Whilst scoping out some AR libraries for a potential project I was playing around with IN2AR. The office was buzzing with Vivid so it got me wondering if I could use alpha video on an Opera House marker to catch a personal peak of Vivid from my desk!

This was the result:

IN2AR is a great library. Pros were the markers could be any picture, provided there was a good amount of detail and contrast. Many other solutions require a boarder also, even though I had one on my marker it is not required. Plus cropping part of the target still let the marker work very well. Only downside I found was attempting to use alpha video on a mobile device was too resource hungry and barely worked. A basic 3D piece of content did work fine though.

A fun project developed using AIR, Away3D and AIRKinect. The first part of this project that you don’t see is an iPad app developer by a colleague, you use it to either register to play or search for your name if you have previously registered. All this information is stored in a database. Once registered you are added to a queue and requested to step up to the game.

Watch the video to see the rest of the game play:

As you can see the game is gesture based and also detects when someone is in a “hot spot” or not so that if there is a crowd gathered there is no confusion as to who is controlling the game.

The game was set up in the office on a Friday afternoon and over a few drinks we had Spinifex folk battle against each other to see who was the trivia king!

Basically a revved up photo and video gallery with some parallax. But under the hood there is some cool stuff going on. (wow all this car lingo – this work is getting to me!).

All of our apps utilised ApplicationUpdater availible in AIR, this enebles us to upload an update to a servier and where-ever the application is, if it has an internet connection, it will download and update to the new version. Also implemented is our own assetsync server. This lets us upload new or changed content and once again have the application pull it down and use it.

5 developers developing 8 interactives! Great work!

The communication of the turntable and the app was built last auto season, this auto season I was given the project to update content and add new functionality.

With my progression in Unity I’m sticking to doing all my coding in C# where possible. With the flexibility of Unity being able to use any of its supported languages in the same project there were a few UnityScript classes, mostly for the OSC comms, I decided to port any non C# classes over to C# as a nice exercise in progressing my C# skills. This was pretty painless.

The concept for this project was that when standing at the right angle the real and virtual cars would line up, giving an illusion the car has been scanned. Unfortunately in the photos and videos this is not seen.

Worked closely with the 3D artist and a second Unity user who worked on some of the car animations.

Here is a screen capture of the application in action. There are 3 buttons on the fabrication to see the content section of “Clean”, “Safe” and “Fun”. Visitors to the interactive could watch a section in it’s entirety or change part way through. When complete an attractor would run that kept the car hidden.

Unity plugins I used in this project included NGUI (for most of the text on the screen) and AVProQuickTime (for smoother video playback and alpha video).

Here it is in use at the Los Angeles Autoshow. It was then used at other shows including Detroit and (I think) New York.

Very interesting project to work on that I learnt a lot using Unity. Looking forward to more Unity projects!

This was a big one. 12 x 55inch screens working together across 4 machines. Also included in the setup was another machine to act as a server and 4 Kinects used for detection of people moving towards the screens.

It is located in the new Tyree Energy Technology Building located at the University of New South Wales.

The 12 screens were divided into 4 sections. Vision, Innovation, Building and Informatics. Vision allowed visitors to select from a number of videos to watch, Innovation allowed visitors to find information on those people that worked in the department and links to their projects, Building gave visitors the chance to see unique and special features of the building and Informatics displayed data collected by systems monitoring the building.

As a nice organic touch a flow field and partical emitter were used to create the inactive state. This disappears when the Kinects are triggered by someone coming close to the screen.

Essentially the application was built as 1 that could be switched into any of the 4 sections making for simpler development and a simpler deployment.

Each screen was built to fill the 3240 x 1920 resolution from the 3 HD screens – that gives a total over 4 screens a resolution of 12960 x 1920! Biggest AIR app ever?

Also what had to happen was for all 3 screens’ touchscreen responses to be seen on the 1 computer they were connected to. Lots of drivers and lots of hair pulling finally had this working.

The application pulls data from from too many servers, services and APIs to mention!

Here it is in action:

big long project that many people had a hand in to produce this one-of-a-kind interactive.

The concept of this interactive was visitors would be presented a name-tag when they arrived at the venue, once they then entered the seating area they would be greeted with their name on the big screen and a custom welcome message would also wrap around the room for them.

The name-tags that were given had a RFID chip in them, when the person then walked past 1 of 2 RFID sensors the information was relayed to an application that retrieved personal information of that person. This information was then sent to my application and displayed.

The display setup was an interesting one. 2 massive LED screens and 2 projectors – 2 computers were used 1 screen and 1 projector coming from each. There was a 5th screen that was a video that had the Motorola logo in it that I was not in control of. A 3rd machine was used for the application receiving the RFID message and sending information out to my application.

The machines and my makeshift work area:

Some of the functionality that needed to be thought out was how to deal with groups of people entering at once and what to do if someone was lingering near the sensors too much or too often. Also developing the outputs to different resolutions and making them all line up given the differing resolutions and pitch between the screens and projectors.

Communication between the machines was achieved using so using Socket and ServerSocket and data was passed by JSON.

The flow of data worked like this. The RFID sensor was triggered, an application received this and gathered the data associated. Data was then passed to the “parent” display that converted the data to a visual display and monitored it travelling across the 1st projection screen. When it hit the end of the first projection screen the visual was then recreated for the 1st LED display and monitored until it hit the end of that screen. The data was then packaged and sent to the “child” display. Here the data again was then converted to display on the 2nd LED and then 2nd projector.

One of the sensors used:

Here it is in action with people walking in add triggering the action.

Was a great experience working on this project. I was in Los Angeles for 3 weeks to dev it with a backend developer and a designer and then in New York for 5 days to set it up.

Staring at the word Motorola must have had some sub-concious effect on me… as I actually bought the RAZR HD months later!

The interactive was to display floating markers over relevant locations on a live video feed as seen in this demo:

I wanted to make it simple for anyone to set up once on location. Positioning the markers at the right location was only going to be possible once the actual live video was running onsite. To solve this issue I added a config mode so that the marker could be turned on or off with a double click and positioned by dragging them on the screen – this was all possible with the touchscreen so configuration or adjustments could be made without having to have access to a keyboard or mouse.

Config mode in action.

And here are screenshots taken from the actual machines via Teamviewer.

It was a fun and simple to use interactive that was great to build.

Spinifex was involved in bring Cadman’s Cottage to life for the Vivid Festival 2012 in Sydney. There were 4 components for the installation. Several small touch tables were set-up with an existing website interactive, a video projection was projected onto the building next to Cadman’s Cottage, an interactive projection was projected onto Cadman’s Cottage and finally, the part I developed, a 50″ touchtable that controlled the interactive projection.

The touchtable was developed in AIR and used a multi-touch touchfoil which then used the native AS3 multitouch features.

The role of the touchtable was to act as a filter for the data being projected on Cadman’s Cottage. The data was the Census data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Data to be filtered was grouped into 4 categories. “Age & Gender”, “Country of Birth”, “Transport to Work” and “Occupation”. These then had to be filtered down to a given post code – so there was a mountain of data to filter.

All data was provided in several csv files so I thought this was an opportune time to see how good AIR’s support of SQLite databases could be. And it did well! In a future post I will outline the basics in how to do this.

The postcode data came with latitude and longitude values which then with some additional code, plugged them into the Delaunay triangulation library mentioned in an earlier post. Out popped a very interesting looking map of Australia.

Triangulation of Australian Postcodes… (much bigger on a 50″ screen!)

With how AS3 deals with it’s y co-ordinate’s and how latitude is set, my map of Australia was upside down, but normalising these values did the trick to set it right.

Once again touchfoils were disappointing, not giving the accuracy that was needed. Hopefully all involved learnt their lesson and we can find a better solution for an outdoor touchscreen in the future.

But overall, in the freezing cold, sometimes rain and last second changes, my first Vivid Festival project was very enjoyable.

ABS Come to your Census from Spinifex Group on Vimeo.

JK.

Combining Unity, Kinect and Touchscreen Technologies to form a fun concept game for all.

Speeches, food, drinks and interactives!

Spinifex had a strong showing at the ConnectivityLab held at the Sydney Opera House. 4 interactives were on display including the recently successful Magnum Infinity campaign.

I developed a simple fun game for people to pit their skills against each other and attempt to get the highest score on the leader board to win a prize.

The concept was to bounce tennis balls on a racket as many times as you could, you had 3 lives and a maximum of 3 balls would appear depending how well the player was doing. If you made the list of top scorers you were then prompted for your details, leaving you name there for all to see – just like an old-school arcade game. Once a player was detected they would control a virtual tennis racket with their hand and bounce the falling balls.

From a simple concept came multiple technologies combining to form this interactive. To track the player the Kinect was used with the ZigFu library and was then build in Unity and all it’s great inbuilt physics. The touch interactivity used a touchfoil… I’m not a fan of touchfoils due to my perceived flackiness/sensitivity, some people struggle with using them, others are fine, but overall I think there are better solutions.

It’s alway great to see people playing with your projects, I was impressed with the Kinect being able to detect the correct person to be the player when a crowd was standing around it. Seeing people’s competitiveness come out was great with many people playing the game over and over.

Overall I was very pleased with how the concept piece turned out and think people were engaged with it and had fun.

Here is a video from Spinifex that shows it and others created by Spinifex in action.

JK.

(Drag you mouse over the example and click to switch between Delaunay and Voronoi)

A recent project required thousands of points to be displayed and lines connecting them all. A colleague then introduced me to Delaunay triangulation.

I started searching around for any libraries that had been build that used Delaunay. I cam across a few and after some testing found that as3delaunay was exactly what I needed.

The library also allows for drawing Voronoi diagrams also.

I found it rather hard to find a basic example so here is some code to get you started:

package com.kafkaris.delaunaydemo {
	import com.nodename.Delaunay.Voronoi;
	import com.nodename.geom.LineSegment;

	import flash.display.Sprite;
	import flash.events.Event;
	import flash.geom.Point;
	import flash.geom.Rectangle;

	public class Example extends Sprite {
		private var _points:Vector.<Point>;
		private var _plotBounds:Rectangle;
		private var _voronoi:Voronoi;
		private var _segments:Vector.<LineSegment>;

		public function Example() {
			if (stage) init();
			else addEventListener(Event.ADDED_TO_STAGE, init);
		}

		private function init(event:Event = null):void {
			_points = new Vector.<Point>();

			for (var i:uint = 0; i < 50; i++) {
				var point:Point = new Point(Math.random() * stage.stageWidth, Math.random() * stage.stageHeight);
				_points.push(point);
			}

			_plotBounds = new Rectangle(0, 0, stage.stageWidth, stage.stageHeight);
			_voronoi = new Voronoi(_points, null, _plotBounds);

			_segments = _voronoi.delaunayTriangulation();

			for each (var segment:LineSegment in _segments) {
				graphics.lineStyle(2, 0x000000, 1);
				graphics.moveTo(segment.p0.x, segment.p0.y);
				graphics.lineTo(segment.p1.x, segment.p1.y);
			}
		}
	}
}

If you want to use this example to draw a Voronoi diagram instead, swap this line:

_segments = _voronoi.delaunayTriangulation();

with this line:

_segments = _voronoi.voronoiDiagram();

Really enjoyed using this library, a good one to keep in mind for data visualisations.

JK