfuhrer.

The interactive billboard allows the general public to pick up a pen and contribute their own 'graffiti', or whatever it is you want to call it, to the billboard, leaving a (pseudo) permanent mark on the display. The user can choose whatever colour and compose whatever message they want to broadcast to passers by.

I really love this kinda thing. It's a nice simple technology that allows for public collaboration in a really light hearted manner, even Sharpie's choice of using the plaster cast on the poster is a master stroke. I'm really annoyed I didn't think of it first...

Keeping the same theme on public interaction and stuff, I came across CBS Outdoor Alive while I was in London recently. This is a really interesting concept as it's really related to my research topic that I'm going to be doing for my Masters thesis this year.

I'M BACK!

Hello and apologies for being away for so long. Things got a bit academically mental coming up to Christmas, so I had less time to peruse the web and post random and wonderful things I came past. When I actually get around to outputting openGL animations into quicktimes, I'll shtick them up here. In other less exciting news, I've updated my Linked In page and that can be accessed by here...

Anyway, there's a couple of things I can notify you about.