I’ve just “processed” the first few images from my homemade 3d camera, and they’re viewable on my flickr page. They are viewable without any glasses or anything - just cross your eyes as per usual for cross-eye stereographs. Some pictures from my farewell, and a few others from just experimenting with the cameras.
The last few days I’ve been working with a new capture of myself for the purpose of experimenting with animation. The capture was done in a neutral pose, which makes it much easier to work with in this next stage. Using Milkshape (a lightweight game-mod development tool), I’ve articulated the model using a skeleton from the game Max Payne 2, and have been animating it using pre-recorded actions that come with the game. At this stage the model can be used to import into the game (which is quite fun in itself), where it can be used as an actor for producing Machinima. Alternatively, it can be animated directly from a 3D rendering package.
Interactive model and You tube video of animation in next part of entry… (more…)
I’m posting a rough model created using my 3d photo setup. It is smoother than the final model, as I haven’t finished interpolating the angles and so have averaged out everything to make it look better at this stage. Thought I’d post something just to show I wasn’t slacking off. 
The Java applet allows you to zoom (Shift+Left mouse), move (Ctrl+Left Mouse), and rotate (Alt+Left Mouse). It will slowly spin without your input. It is also quite large - in the region of 400k - so I’ve stuck it in the second half of this post to speed up loading of the blog.
I’m currently working on a photo egg and digital camera array to allow me to produce 3D digital models of people (see previous entries).
Progress report: I’ve just completed the wooden framework of the egg. There is now a Flickr photo set tracking the progress of the egg. In other news I’m close to finishing installation of the last few remote trigger mechanisms in the cameras.
As part of my current 3d modelling project I need to trigger an array of 25 cameras reliably. I did a great deal of research looking for a cheaper digital camera that could be triggered either by USB, or similar computer controlled, and came to the conclusion that there were none. Despite how simple it would seem to be, the cheapest point-and-shoot cameras with this feature are all above US$400.
I decided to go for a good, sturdy camera that offered a good layout for hardware modification, and to brew my own trigger system. I’ve posted the results to instructables: a how-to for adding a shutter trigger to the Kodak C653 camera. Hopefully this will help save others the hours of wasted research I spent.
The above image (with zoomed detail below) was created with a script I wrote way back in 2003. I’ve just rediscovered it, and have been tinkering around with it a little. The script allows you to recreated composited images using coloured circles, randomly generated winding characters (as above), or your choice of text as a substitute for pixels in the image. I’m tempted to get some A0/A1 sized wall posters printed of some of these, as I really love the aesthetic, and think there can be some fantastic effects produced with the right choice of text + subject.
I’ll give access to the script if anyone has any immediate ideas they’d like to implement with it… Give me a yell.
Via Philwilson.org:
A fantastic Firefox plugin is available that lets you perform common tasks usings gestures of your mouse. As an example, holding down the right mouse button while dragging up opens a new tab, dragging left or right moves back and forward within your history.
This may remind anyone who has played Black & White of the fun spell-casting interface that game had. The ability to create your own custom gestures (nothing to do with insulting finger movements) means that there is already a library of interesting commands shared.
The BBC, amongst many other sources, reports that three new security holes have been found in Internet Explorer. For those of you out there surfing using IE, here is my strongest recommendation: Get Firefox!*
On top of the security benefits Firefox is faster, and comes with a bunch of features that really improve one’s browsing experience such as tabs and Livebookmarks for RSS sources.
Mozilla [Firefox] has bugs to (sic). Lots of them. The difference, however is the time it takes to patch them.
…This vulnerability is the perfect example: MS was notified about this on 13/02/2006, 40 days ago. They had all the opportunity to fix it in this month’s security patch, but thy did not. So the patch will come no earlier than 2 months after discovery - that’s a huge window of exposure. (Stellian commenting on Slashdot)
Microsoft obviously doesn’t think that the two holes allowing full-hijacking of a computer are serious enough to deviate from their regular second-Tuesday-of-every-month patch release, saying that they would only consider releasing earlier if the “threat grew significantly”.
and I love this typically useless piece of advice:
To avoid falling victim, Microsoft urged users to avoid websites they did not trust … (BBC Article)
I think if we want to seriously comply with Microsoft’s suggestion, we might as well unplug our broadband now. How about this little nugget of wisdom: Avoid using browsers you do not trust.
* I realise that some of you may be forced by company policy to use IE, and in this case I would urge you to bring up the intelligence of such a policy with whoever is responsible. Why waste workers’ time and their computer processor power on the plethora of spyware, adware and malware that typically accompanies Internet Explorer use?
sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ! is a program for mixing sound and video snippets taken from any (music) video source into a new audio-visual experience, based on any audio input, and in realtime. The promo video gives the best summary of what it does and how, and also has an example of the software being used. This is fab, and hopefully the software will soon be released (as GPL for open-source developement) so we can all have a go!
I’ve now set up the Internet TV infrastructure to allow us to easily host a “video channel” of Carrie & Vostok episodes. A Carrie & Vostok channel is available which, in after downloading Democracy, will allow easy subscription to episodes downloaded distributively via BitTorrent.
The channel is empty at the moment, but hopefully will soon be teeming with movies!