Hey guys

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:

http://www.packtpub.com/article/graphic-open-source

Cheers
Michael

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!

Hi Everyone

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.

Youtube Playlist

Cheers
Michael

Hello Everyone

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.

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.

Hey Everyone

So this week I became a member sponsor on www.3dbuzz.com. The first thing I had a look at was their XNA Behaviour Programming videos, which are the first in their set on AI programming. However, not being particularly interested in XNA, I implemented the algorithms presented in the videos for Android.

Here’s a video of the demo running on my Nexus One:

Since I was on Android and only using the Android and OpenGL ES libraries, I had to write a lot of low level code to replace the XNA functionality that 3DBuzz’s videos rely on. I also had to implement an on-screen joystick. I might write up a couple of posts on the more interesting parts of the code (what is not in the videos) soon.

Thanks
Michael

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 video looks at how we can use the OpenGL graphics library in our Java programs. This video was an entry in a competition on 3dbuzz.com. As such, it doesn’t flow on from the previous videos, just consider it a bonus. (more…)

This video gives an overview of the Eclipse IDE. Eclipse is a feature packed Java development environment that is also free and open source. In this video we see how we create projects in eclipse and run our programs. (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…)