Cooking Glasses…

Finaly finished!

After a couple of hectic days editing video and transfering to flash and getting the sound to sync properly the project is all but done.

All thats left is the presentation tomorrow.

The final design is similar to my oraginal design. There are some majour changes however.

The final design takes up less space leaving more room for the user to see the world as it really is (important when in a kitchen as there are many dangers). Where the original design had 2 boxes of information the final design reduces this to one box. The colour scheme of the box has also changed with a slight reduction in the amouth of information displayed at once. I decided to reduce this as there is no realy need for the user to know what they have already done.

I also changed the design of the lines and pointers used. They are now much easyer to see and understand.

Filming Finished…

So I got the filming I needed done over Easter. I got my girlfriend to make her speciality, leek and potato soup.

How ever I did run in to a few rather large problems. 1st of all the video camera I was using was crap. I mean really crap. And very old. But it did the job. For a wile. Then the battery exploded. I say exploded it just hissed and sparked and wouldn’t work any more.

So I managed to scrounge a second camera. It Had a much better video quality. How ever it didn’t have a battery. Luckily I managed to find a mains adapter that fitted it.

Another problem I encountered was that my girlfriends pet cockatiels wouldn’t shut up. There normally really quite but i guess they knew i wanted silence so made as much noise as they could.

So my final video was filled on 2 different cameras with very different quality and with some really noisy birds in the background.

FANTASTIC!

More On AR…

Over the weekend I took a picture of me cutting up a pepper. I then overlayed a mock up of the HUD that the glasses would show. Hopefully this will give you a better idea on what Im talking about.

One thing to note is that this is not the final view. This is just a very quick mock up.

AR Project proposal…

So this project is all about Argumented Reality, when the physical and digital world collide. After looking at many of the examples Vlad gave us I first wanted to do a video in witch 3D is mixed with traditional video. How ever I’m not very confident with video editing and haven’t used 3D soft ware since the CAD software we used in college. I decided that I didn’t want to take on to much and them mess every thing up.

Ive decided to make a video showing a form of AR in the kitchen. My video will be about a totally made up product. It its a pair of glasses that when the user puts them on, the glasses overlay a virtual HUD over what the user sees.

OK that’s a poor explanation, maybe looking at this video will help. This is the kind of thing I plan on doing, but for a kitchen not a garage.

My idea is very similar to a Nintendo DS game called Cooking Mama. In this the player must cook a recipe following ‘Mama’s’ instructions. The instructions are overlayed pictures of the food. Click Here Here and Here for examples.

However as my ‘glasses’ are for total beginners at cooking, they will feature lots of details, such as telling the user what they need for each task, be it a bread knife, chopping knife or whisk. They will also feature Voice commands to help make the process easier.

Update…

right so just so you know whats going on…

iDAT 205 project/presentation… DONE

iDAT 206 project… due Monday… putting it all together

iDAT 204 killer app project/presentation… due next Friday… only just started but should be finished on time easily

Database project/presentation… due Thursday… got the basics working, just need ot apply it to our shop/website

Java project… due 1st week back after christmas… looked through the breif and then realised i wont have time to even start this until Christmas but it didnt look to hard so should be ok

right i think thats about it…

Killing the killer idea…

Right so after Vlad saying our 1st idea was useless we went back to the drawing board. I came up with the idea of making a sort of search engine that searches just SWF files (SWF files being the result of publishing a Flash document).

But more than just searching for SWF file, the system would search through the files for individual scenes or movie clips etc. For example, the user searches for “red car”. Then the search engine come back not only with flash files with red and car in the title but, say, files that contain a red car.

So from here ive started looking at a wide range of conventional search engines so we could get a good idea of how to design ours so that it is easily usable by every day people. So far there all prity much the same, a big text box and a search button in the middle of the page. Yet with this simplicity there is still a big diffrence, some simply look nicer than others. In my opinion ask.com is the best looking, so will will proberly use this a a basic template of our aplication.

Well im off to draw up a couple of designs for the app.

Killer ideas…

Well ive been to 3 of Vlads lectures now. Ive learnt a lot about XML and how to add it in to Flash. So its good on that side.

Bad thing is i havnt got a clue what he is on about when he talks about the semantic web. I know hes written loads of books on it, so he does know what hes goin on about, when i look it up on the net every other website says its a diffrent thing.

So anyways when he came round asking our group (im with chris again) what out ‘killer idea’ was we gave him our idea. it involved a sort of add on to a mobile phone of sat nav. basicaly it uses a GPS device to find your current possition and tell you where the nearest petrol station is (its ment ot be used in a car) or where the cheepest station is. he said that the idea was total rubbish because it can be done.

Yes our idea is crap because we could make it happen.

so we asked him to explain again exactly what we have to do. he said we have to use the semantic web and come up with an idea that is impossable witht eh current version of the web but possable with semantic web. Eh? come up with an idea that cant be done? yeah not really sure about that….

And were finished…

Well its been over a week since my last post and we have done a lot. We just about worked out how to get the PHP working properly on PC’s. Turns out the local host is a place on the hard drive. so after placing the PHP there and a bit of tweaking different things we got it working.

 So for the presentation we wanted to use a mac cuase the BlueTooth on there is better than on pc’s (pcs have a weired protection thing so you have to tell the pc to connect to each device one at a time and then tell it where to place the file where on a mac you can just tell it to auto accept any device and place it in a folder automatically.

But no, cause we need to install a program called xampp to enable the computer to use PHP we cant do that on the mac’s cause of security restrictions (we can install anything we want on pc’s (whats up with that???)). So we tyred to get a technician to install it on a mac for us but it didn’t happen.

So after spending days trying to get it to work with a mac it wasn’t going to happen, so we had to just tell to computer to accept each pic one at a time, and with 70 odd spaces for pics, it would take nearly an hour to fill our ‘human’. So we added some pictures that we had made in advance so we could demonstrate how it should look.

I think the presentation (2nd time round) went well (we couldn’t do it the 1st time casue we didn’t find out about not being able to install xampp on macs until 20 mins before the presentations and for some reason it wouldnt work when we transfered the application to chris speeds mac book). People seamed to like it, and some said it was interesting.

So yeah that’s that…

Next project!!!

PHP problems…

Right well after getting the picture working we desided to make lots of pictures work. Easy! Then we arranged them in the shape of a body. its really starting to take shape. then we realised that we were having to type the names in ActionScript to make the pics desplay. when people are going to be bluetoothing the pc, were not going to be able to change our script to make it work.

 so we need to change the filenames to match the script, or get the filenames and load them in to flash.

 changing lots of names at once is easy, there are tons of programs you can download to do it. only thing is that we would have to keep doing it as more pics are bluetootheed in and we just want to sit there and watch it work and not have to do anything.

so that means sending the filenames to flash.

 for this were goin to use PHP. never used it before, not really sure what were doing. so far we have a PHP script that should work. we just need to figgure out where to place it. and this is where were stuck.

we also have some ActionScript that should work with the PHP to get the filenames. from there we can easily make random pics appear on screen. but we can test it out untill we figgure out where exactily we put this PHP script on our pc.

 did i mention that this time next week we would have already have finished out presentation? its not looking good……   :(

loadMovie()…

Thats what i was told to use when I asked on a forum where I should start with this project (see last iDAT 204 post).

I had head of it before, but didn’t have have a clue what it did (other than load a movie, duh) or how to use it. After reading the sites i was given links to i was still kinda confused. So a quick google later and I came across:

http://www.verticalmoon.com/tutorials/swfnslide/loadmovie/loadmovie.htm

Nice simple explanation of exactly what i need to do. Now having read that I understand the really complicated stuff the other people sent me to. Its easy when you know how!

So Ive got a very basic .swf file loading a Pict. Not even worth showing you casue it really is just a pic on a white background. So next step is to get it to load the same pic lots of times randomly. Should be easy enough, just a couple of loops and an array or 2.

The hard bit is going to make it choose a random picture. Well we can bother with that when we get that far…

Rite now Ive gotter get some dinner