Little Robot that could

July 3rd, 2009

They are getting smaller by the minute! This is what a DARPA contractor was up to over the last two years.

more at: endgadget

Blog?

July 2nd, 2009

I just realized, I haven’t had much time writing something productive in this blog. The main reason for this is my 80DAYS project, I am working on and trying to finish this year, but also many other little things I am trying to suss out and restructure. Generally the resonanceDesign website really needs a relaunch and the blog will have to find a different position in terms of how it fits into the website. So if anyone is reading this, stay tuned, some new things will come this way very soon.

Actionscript 2, on embedding fonts during runtime

June 30th, 2009

I like to code everything. No assets that could create weight, etc.

Embedding fonts in AS2 in runtime, yet is a nightmare, unlike in AS3, here a bit of a summed up list of things:

A very good list for the basics as well is found here.

Hands on mixed reality : Pig and Wolf

June 22nd, 2009

As a constant ’student’ of the overlap between fictional/digital and real space, this one is a very interesting example of the synergetical effect of media in human space.

Microsoft ‘Project Natal’

June 2nd, 2009

The name makes me think of pregnancy gymnastics and I am kind of half-way right on this. Could it really be that Microsoft manages to deliver some cool new invention? Full body input interface for gaming and the rest of your life-style. The promotional video obviously looks very very slick, so can they deliver? The tech specs of the sensor unit uses a clever combination of cameras and distance sensors, etc. plus some impressive looking software. Who would have thought that so much future technology will be based on one movie (Minority Report that is…). if this really hits off the shelf, evryone will need a huge living room from now on(and Xbox live I bet…) not always a given here in London(and I havent heard much better from Tokyo.

Don’t eat the marshmallow

June 2nd, 2009

Nice little simplified experiment. Are we really only 1 out of 3 successful? Make up your own mind, after the vid.

80DAYS, end of tunnel, beware Phileas!

May 14th, 2009

After 2 long years (well with a big 1 year break inbetween) I am finally getting my little garage project 80DAYS on the way. Just got round the blue one first time yesterday. More to come and launch very very soon.

Check out my project blog here.

Flexible projection surface

May 1st, 2009

Some guys at  Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University have been playing with latex and back-projections. The below video shows best what it’s doing. I would best describe it as physically supporting projections. It just makes it more haptic. Even though it is more flexible, it is still based on a fixed project-to-project based mask inside of it, or so it seems. Then again the most striking idea is the fact that it can detect push-pressure by measuring the air pressure change, now that’s sweet… till the latex wears out that is.

It would indeed be interesting to find out the durability of the latex, otherwise, one might have to redress the case many many times, plus I am wondering how great this one looks after a few hundred (kids with dirty fingers) visitors have used this. Enjoy the video, comments welcome.

Beautiful robots (Shigeo Hirose)

April 24th, 2009

I am NOT a great fan of robots, apart from Priss of course, but she is not really a robot (nerd). The ones below yet are something really different. Seems like only when we try to copy nature are we able to create something really beautiful.


The Beautiful, Scary Robots of Shigeo Hirose from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

mProjector – relative and absolute Paths

April 22nd, 2009

I keep finding myself with some trouble whenever I work on a standalone application and finally test it as a mProjector render. There still seem to be some quirks with it’s difference to how your app will run on or as a Flash Player app. As I am using many external files (images,xml, flv, etc.) this makes large parts of my app become ‘buggy’.

Latest example: I need swfs to be loaded from a folder and some flvs, too. I am using mFile.listFiles().
After developing the app and testing it inside flash, everything is working fine. My video recorder records, and plays the video files afterwards and the swf interstitials play.

I render the swf out to mProjector and BAM, no swf is loaded. Now generally there seems to be a difference between Flash Player and mProjector, which is that mProjector likes absolute file paths.
Knowing this from a previous app, I developed a MProjectorPath class, which checks the path and makes it an absolute one. I also have to consider both Mac and PC as I develop for both systems. On top of that, I like to sometimes use backwards relative paths (../). Combining these with everything else is a bit of a heckle, so I spend some time today to write a class taking care of this.

- it checks if the path is a web path or not (http:, etc.)

- it adjusts non-web paths to the OS it’s running on (changin / to \, to cover windows and osx)

- it turns relative into absolute paths

- it takes into account ../../, etc. paths when creating absolute paths

- it doesn’t turn absolute into application relative paths (to come when I really need it)

- I thought I share it

You can download the class (pretty static, AS2, zipped) here.

To use:

 
 
import mProjClasses.MProjectorPath;
 
var tPath:String = MProjectorPath.relativeToMPath(myRelativeFolder);

Have fun and let me know in case I missed something. I tested this one on mac laptop and tower and a windows xp machine and they all worked fine.