Minivegas is my new home. What’s the story? Well, let me tell you.

Around April, Minivegas asked me to develop a interactive piece for Heineken that would allow people to draw light onto a mirrored screen using their body.

To work on this project i traveled to Minivegas studios in Amsterdam. Better to work on site than remotely i think. I have to say, it was a good idea but i am not used to be surrounded by people anymore while focusing on work. I did ok. We did ok. I had to do some over night time just before the client’s visit to watch our first draft of the piece. We went through a lot of reviews concerning the features to be implemented, alot were rejected and we ended up with using things like basic polylines defining a streak. Ofcourse there’s more than that, but we can say that is basically the core.
After 2 weeks things were looking better but we had some major problems with the interaction. Kinect is no miracle-maker, and we learnt that the hard way. Long story short, during my flight back to Portugal i fixed the major problems of new user entering the interaction area. Why? Well, I was alone. Don’t take me wrong, i’m not saying being a lone ranger is a good thing, but sometimes having time on your own takes you where you need to go.

“What exactly are you trying to say?” – Well, nothing really. Just telling a story.

After getting that annoying bug fixed we were able to focus on the rest of the application. Visuals, features, etc. It was awesome, but i was back home and working over skype and email. That was a bit annoying after 2 weeks with the guys over Minivegas. I missed that, but only when i got back. Yeah, i know what you’re thinking.

Anyway, the time was to travel to Milan, and what did i find? The bug that i had fixed before actually was just taking a break. He came back! And stronger. I started to panic. No, not really, but i wasn’t calm. Anyway i ended up working on the application until the doors opened while drinking some beer to release some steam. And there it was, the VIPs were flocking around the screen, really! They started playing around and having fun, i was having fun!

Maybe you’re asking yourself. What about that bug you were talking about? I want to know. Well it was there, i can tell you that, but i guess it was a nice bug and turned out it did not ruin the party, the amount of people did, but everyone was drunk and there was very little space for anyone to do anything. It was fun!

Oh yeah! Minivegas was looking for a interactive developer/creative technologist/programmer and they asked me. I said yes, and I fixed the bug later.

So, this is Goodbye to Coimbra, Hello to Amsterdam.

Let’s see what the future has for me. Hopefully, it’s dynamic.

“Light streaks” is an application created by Minivegas for Heineken, part of their new STR bottle launch party´s creation.

This application runs on top of a kinect device and its skeleton tracking capabilities. Using this technology, the user is able to draw virtual light streaks in 3d space on using their hands. The user is also able to trigger several animations by adapting different poses e.g. the star pose. Another cool feature allows the user to light up his and other players bodies on screen by using his hands.

8

The hype around WebGL is quite big these days. People are talking about it and getting their hands dirty for sometime now. I wanted to give it a try, but I have to be honest: HTML, Javascript, Webdev in general scares the crap out of me, but eventually i ended up taking a look at it and what’s going on these days (WebGL related).

After watching Rome, a project created by Google, my interest got bigger, so I downloaded  a framework called Three.js. This framework is more than just WebGL, but i didn’t really care, i just wanted that section. If you get curious, check it out, it’s growing and even Google used it.

It was quite easy to start playing with, as it brings loads of samples (would be alot easier if i knew where to find the documentation), so i started from there. Create a simple page capable of rendering WebGL to a canvas, explore the framework more or less until i actually made something with it.

My part of this was mostly copy/paste of a shader i had written recently on Approximating Translucency for Subsurface Scattering. A couple of hours later and alot of rambling towards javascript, I finally ended up with the same shader running on the browser.

Next screenshots includes one from the application running with OpenGL and the other two were capture directly from the browser.
Last but not least, i want to mention the work of Tristan Bethe. The 3d scan model seen in this pictures is all him.

Link to the WebGL version. Enjoy!

Link to the WebGL version. Enjoy!

Since the release of OpenNI, I wanted to find a way to be able to keep Skeleton Tracking features while having access to things such as Motor control, LED options, etc. OpenNI as an API for PrimeSensor, makes sense that it doesn’t include any of this features, afterall it’s not their problem (speculation). Well, recently i found a thread at the OpenNI Groups from a guy named Michael Kuzmin that made me feel stupid as to how simple it is to have both things working together. Only for Windows OS.

And I quote:
“Simply install OpenNI and after that CL NUI. Then all three components (audio, motor, camera) should be managed by CL NUI.
Now just go to your hardware configuration and delete the driver for the NUI Camera. When you have done that, the OpenNI driver should be found by your OS.
If your OS installs the NUI driver again, just go to your CL NUI installation dir and rename the “driver” folder, so it can’t find it again.”

I was asked to try some stereo rendering using one of my latest experiments with particles, Disintegrates. It worked ok at that time but it wasn’t good enough imho. Lately i have been working hard, we can see that by the amount of posts/videos, anyway, today i picked that old project of mine and fixed some old problems and added some new features that i should have done in the first place. Now with visual debugging for the stereo rendering it helps me to create a better 3d effect aswell as debugging things quite easily. Eye separation, Convergence plane, Parallax, Clipping Planes, etc. All that is much easier to handle now. Hopefully i’ll make a new video showing off steps to prepare a scene for stereo rendering. No promises. Enjoy the following video.