v3ga » Tech http://v3ga.net/blog Bits and Blobs Thu, 14 Apr 2011 19:55:05 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Oh wii http://v3ga.net/blog/2007/12/oh-wii/ http://v3ga.net/blog/2007/12/oh-wii/#comments Mon, 24 Dec 2007 00:34:15 +0000 v3ga http://v3ga.net/blog/2007/12/oh-wii/ All of the wii experiments I saw in the past few months were based on the built-in accelerometer: shake, move and create responding visuals. But did you know that it also had infrared camera with hardware blob tracking? Well I didn’t and just discovered it tonight on the website of Johnny Chung Lee where stunning and flawless applications are shown including fingers tracking, multi-points interactive whiteboard and the impressive head tracking desktop VR.
Also be sure to check his thesis work on projection displays !

Via Hack-a-day

]]> http://v3ga.net/blog/2007/12/oh-wii/feed/ 1 Back from Paris http://v3ga.net/blog/2007/04/back-from-paris/ http://v3ga.net/blog/2007/04/back-from-paris/#comments Tue, 10 Apr 2007 20:59:16 +0000 v3ga http://v3ga.net/blog/2007/04/back-from-paris/ I just came back from Paris where I animated a second Processing workshop there. It went super well again, thanks to Craslab (cheers Agnès and Jean-Noël) and all the participants who were strongly motivated to learn and code. Cheers to them too ! As usual, two days were damn too short, but I have the feeling that when you do something you like with people positively interacting, time goes fast no matter what you do.

Breakpoint 2007 logo
When I get back to home, a mail from my friend Kss was waiting for me in my inbox. He was very enthusiastic about released products at Breakpoint 2007, a famous demoparty held in Germany. So I comfortably sat down, typed www.pouet.net in my favourite browser and started downloading the products from the usual suspects, with a first surprise seeing old-timers popular crews like Andromeda, Equinox or Rebels among teams which released a demo there. I always thought that a good demo was a demo making you wonder “How the hell did they do THAT ? Which TRICK did they use?” and then making you freak out. That exact feeling happened first when I saw The Cuddly Demos on my Atari ST. And it happened again yesterday while watching Farbrausch “Debris”. That is totally impressive in every aspects. I won’t spoil here, but the main effect of the demo is insane. And best of all, the program is only 180 kb. An instant classic which is already and undoubtedly part of demomaking history.
Two other demos worth being mentionned are the megacool intro invit “Frameskool” by Equinox, which contains lovely shadowed vectorballs as well as tons of revamped oldschool effects (scrolling, stars, text-writer, distorted rotozoom :-) ) and a catchy chiptune by 4mat, a well known musician from Amiga. All in 64 kb of course. Andromeda struck hard too with their “Noumenon”, including an amazing kind-of-infinite-3D trip and shiny glowing effects.
Though, Windows broke the experience. In the middle of Andromeda, a window popped up telling me I had to install updates right NOW. It made the demo crash and didn’t restore the default resolution of my screen. I was really impressed. How the hell did they do that ?

]]> http://v3ga.net/blog/2007/04/back-from-paris/feed/ 3 Pomme d’amour http://v3ga.net/blog/2006/12/pomme-damour/ http://v3ga.net/blog/2006/12/pomme-damour/#comments Thu, 07 Dec 2006 22:27:55 +0000 v3ga http://v3ga.net/blog/2006/12/pomme-damour/ MacBookPro with Processing

So this is it. I finally got my hands on a brand new MacBookPro notebook, being my first Macintosh computer I have ever owned. The switch from PC/Windows was less difficult than I first thought, though I am still feeling a bit uncomfortable with the keyboard and shortcuts (” Where the hell are the ‘{}’ chars ? “). Of course, this is very little pain compared to the difficulties I have been encountering for some time now with my slowly-dying three years old laptop : broken keyboard and dvd device, usb ports switching on an off randomly, unbearable fan noise and heat, degrading Windows operating system, and on and on … Anyway, I installed BootCamp, so I am still able to develop Windows applications which was very important for continuing developping VisionFactory on that platform.

I brought it to the second Processing workshop I animated in Craslab (Paris) last week-end. It went super well, again with lovely participants and organizers. Cheers to them ! For the occasion, I had coded a very little application based on Dan Shiffman SMS library and directly inspired from his particles example. It’s basic and brute force codeing, but still it is fun. By the way, it produced small Oooohs and Aaaahs when I showed it to the workshop audience, guess it was time to show how to install and use libraries in Processing.


Download source code.

Photo and video were shot by Mike, who just released his new website yesterday, exposing his masterpiece paintings.

]]> http://v3ga.net/blog/2006/12/pomme-damour/feed/ 10 Human computation http://v3ga.net/blog/2006/10/human-computation/ http://v3ga.net/blog/2006/10/human-computation/#comments Wed, 25 Oct 2006 20:55:27 +0000 v3ga http://v3ga.net/blog/2006/10/human-computation/ I was randomly browsing the web when I came across this video. This is a very dynamic and funny talk given by Luis von Ahn showing how the processing power of a human brain can be used to improve image search on the web by playing fun games (ESP game and Peekaboom).

This brilliant idea is currently used in Google image labeler.

]]> http://v3ga.net/blog/2006/10/human-computation/feed/ 1 Sketching 2d rigid body physics http://v3ga.net/blog/2006/10/sketching-2d-rigid-body-physics/ http://v3ga.net/blog/2006/10/sketching-2d-rigid-body-physics/#comments Sun, 15 Oct 2006 14:25:56 +0000 v3ga http://v3ga.net/blog/2006/10/sketching-2d-rigid-body-physics/ If only my college lessons had looked like this !

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