Prototype

Right!
I've recovered from my lack of sleep. And thought it was about time to do another blog update. I've been quite slack lately.

So we had our prototype presentation on wednesday. It went rather well I thought. We had three things to present :

- A Basic version of the Simulation ( RSS feeds )
- Motion Capture
- The Interaction ( And Weather Simulation )

We presented the simulation first.

Although we didn't have the RSS Feed working, we did have the sun / moon moving across the screen depending on time of day.

For the final version we're going to have weather data brought in from an RSS feed. Ben is working on that, I'll then implement that code in our full flash file.

I cant remember which we presented next, I think it was the final interaction.

This was a working representation of our finished product. Fully interactive sun / moon and clouds. Grouped clouds would create a storm and then would rain. Very simple, Very Effective. Clouds could then be pulled apart and the storm would end.

Finally we had the motion capture.

The motion capture unfortunatley didnt work correctly. As the LEDs we were using decided to die just before the presentation :(.

However we managed to prove the intent, and Jaime suggested we look into using Infra Red lighting instead of LEDs. I've begun some research into it and will post more on it later.

Overall I think it was a successful day, and I almost missed the best part , we've now got a presentation space. We are presenting in a stairwell just outside our critique space. There's enough room to rear-project a decent sized image, with the user lying on a beanbag or some low chair interacting with it from below.

We've got Kevin working on some sketches etc.

Im also going to bring a camera to uni from now on so we can get a good amount of photo documentation for the final phase.

The three SWF's are all available in my swf repository :
http://members.optusnet.com.au/gmassingham/weatherroom/
( Mocap and Simulation are now out of date , WROOM_PROTO is up to date ).

anyway, Im still rather tired, so Im off to bed. Will post more updates as they come. Just a quick "where we're at" thing.

- Anthony

RSS Weather

I had a look at accuweather.com after i had found this one at http://www.weatherzone.com.au/rss.jsp

From what i can see with my untrained eyes, i it covers all the aspects we need for our 'forcasting widget'. ie. wind speed, temp, amount of rain and i think it has a 1 day weather forcast... so yeah. check it out.. i think this will be the one to use.. so ill get experementing with the importing to flash and chop up the code so it only has the stuff we need.

RSS / XML

Just a quick update.
im looking at XML feeds for the widget thing and although there are some good feeds, they are either U.S Based or only provide the temp.
I havnt given up yet, so ill post again when i find somthing.

Sun, Moon, Clouds and SWFs

Thought I'd post a progress update.

Done some work in flash recently. I've uploaded the .swfs for viewing.


Firstly : Motion Capture.

This is just our basic motion capture system. Using Colour tracking. Hold a colour in position over the x in the bottom right corner, press the 'space' key, and the program will attempt to track that colour. Still needs work. ( you need a webcam to view this ).

URL : Colourgrab_05_testthresh.swf


secondly : The Sky.

Because we're doing two things (interactive sky, and simulated sky), We needed a sun that would accurately plot time. So I made this :

timeofday_timelapse.swf

It's a timelapse version of an accurate program. The code places the sun / moon in the approprate spot depending on the time of day. This timelapse program is exactly the same code, however it's me manually setting the time at a faster speed. Just so you can see the effect.

finally : Clouds.

I've spent a long time trying to get our clouds to look right.

We had so many options. Using actual images of clouds. 3d modelled clouds. Perlin Noise generated clouds.

I wanted to go with the perlin noise ( for those of you who dont know what perlin noise is, it's fractal - based noise. Great for organic textures / shapes like wood, or clouds. More information here ).

However I had *great* difficulty in creating clouds that looked right.

The closest I got was this : Noise_Xp_2.swf

I was not happy with that.
So I sat down and started again.

I decided to create clouds out of particles. Each cloud would consist of a number of these particles depending on the 'density' setting. Then I could create a randomly generated dynamic cloud with a dynamic number of particles.

Chuck a couple of filters on it, and voila - we have clouds.

I also discovered something neat along the way. Dynamically LIGHTED clouds.

Here are the clouds, minus all the filters, have a look at the shading on them as they pass the sun.

particle_clouds_03.swf

The dynamic lighting looks GREAT.
But is VERY VERY VERY cpu intensive. Unless I can find another way to do it. Im scrapping it for now.

Anyway

This is what Im happy with for now :

particle_clouds_04.swf

Keep in mind, this is just for the prototype, and I can add detail and the likes later. But I think they look pretty good! ( and most of them are draggable ).

So that's just a quick update of what I've got working so far. Now it's just a matter of writing some more code over the weekend. And I think by monday I should have 3 working prototypes. Maybe longer for the motion capture. I m still waiting on a response from a flash expert for some help with that.

Ben is currently working on getting me some RSS / XML data
Bonnie is collating sounds

And we're still waiting on a spot / shorthrow projector so we can get our specs and (Hopefully) start building soon!