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