Tattoo AR

I’ve often thought about having a tattoo. Apart from the pain, the reason I’ve never got one is because what if after a year or two I don’t like it anymore. Yes you can have them removed these days but then there’s the added expense as well as scar tissue. So I’ve been toying with the idea of having some kind of augmented realty tattoo. Something that I could change on a whim or maybe for a giggle. Well, I think I’m now at the point where I can show the world the project. I’ve had a bar code tattooed on my right arm and using Processing I can scan it and display pretty much anything I want. so far I’m just displaying phrases. Obviously over time it will fade and hopefully I might get a bit of a tan but I can cater for that in the code.


Jam & Hack

I went and took part in the Jam & Hack recently held as part of Digital Shoreditch. The event was held at Google Campus in London and was sponsored by Cadbury. Cadbury is one of the official sponsors of the 2012 Olympics so consequently the object of the exercise was to design a mobile app based on the Olympics. But that was not all, it had to include social media and as Samsung are also one of the sponsors of the Olympics, it had to run on Android devices. Obviously being in Google and their ‘connection’ with Android was purely coincidental 🙂 We were given loads of Cadbury related assets such as RGB values of their corporate colours and images as well as free food and drinks. Most of the free food was chocolate and after a couple of hours I had had enough – even with my love of Dairy Milk.

I decided to use Twitter and make a relay race. Players would register in advance using their Twitter ids and then added to a team. The “baton” would be a trend that was passed between players and the app would control who had the baton, who it would need to be passed on to and pass all of this data onto Twitter so people could follow the race. The GPS coordinates of the handover would be logged so that there could be a prize for the longest route as for the quickest time to get from the 1st player to the last. I called it the Joyville Relay after Cadbury’s recent advertising campaign. I also used Phonegap. Whilst it looks a really good tool, I wanted to see if it was good enough to build a robust product. And, I think it’s fair to say that it is. Passing data to a MySQL database, the visuals, everything performed just as I would have expected if I had written it as a native Android app. So I am very impressed. I got most of it completed but I had to bail out early as I was concerned about driving the 4 hours home. All that was left to do was to sort out the player registration and it was good to go. Below are some screenshots of the game.

Joyville Relay Joyville Relay

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