Electronics lesson
Posted: 16 November 2006 Filed under: Sound, Undergrad | Tags: sound, Undergrad Leave a commentNot so much a lesson more a safety tutorial. Don’t hang your coat on the back of the chair, don’t touch the hot end of the soldering iron, never run with scissors – he didn’t mention that one but it’s still a top tip kids. We also got told about using the lab and how we can order more kit. At the end, we were given our goody bag of resistors, tilt switches and light sensors.
We went and tracked down Dan to have a quick chat about our sound applets. Gareth mentioned to me earlier in the week that he thought I might need an accelerometer coz I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to measure the tilt of my rainmaker but Dan had a solution using an array of tilt switches which will do the job – it’ll also save me a bit of money as well. He mentioned that we ought to look at Max first rather than get hung up over the front end which makes sense considering my first venture into MSP didn’t work and I couldn’t see why only to find out that it doesn’t like MP3 files – yet another top tip for you.
Methodology chat
Posted: 16 November 2006 Filed under: Space, Undergrad | Tags: space, Undergrad Leave a commentSpoke to Chris yesterday about our trip to the Torpoint ferry. Explained that I remember from years ago the guy who used to direct cars on and how they have to go in certain places otherwise the ferry would be gridlocked or maybe even tip up – that last bit could be a lie coz it was a relative who told me that when I was little. So, anyway, I saw that guy as the “playmaker”.
We chatted about him and Pele having a meta perspective, needing to see the bigger picture to be able to control it, about being outside of the group as well as participating at the same time. Could what they do be broken down into programming statements.
if (car ==0) {parkCar(row[1], position[0]);}
or maybe
if (time == 86 && rightBack[“actions”] == “running” && possession[“team”] == “Brazil”) {ballAction->stop; defender->dummy; ball->roll(“right”);}
Which is quite an interesting an idea. What if the way we travel thru’ time and space, what we do could be broken down into code. Chris mentioned granularity and what in maths is called frames. He also talked about clashes of resolution which at the time I thought I understood but now I’m not so sure. In the meantime, I think I’m gonna have to research my idea more and dig out some old matches. The 5-1 against Germany might be a good place to start.
Small update
Posted: 15 November 2006 Filed under: Final Year Project, Undergrad | Tags: Undergrad Leave a commentFollowing on from my meeting with Chris yesterday regarding changing the project to be mobile phone based and in so doing, use my “expertise” in this field, I’ve performed a little experiment with my daughter to see how she interacts with a mobile phone. I developed a game called BluPong for mobile phones last year and I sat down with her to try and get her to play it. Whilst the enthusiasm was there, the fine motor skills to control the bat with the small joystick or the numbers wasn’t. Next was to try and get her to take a picture with the inbuilt camera but again this was a bit of a failure as she just didn’t understand. Considering her language skills, texting was out of the question.
So next up was to see just how many children in the senior part of her school had mobile phones. Fortunately being friends with one of the TAs helped and after a quick phone call the figure is zero. Not one has a mobile phone and her comment seemed to back up my theory in that they just don’t know how to use them. If something that is phone based is the route I should take then it needs to be really easy to use, possibly even use speech (recognition and synthesis) as well as keeping to my core principles of cheap and tailorable. This is likely to be hard but then, isn’t the project meant to be?
Hmm
Posted: 14 November 2006 Filed under: Final Year Project, Undergrad | Tags: Undergrad Leave a commentChris has got me thinking again. It’s my own fault – top tip: don’t mention any extra curriculum work you’re doing at the start of a project meeting, glad I didn’t mention the mobile wallet thing! So I’m sorta back to square one. Do I work on the thing that I think I wanna work on, or do I work on a thing that everyone else thinks I’ve got the skills for? Answers on a postcard please. I think it’s a couple days of deep soul searching for me.
Animation and lighting tests
Posted: 10 November 2006 Filed under: 4D, Undergrad | Tags: 4D, Undergrad Leave a commentWe finally sussed how to get a scene to play in UT2004 instead of the preview screen which means all the little angled lines and stuff don’t show. We’ve also managed to animate a character and got him to run up some stairs. One of the problems with running a scene thru the game proper is that you now have to worry about lighting – no different from a real film studio I suppose but not something I’ve certainly never considered before. So it was back to the tutorials for a quick lesson on how to brighten up a scene. The first clip below is how the scene plays without extra lighting and the 2nd is with some lighting added.
Something else we’re gonna have to bear in mind is that there is a slight delay between starting the screen capture and Fraps actually capturing stuff coz you’ll notice that the Space Marine starts part way up the stairs. A delay added to the start of the scene would probably fix it
Animation test 1
Animation test 2
Quick chat
Posted: 10 November 2006 Filed under: Final Year Project, Undergrad | Tags: Undergrad Leave a commentHad a really good chat with Katina today about my project. Chris suggested I talk to her about it due to the work she’s doing with Infinite Infants. I ran thru my ideas, what I originally wanted to do, what I think I want to do now, pretty much everything I talked about with Chris in my first meeting. Collaborative play/working came up and researching to see if children with autism will do it more via computer than in the “real world”. This is brilliant, I never even considered that angle before. Kartina suggested a virtual room which they can colour as they want and do stuff in but with the ability to invite their friends in for a play. As one of the core values that I want to keep with the project is that “the thing” must be tailorable to fit the child, allowing them to decorate the room as they want definitely fits that. Something to bear in mind, as Katina said, the front end should be something that can run on a large touch screen as well as a monitor so everything needs to run off one-click.
This is all brilliant. Time to track down building virtual worlds.
Dorkbot Bristol
Posted: 10 November 2006 Filed under: Ramblings | Tags: bristol, dorkbot 1 CommentWent to the 2nd ever Dorkbot Bristol last night with Chelle and Jamie. The main event was a presentation given by Adam Nieman about Space Signpost. This essentially is a signpost for the Solar System. You select the planet of your choice and the sign moves to point where that heavenly body happens to be and tells you the distance to it on the led readout. This demanded a visit. After that was demos given by Carolyn Ryves, John Honiball and Tom Bugs. Carolyn showed us PedalPower which is a bike-powered generator and managed to blow up quite a large ballon. John showed us an led gadget that made sounds as you waved a wand around in the air and Tom demo’d his Drone Machine which was a box with switches and dials that made some crazy sounds.
After some nachos, we dressed up for the cold (I pulled my sleeves down) and headed off to find Millennium Square and the Space Signpost. This is a cool piece of kit and we probably could have played on it for hours if it wasn’t so cold. Unfortunately, it pointed in the wrong direction to do the Uranus gag which is probably just as well. After that, we made our way back to the car and drove all the way home.
Anyone who isn’t aware of Dorkbot, it’s described as “people doing strange things with electricity”. There’s been one in London for quite sometime so it’s nice that it’s finally hit the South West. If you like doing strange things with electricity or even just looking, they really are well worth a look.
Space walk
Posted: 9 November 2006 Filed under: Space, Undergrad | Tags: space, Undergrad Leave a commentHad our field trip on Wednesday to the Torpoint Ferry. Bit of a trip down memory lane for me coz I haven’t been on the ferry for years, probably not since before I moved to London. We were to document the space in conjunction with the choice of our spaceman. I won’t say what I concentrated on just yet but I got some nice footage of stuff both on and off the ferry. As “going off ferry” meant having to let it go off and leave me behind, Jamie and John got off as well to keep me company. So it seemed rude not to have a quick half in the Queens Arms whilst waiting for it to come back.
YouTube audio not playing
Posted: 9 November 2006 Filed under: Useful stuff | Tags: mac Leave a commentFor about a week or so, whenever I visit YouTube and play a video I can’t hear the soundtrack. I’ve unplugged & powered off my speakers, tried headphones but still no good. A quick trawl of the net and all the fixes seemed to suggest dumping the contents of ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia which did nothing other than stop Flash stuff from playing. But this little trick seemed to do the, um, trick.
Open up “Audio MIDI Setup” which is in your Utilities folder and set the Output Format (in the bottom right corner) to 44100.0Hz. You might need to change the source as well but that’s all I needed to do and now I can listen to Star Guitar in all it’s glory.
DS wireless VJ controller
Posted: 9 November 2006 Filed under: Ramblings | Tags: nintendo, vj 1 CommentThis is really cool project using a Nintendo DS as a wireless VJ controller. Have a look at the Quicktime video but if it’s something you’re interested in, check out their website coz there’s links to the hardware and software they used and one of the sites has some tutorials.