It is all in full swing, but here are some amazing pictures from SG this year!

the picassa albums

I got a bit sleepy in a meeting the other day and I started drawing. It was one of those darkened room affairs with an impeding food coma, so i needed something to ease the pain.

It just so happened that I was drawing with my Livescribe pen. I’m going to post this now, but I’ll finish it off later.

Here’s a photo of the pen scribble in my book. It’s about 50mm across in real life.

The finished version is missing a lot of the feinter lines as the pressure sensor on the pen isn’t as responsive as something like a good wacom tablet.

…yup

my current coffee making setup

This is mostly for Andrew’s benefit, but I thought I’d use it as a chance to show off a bit.
Out of shot is the £5 Ikea thermometer/timer for measuring water temperature.

I probably should start charting the grind setting, water temperature volume of water etc. but I worry about it turning into full blown OCD (Aspergers is looming close enough).

If you are reading this on Facebook then that’s great, but if you want to make a comment then follow this link and make a comment at the source.

Jalal is in the process of transferring gcuser from the  old clunky DNN windows server to a new sparkly sever, and content management system.

The data is all safe, its all very tedious back end stuff, and the end user experience should be much the same,  probaby just a different colour.

There have been plenty of examples of people using multi touch displays for useful and interesting things, but the idea behind this totally ignores the practical things like the cost element of having hundreds of beamers and a server farm to rival Google, and just goes for the hope that something cool might come from the thought experiment (such is the nature of architectural education)

so what’s going on?

1. when you first arrive, the floor’s inactive
2. initially, ‘things’ (in this case little flowers) flock around your feet
3. then once you stop moving some colour gradient announces your arrival as a platform dweller
4. a menu of possible destinations pops up, and you can select one by stomping on it (this is actually quite intuitive)
5. on selection, information related to that destination pops up, i.e. “move back, this next train is not yours”
6. to kill time, news stories from a standard feed appear (these ones are from today’s age)
7. when your train is due, the distractions fade
8. and you are prompted by a moving line move to where the doors will open
9. disembarking passengers are allowed passage as there is an organised group ready to board
10. you board.

it’s that simple!

There are plenty of other things that could be done with it, but that’s a story for another day children.

this might need captions, but we can’t decide on the font, so they are in my head at the moment…

I think I’ll get something at least a little bit useful out of this soon though.

lots of tests and diagrams after this

	This is the stock code for finding blobs, but with an extra line that marks the centres of the boxes
	They make a bit more sense with just the edges turned on. Ultimately the display of all this data will be switched off to maximise running speed.
	The centre markers can be tagged…
	..with a number to identify them. This highlights a problem that I had anticipated. The numbering (array index) of the blobs is dynamically assigned. They are detected on a frame by frame basis, and therefore the numbering is not consistent across frames. This means that the paths can’t just be drawn, but I’ll need to do some sort of proximity search to find the nearest one to the previous one, and just hope that the movement isn’t sufficiently large to upset the progression.
	First attempts at tracking points are proving tricky, even without any sort of continuity tracking.
	If the vertices with 0,0 coords are removed, it just spatters points. This also highlights the vast quantity of data that I am gathering here. There will probably need to be some sort of data reduction at the end, as at 10 fps, with 5 blobs, that produces 100 values a second, so even recording for a minute will make a huge dataset.

The mapping of a point from frame to frame is going to prove to be the most complicated part of this operation
The possible options for frame to frame changes in path coordinate arrays. I’m going to have a go at implementing a solution that tests to see if there is a centroid in the previous frame within 10ish pixels of the current one, then if there is, starts measuring it’s path and adds the list of coords to a list.
It’ll take a bit of fiddling to find out how to work with lists in processing, but it should work.I should probably also implement a filter that only bothers dealing with blobs if they are over a certain number of pixels in area, as suggested here.There are all kinds of issues that will probably pop up. I find this sort of data management/array stuff quite hard to get my head around. I wonder why?

Manually capturing that much information is for people with more time and patience than me.

I’d like to start out by pointing out two things. I have no idea where this will lead to, and that there is an ulterior educational motive at work – I don’t know how to do any of this so I thought I’d get down to it and learn.

I’d like to measure how long it takes for people in a fairly uninteresting area of street to pass from one side of the cameras frame to the other, and then make subtle changes to the environment to see if this affected their behavior.

Changes like lines marking territory, the addition of mirrors, blasts of hot air etc. might or might not affect the behavior of the people passing.

In order to capture the data I’m going to have a go at making a piece of person tracking software using blob detection, and then hopefully I’ll be able to mine that information and extract vector paths and times.

the v3ga.net Blob Detection library has been used for projects like shadow monsters (above) and a few other projects

the myron webcaXtra library is a possible alternative, but i haven’t researched the relative merits of the two options

Jason Bruge and White Wing Logic used bluetooth rather than image based methods to track people over London bridge and display the results on tower bridge. The possibilities of bluetooth are great, they allow tracking of specific people even if they go out of sight, but the technology is much more expensive and complicated.