So, for the last few months I’ve taken a break from the PhD to do some work for a theatre show for The Border Project, Half Real.

There’s a lot of technology in the show. In particular, most of the set is projected, and we are using a Microsoft Kinect to track the actors on stage, and modifying the projections based on their location.

I’m working on Linux, and using OpenNI for interfacing with the Kinect. Things almost worked perfectly. In this post I will document the trials and tribulations of getting the Kinect to work for Half Real.

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Hey Everyone

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.

Hi Everyone

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:

http://link.packtpub.com/NwneHs

So some of my work at uni involves programming using OpenSceneGraph. Now, anybody who has used OSG before will know that as powerful as it may be, it is seriously lacking in the documentation department. So, this article describes how to do dual screen graphics on Linux using OpenSceneGraph. First we’ll look at the X Screens approach, which is easier but probably not the best solution. Then we’ll look at a method that works with a single X screen. (more…)

This is a very short video explaining a problem that comes up time and time again on 3dbuzz.com. Essentially, why the code for their Hello World example doesn’t compile. If you have done any C++ coding before, you can safely ignore this video. (more…)