So the Australasian User Interface Conference for 2012 has been and gone. The Wearable Computer Lab presented two full papers and two posters, of which I was an author of one
The papers we presented are listed below, and the publication page has been updated so you can get the PDFs. Cheers!
E. T. A. Maas, M. R. Marner, R. T. Smith, and B. H. Thomas, “Supporting Freeform Modelling in Spatial Augmented Reality Environments with a New Deformable Material,” in Proceedings of the 13th Australasian User Interface Conference, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 2012. (pdf) (video)
T. M. Simon, R. T. Smith, B. H. Thomas, G. S. Von Itzstein, M. Smith, J. Park, and J. Park, “Merging Tangible Buttons and Spatial Augmented Reality to Support Ubiquitous Prototype Designs,” in Proceedings of the 13th Australasian User Interface Conference, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 2012.
S. J. O’Malley, R. T. Smith, and B. H. Thomas, “Poster: Data Mining Office Behavioural Information from Simple Sensors,” in Proceedings of the 13th Australasian User Interface Conference, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 2012.
T. M. Simon and R. T. Smith, “Poster: Magnetic Substrate for use with Tangible Spatial Augmented Reality in Rapid Prototyping Workflows,” in Proceedings of the 13th Australasian User Interface Conference, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 2012.
So a little while ago I said that I was going to review the new Open Scene Graph 3: Beginners Guide book from Packt Publishing. Unfortunately, I still haven’t had time to do the review. However, I thought I would mention that all through April Packt Publishing are running discounts on all of their Graphics books!
During April, Packt will be running a series of discounts and promotions on a selection of its Open Source Graphic books wherein readers can avail exclusive discounts of 20% and 30% off the cover price of Graphic print books and eBooks.
So, I suggest you go check out what they have to offer:
Full Disclosure: I have nothing to do with Packt Publishing. However, they did give me a free e-book version of the OSG3 Beginners Guide for me to review. I feel a little bit guilty that I haven’t done the review yet. Other than that, I have no affiliation with Packt Publishing, and I didn’t get anything for posting this. So I haven’t sold out. In my opinion, someone going out of their way to produce documentation and reference books for Open Source Software is a good thing!
Just a quick note to say that I’ve put all the Java video tutorials up on Youtube. Things have changed since I started making the videos – Youtube has finally allowed videos longer than 15 minutes, which means I can upload them without having to slice them all up.
3DUI has wrapped up for the year, so here is our second publication. We introduce a new material for freeform sculpting in spatial augmented reality environments. Please read the paper, and have a look at the video below.
So right now I am at the IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces in Singapore. We have a couple of publications which I’ll be posting over the next few days. First up is Adaptive Color Marker for SAR Environments. In a previous study we created interactive virtual control panels by projecting onto otherwise blank designs. We used a simple orange marker to track the position of the user’s finger. However, in a SAR environment, this approach suffers from several problems:
The tracking system can’t track the marker if we project the same colour as the marker.
Projecting onto the marker changes it’s appearance, causing tracking to fail.
Users could not tell when they were pressing virtual controls, because their finger occluded the projection.
We address these problems with an active colour marker. We use a colour sensor to detect what is being projected onto the marker, and change the colour of the marker to an opposite colour, so that tracking continues to work. In addition, we can use the active marker as a form of visual feedback. For example, we can change the colour to indicate a virtual button press.
I’ve added the publication to my publications page, and here’s the video of the marker in action.
The guys over at Packt Publishing have kindly asked me to review a new book on programming with OpenSceneGraph. I haven’t looked at the book yet, but will get the review done sometime this week. In the mean time, checkout the book:
Time for another shameless plug. This time it is for Swiftless, a guy who I work with in the Wearable Computer Lab. His website has some pretty awesome tutorials on game programming, OpenGL, Shaders, game related maths and heaps more. Check it out!
In another blunder, the Office of Film and Literature Classification has refused to classify Alien vs. Predator, effectively banning it from sale in Australia. This comes just a month or so after Left 4 Dead 2 was refused classification, then heavily censored to meet the requirements of an MA15+ rating, what some are calling “the most disturbing censorship result in Australia’s history”. Normally, this website is a place to show off my work, and I hear some of you enjoy watching my tutorials. However, I just find this situation ridiculous, and urge everyone in Australia to do something about this. (more…)
![Follow [wcl] on Twitter](http://twitter-badges.s3.amazonaws.com/t_logo-a.png){kind=logo}
