AR E Sting submission

The UK TV channel e4 is holding a competition to create E Stings. I suspect most of you don’t know what an E Sting is – I was one of you a few months ago. They are the short animated clips that appear between programs and adverts.

A team of us came together and this is what we have created.

It was Lee Daley who suggested we make an AR entry. He also did the 3D work. Since then my fiance Juliet Lall has graced the project with some illustrations and Rakesh Mistry has taken control of the video production. I did all the Flash development and took the role of project leader.

15 E Stings will make it on-air and there have been over 750 entries. Let’s hope the lure of a free AR application will improve my chances!

Ironic business card becomes accidental viral

Well, it’s been an interesting week to say the least. Although I have physically handed my new business card to only a handful of people it has reached enough to fill Wembly Stadium almost three times over.

About 7 weeks ago, in my spare time I created an Augmented Reality business card and posted it on my blog and Vimeo. I had a small initial rush of a couple of thousand views and then it quietened down. Standard story.

Then just a week ago things went absolutely mental. In the last 7 days I’ve had 45,000 hits on my blog and a quarter of a million views of my Video. I’ve being Tweeted something silly and blogged by such giants as Engadget, Popular Science, Gizmodo, Notcot and many others.

As a result, I’ve been approached by lots of companies and individuals expressing an interest in working with me on Augmented Reality projects. I’ve had parties approach me for interviews, articles, tutorials and to be involved in books and conferences. I’m passing the big projects onto my digital agency Skive and keeping the smaller ones for myself. I’m currently in the process of setting up a limited company so I can deal with all these projects on a professional basis.

It was fascinating to see how interest in this piece of work evolved over several days. There was an absolute digital ripple effect. It seems that Twitter played a huge part in driving the success throughout. It’s great to see, first hand, social media acting as a vehicle for non-commercial work to gain such a huge audience in a small space of time. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who Tweeted, blogged, emailed, commented and generally passed my work on to others.

So where to from here? I will be continuing to experiment using AR but in addition to investigating it at home I will be doing some more R&D at work. My aim is to set up a new ‘experiential’ department or possibly even a sister company focussing on AR, Multitouch and installation work at Skive.

So who wants an AR application? Form an orderly queue…

AR Business card

Inspired by this guy, I just got a fresh batch of business cards from moo.com. There’s not really enough space on a business card to explain yourself in any detail so I thought I’d extend it using augmented reality. I recorded a short video bio and created a 3D grid of coloured planes. These planes are updated with the colours from the video and extruded depending on the level of brightness.

***EDIT***

This is now online for all to enjoy. First print out this (or open it on you’re phone). Then go here to play with it.

***EDIT 2***

Mac users with iSight camera who are experiencing a black screen might be able to get around this by Following these steps:

Right click on the app and select settings. Then click on the camera tab. There should be a drop-down menu. Select USB Camera.

Failing that apparantly it won’t work if you have any other apps that use the iSight open at the same time, so close PhotoBooth, Quicktime etc.

Thanks to JereDog and Bish for these workarounds.

***EDIT 3***

I’m using the following AS3 libraries in this project

FLARToolkit

FLARManager

Papervision The new version now uses the FP10 native 3D capabilities

TweenMax

***EDIT 4***

I’ve temporarily had to take the application down as I’ve had a huge amount of traffic which will undoubtedly cost a horrendous amount of money. Check back next week when things have calmed down a bit.

***EDIT 5***

OK the application is back up now. Big thanks to my agency Skive who are hosting it until the madness subsides.

***EDIT 6***

I’ve made quite a few changes to the applciation recently. The main change is that it no longer uses Papervision but is now run using the new Flash Player 10 3D capabilities. This has sped things up slightly. The app is now built using the PureMVC framework. There are also many optimisations and tweaks to make the app behave faster and better. If you click the link above it will now open the new version.

AR Particle Beam

So I thought it was about time I jumped on the augmented reality bandwagon. Rather than the obligitory 3D model I decided to make something a little different. I’ve used 3D lighting techniques and physics here to create this beam of light surrounded by strange celestial light particles.

If you would like to interact with it, first download and print out the marker here then go here for a live demo.

Big thanks to a few people. First and foremost Saqoosha, the clever chap who created the FLARToolkit library, a port of the C++ library ARToolkit. Mikko Haapoja for providing a fantastic introduction to using FLARToolkit. Eric Socolofsky for building the framework FLARManager which makes working with FLARToolkit a sinch.

Incidentaly while making this, John Lindquist started an augmented reality competition on the Papervision forum. I’ve decided to enter it (hence the Papervision Logo on my marker – rules of the comp, not sucking up) so please feel free to vote for me on the forum.

For those of you who are interested, you can download the source code here. It’s an FDT project but it shouldn’t be too difficult to convert it over to your favourite development environment.

PING range sensor setup

I was recently asked for some help from someone having problems using 2 PING Ultrasonic range sensors. I promised to send some pictures of the setup as I hadn’t provided information on this in my previous post. So just in case anyone else is having problems, here they are. Hope they can help.

Playing with particles using a webcam

This installation is an AIR application that was built using Flash. It is intended to be placed in the reception area of my workplace, Skive. It was actually completed a few months ago but I just recently managed to put some video documentation together.

The piece uses a webcam to track any form of movement to displace particles. The letters of the Skive logo are broken up and forced to the edges of the participant’s silhouette. This creates a chaotic outline as the pieces attempt to rush back into their original places to reform the letters. The springiness of the particles brings a fluidic motion which encourages play.

Click here to see the video on Vimeo

I’ve worked with webcams several times before and found that differences in light and surroundings can cause the application to behave in different ways. This can be very frustrating as it means recompiling using different values. This time, I decided to do something about it and created a control panel which would allow me to alter and save values such as springiness, threshold and pixelation on the fly. This saved a lot of time, effort and stress.

Arduino > Flash range sensor experiment

I’ve been playing around with the Arduino microcontroller recently and this is my first experiment. It’s a prototype for a future artwork that essentially acts as a primitive touchscreen device. I’ve used 2 PING))) Ultrasonic Range Sensors positioned at the top of my monitor. These measure the distance of any object placed in front of them. The Arduino board collects this data and passes it on to Flash via SerProxy.

Click here to see the video on Vimeo
Click here to see the video on YouTube

For this project I used a modified version of David Cuartielles’ Arduino sketch and SerProxy as a Serial-to-Network Proxy Server. Here is my serproxy.cfg code.


# Config file for serproxy
# See serproxy's README file for documentation

# Transform newlines coming from the serial port into nils
# true (e.g. if using Flash) or false
newlines_to_nils=true

# Comm ports used
comm_ports=3

# Default settings
comm_baud=9600
comm_databits=8
comm_stopbits=1
comm_parity=none

# Idle time out in seconds
timeout=300

# Port 3 settings (ttyS2)
net_port3=5333


I spent quite a lot of time trying to use Firmata, and AS3Glue but found that Firmata didn’t work with the PING Range Sensor. I’m fairly sure that AS3Glue requires the Board to be running Firmata so, as mentioned above, I settled for Arduino code from David Cuartielles. I wrote my own Actionscript to deal with the incoming data using the Socket and ByteArray classes. You can find an early rough version of this code here.

UPDATE:
Images of the setup can now be seen here.

Wiimote Powered Self Portrait Generator

This is my first experiment using the open source framework WiiFlash. It is an AIR application built using Flash in which the user can generate a Cubist self portrait by pointing a Wiimote at an Infrared light. Webcam footage is masked and layered using a variety of shapes and lines, the propeties of which can be altered using the Wiimote controls.

Click here to see the video on Vimeo
Click here to see the video on YouTube

The controls are as follows:

B adds shapes to the stage
A gives the pseudo random positioning effect
+ increases the scale of the shapes
- decreases the scale of the shapes
up/right increases the alpha of the lines
down/left decreases the alpha of the lines

The AIR app and source code will be available to download soon. You will however need a Wiimote, a bluetooth dongle, the WiiFlash server installed, a webcam and an Infrared light to use it.