V // Pixelnerve » News http://www.pixelnerve.com/v Sun, 30 Oct 2011 23:43:57 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3 Minivegas http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/2011/09/13/minivegas/ http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/2011/09/13/minivegas/#comments Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:11:55 +0000 victormartins http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/?p=1516 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.

]]> http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/2011/09/13/minivegas/feed/ 0 Heineken Light Streaks http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/2011/07/10/heineken-light-streaks/ http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/2011/07/10/heineken-light-streaks/#comments Sun, 10 Jul 2011 09:09:49 +0000 victormartins http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/?p=1484 “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

]]> http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/2011/07/10/heineken-light-streaks/feed/ 0 First steps with WebGL http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/2011/05/27/first-steps-with-webgl/ http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/2011/05/27/first-steps-with-webgl/#comments Fri, 27 May 2011 20:15:09 +0000 victormartins http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/?p=1464 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!

]]> http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/2011/05/27/first-steps-with-webgl/feed/ 1 OpenNI & CLNUI Working Together http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/2011/04/22/openni-clnui-working-together/ http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/2011/04/22/openni-clnui-working-together/#comments Fri, 22 Apr 2011 01:54:27 +0000 victormartins http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/?p=1428 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.”

]]> http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/2011/04/22/openni-clnui-working-together/feed/ 0 Kinect Disintegrates Stereo3d http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/2011/04/21/kinect-disintegrates-stereo3d/ http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/2011/04/21/kinect-disintegrates-stereo3d/#comments Wed, 20 Apr 2011 23:15:34 +0000 victormartins http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/?p=1422 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.

]]> http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/2011/04/21/kinect-disintegrates-stereo3d/feed/ 0 CgFX Block of Code http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/2011/02/17/cgfx-block-of-code/ http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/2011/02/17/cgfx-block-of-code/#comments Thu, 17 Feb 2011 11:36:14 +0000 victormartins http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/?p=1388 I have been doing more and more work away from java/processing so i had to bring some tools with me to help and improve development time. One of my favourite shader languages is CgFX, a brother of HLSL. I spend alot of time using this for my shader programming, so i wrapped it up in a simple to use block of code that should be easy to use with your favourite framework.

You can find it at github.

]]> http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/2011/02/17/cgfx-block-of-code/feed/ 0 Aliasing Beauty http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/2010/12/30/aliasing-beauty/ http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/2010/12/30/aliasing-beauty/#comments Thu, 30 Dec 2010 18:25:29 +0000 victormartins http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/?p=1377 Finally, i posted about the Aliasing Beauty, a relative to Black&White project created for Written Images book. Read more..

]]> http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/2010/12/30/aliasing-beauty/feed/ 1 CLNUI 4 Java (Kinect) http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/2010/11/19/clnui-4-java-kinect/ http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/2010/11/19/clnui-4-java-kinect/#comments Fri, 19 Nov 2010 02:14:44 +0000 victormartins http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/?p=1343 Kinect is a new product from Microsoft for XBox360. With an RGB camera, a 3D depth sensor (structured IR light) and  a multi-array microphone , it is able to compute a depth map, something very interesting for the interactive world of creativity and gaming. Nothing new as technology, but still, interesting and cheap. Since its release people have been trying to work in order to hack it and get it to work with windows and mac OS. Quite a few people have been working on drivers and a way to hack the gadget to get access to the color/depth data. One of these people is called Alex from Code Laboratories, the man behind the PS3eye camera drivers for PC’s. Recently, he released a new package (C and C#) that includes drivers and SDK for Kinect. I took the SDK and with  JNA i wrote a library for java that wraps the original one and also tries to make its use easy for starters.

A very early release is available http://victamin.googlecode.com/files/CLNUI4J_01.zip. This might or might not work out-of-the-box and it sure needs improvement and more work, but as they say, release early, release often. This package includes the library and basic examples running on Eclipse IDE and processing IDE (untested). It is known that this library does not work directly with Processing.

EDIT! Version 0.2 is now available at: http://victamin.googlecode.com/files/CLNUI4J_02.zip.
You can now find a friendly wrapper and a couple of examples to get you started.

I would love to get some feedback, so if you’re a Kinect owner and you’re into java/processing, give it a  spin and let me know how it works out for you.

Have fun.

]]> http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/2010/11/19/clnui-4-java-kinect/feed/ 9 DroidTUIO http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/2010/11/04/dt/ http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/2010/11/04/dt/#comments Thu, 04 Nov 2010 19:40:30 +0000 victormartins http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/?p=1317 DroidTUIO is my first application made for Android OS. It was created for OS version 2.1+  with OpenGL ES renderer. This application is available to the public as i hope to get feedback, so please, spare a few minutes and let me know how it worked out for you. Now.. on with the application.  First thing you need to do is to run the application and then press MENU/Settings. Enter your network IP and press connect. Once connected, use your phone to send TUIO events (2dcursor only for the moment). Have fun.

Update! The link has been removed as the application was removed from online. I will get a new link ASAP.

]]> http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/2010/11/04/dt/feed/ 1 BottomBar (turns TopBar) http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/2010/07/19/bottom-bar/ http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/2010/07/19/bottom-bar/#comments Sun, 18 Jul 2010 23:39:59 +0000 victormartins http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/?p=1175

Hello, is anyone out there?… I haven’t posted anything for quite sometime now. Hopefully all that will change as i get more free time to organize and work on my projects. Meanwhile, i would like you to know about something else..

Look down… You should be looking at a bar, a dark bar with a few buttons on the right side. I’ve been thinking about this for sometime but as my webdev skills/will are at the same level (low) i was looking for some ready-to-use code. Thanks to this guys here (for the ugly code rip) and Filipe ‘ps’ Cruz for help with CSS.

]]> http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/2010/07/19/bottom-bar/feed/ 0