REDBLIND

Personally, I think the whole Augmented Reality thing is going to get played out real soon (if it hasn’t already). Which is why I’m glad I had the opportunity to build this before the huge wave of AR widgets, apps, and sites hits the masses. This landing page, startwithapencil.com, I built for McCann NY in support of the One Show.

I used FlarToolKit in conjunction with Papervision3D. On top of that, I created the foundation of a FlarToolKit wrapper that introduces stabilization to reduce jitter and access points to retrieve the the orientation of the FlarBaseNode. I also created a new DisplayObject3D class that gave me the ability to render the stream of gold. All of these will get their own blog post in the near future. For now, check out the site and you can check out the new code base in progress in my google code repo.

Looks like my fellow McCannite devs in Belgium beat us too it. If you want to try it out, download the QR code, then hit this page to launch the application. Good job guys.

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&#038;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:3faee485-d8a0-4fd3-89d1-deba76ffff04&#038;showPlaylist=true&#038;from=shared" target="_new" title="Sam showing Microsoft SQL Augmented reality - msftsqlar">Video: Sam showing Microsoft SQL Augmented reality - msftsqlar</a>

Today I spent some time playing with FLARToolKit, an AS3 port of the C based ARToolKit. If you have a webcam, launch the application, download and print this QR code PDF and place in front of your camera.

Flash AR Test from redblind on Vimeo.

I will post source once I clean it up.

Just installed Windows 7 Public Beta on my Macbook Pro (Core 2 Duo) via Bootcamp. Everything runs just fine (better than Vista) except for sound. Updating sound card drivers to Bootcamp 2.1 drivers did not help as one blog comment suggested. Here’s how to really fix it.

1. On your OSX Leopard install disc explore and find (do not run) /Drivers/RealTekSetup.exe
2. Right-click and select “Troubleshoot Compatability” then click “next”
3. Choose “The program Worked in earlier versions of windows”, click “next”
4. Choose “Windows Vista”, click “next”
5. The RealTek driver installer should then run, proceed as you would normally
6. Enjoy

7 is a lot snappier than Vista, but it’s still too much UI chrome for my tastes.

Finally got around to playing with some Processing. Here is my first go at it. It’s based on the included SpaceJunk OpenGL demo. It was written a little oddly (i thought anyway), so I tweaked it out and changed some of the way the cubes are positioned.

Just messing with Pixel3D in Papervision3D. 2000 particles randomly positioned in a virtual sphere that tween to another random position on the virtual sphere. No sphere primitive used. Just Pixels and Pixel3D.

This afternoon a few of my co-workers and I got a rare opportunity to tour Pixar Animation Studios. Big thanks to Ben Ramirez for hookin it up. Our tour guide was Randy Nelson, Dean of Pixar University (Interestingly, he is a former developer for NeXT Computer Inc. according to LinkedIn). To say the least we were all very impressed with not only the facility, but Pixar’s work flow and philosophy. Here are a few highlights of what Randy had to say about Pixar and how they work.

• The Hardest part of what Pixar does is finishing a project with one set of finger prints (one vision) that is worked on by teams of people. Getting individuals to work in teams and getting team players to be individuals.
• There is no bad idea. There are only ideas that match and don’t match the creative concept. Ideas that don’t match go into a pile to be used at another time or to be re introduced as the project evolves.
• Criticize work in front of everyone in an environment where people are physically facing the work on a screen. There should be no secrets. What you say to one person should be heard by all.
• Criticize the work, not the person. The person may be really talented, but the direction of the work could be totally wrong.
• Look at your work from an outsiders perspective. It’s easy to look at work from a experts point of view, but opinions from someone that doesn’t know how to do what you do are even more valuable.
• Extra, not excess, makes an enjoyable and friendly environment. If you do not offer enough resources, people will hoard and not share. If you offer excess resources, people will take it for granted and not take advantage of it. If you offer just a bit extra, people will share and be willing to contribute their own time and resources.
• A third of the creative process is in concepting. Two thirds are in the implementation. The back in forth interaction between the directors and the implementors is where most of the creative process is.
• “Plus” each others work. Let others now what they can do to bring it to the next level. This is an idea from Walt Disney (the person).

 Testing out mapping a panoramic image to the inside of a cylinder.

Source available here.

Panoramic image by the amazing artist Mario Doucet at dusso.com.

I’ve added a simple Trig class to RedLib. Provides easy access to common trig calculations for use in AS3.

• Calculate Distance between two objects.
• Calculate angle of an object reletive to another. Useful for pointing a MovieClip at another MovieClip.
• Convert radians to degrees and degrees to radians.
• Calculate X and Y coordinates given a distance and radius from an Object.
• More to be added.

Source available in Google code here.

Update: Looks like some dude, Sekati, has a Trig class almost identical to this one. Check it out on google code. The rest of his library is pretty snazzy, too. On a side note, even though you may end up using an existing library, it’s always to good to try it yourself first. You learn more that way.

For a while now I’ve been thinking about the barriers preventing me from doing cooler, more awesome visuals and interactions. I’ve come to the conclusion that what is missing is rudimentary trigonomic and geometric principles in my development approaches. So, I am going to do  something about that.

My first step is to conjure up all those things I learned (or should have learned) in high school/early college that I thought I would never use again in my life. I started with these two:

1. The Pythagorean Theorem
2. The Law of Cosines
   

Using these you can easily find distances between two DisplayObjects and the degrees to rotate a DisplayObject to point at another DisplayObejct. Basically you are creating imaginary triangles and using math/code to get the properties of that triangle.

Here is what I came up with. The triangle (movable by keyboard) will always point at the reticle/crosshair (which follows the cursor). Click to shoot. I now have the beginings of a Geometry Wars style game. Next step is collision detection and then fractals.