Today I did a final set up of the project ready to present tomorrow, I still had a few issues to resolve. First was getting the mirror a bit higher, I made a little mirror stand out of a couple of cardboard boxes.

This stops the mirror from sliding off and breaking, I put some double sided tape on the bottom of the box to stop that from slipping too.

Next was getting the active area to fit inside the calibrated area, this was easy to do now that the projection is in it's best position. I found the best way to do it was to get the processing sketch as near as possible to the size, and move it into place. Once that was done I made the trees a bit smaller so everything looked in proportion to the screen, and placed the background images into the code now that I knew what size they needed to be.

Next I cut some black sugar paper to fit around the active area, this gives the blocks a place to rest and shows clearly where they'll be picked up and where they wont be.

Now all there was left to do was to give it one last test to see if the callibration was alright, and make sure the camera settings were set up right

Then film, photos and video don't do it justice, but you get the idea. The projection doesn't show up great on either.

http://vimeo.com/ 19398701

That should be it for a while now.

 

I went out and bought some wood effect fabalon

I wanted to make the blocks look a bit better, gaffer tape isn't very nice to look at, and I thought wood would match the whole theme. what i wanted to do was use the dark wood as a base and I would cut a rotate symbol in the light wood and place that on. It's pretty hard to get a nice smooth small object in fabalon, wich scissors it seems all blocky and a craft knife rips the vinyl. So I think I'm just going to leave that. But all the blocks are now covered and looking better.

They don't look ideal, the fabalon doesn't stick so well to gaffer tape, I've been sticking the bits that pop up with soume double sided tape. I still think it's a pretty big improvement.

I've put in the walking animation into the cade now too. I found this library http://www.extrapixel.ch/processing/gifAnimation/ which helps processing with gifs, it allows transparancy and lets you control gifs a lot better. It lets you fast forward through the gifs frames too, which would have been a much easier way to do the trees and background, oh well.

I've been stuck about what to do for backgrounds for a while, I've had the code for rotate to change background for a while just waiting for the proper images. I wanted some sort of theme to the backgrounds, like the trees going through the seasons. I decided on times of the day, sun rise, day time, sun set and night time.

I had a fair few goes playing about with different elements first, adding in the trees to see how they'd look.

From these I found that they have to be simple, too much detail will look messy and may clash with the marker objects that can be moved about, lots of detail is lost in projection too. The marker images are mostly black, so the background can't be dark. There can't really be any 'floor' or perspective, since the objects can be moved about, a floating tree would look weird. I have to be careful about the colour choices too, they may not look good with the different coloured leaves. I liked the idea of a textured background, but that one didn't look right, it was a bit too dark, the sun looked pretty bad so that had to go. I thought it would be better if the sun was just hinted at with a gradient. So I came up with these:

I think they look pretty good and will work well as the background.

I made a birdhouse a while back which I forgot to post, so I'll put it here. I really liked the idea of having the birds come out of something and fly back into it. But when I was setting up everything it just didnt look right, so I've actually decided not to use it, it looks better with the birds just flying about. I think it's worth posting anyway, so here it is:

Again, I just wanted simple. What I liked about the placeholder image birdhouse that I used before was the hold was shaped like a bird, I thought that would be a nice touch to add into mine. I wanted it to hang off the side of the block, but I thought an actual branch would look a bit weird so I just made a hook like object.

I wanted something to walk across the floor, I was tempted to put in something like a dinosaur or a robot but they just wouldnt match the rest of the project. So I went with the obvious choice and went with a person. I figured a silhouette would be the best way to go, it would match the look of the birds. The actual look of the person was easy to do, the part that made me want to put it off was the walking animation, but it wasn't that bad. I had a look around online and found a a few good examples of walking animations, the one that stood out to me was http://www.dwphotoshop.com/photoshop/imageready/a6.gif It was the same look I wanted to go for and the same sort of size i wanted to go for. I didn't like how the arms moved on it though, so I used that as a guide for the general movement and used http://www.1099.com/graphics/illustrations/walkcycle3.gif as a guide for the arms.

It's not the best animation, but it'll do. That should be all the images I need to make now.

 

Last night I looked up how to calibrate reactivision, the only information I found was on the reactivision website http://reactivision.sourceforge.net/ the rest of the websites were just copy and pastes of the calibrating paragraph on the reactivision site. I kind of wanted a more detailed explaination since I couldn't really test it out at home without my screen, camera and projector. But it was pretty straight forward.

First of all I got the camera position as best as I could, then I tried to fidn where the markers were being picked up best, and where would be most comfortable for them to be put down. Once I had a general idea of how big I wanted the active area I measured it up to see how big I wanted the calibration sheet.

After that I messed around with the projector again trying to get it in the best position for the active area and trying to stop it distorting so much. I managed to get it fairly ok, but it still needs work, my mirror needs to be up higher since with the new settings the top gets cut off. I flipped the projection round too, so all the images would be the right way up.

Since I can't print off the calibration sheet as large as I needed it I used http://www.blockposters.com/ which splits up an image over multiple A4 pages for me, so I could print it as large as I wanted. Once I had that sorted I stuck the printed calibration sheet onto the working area

What you do with that is put reactivision in calibration mode and line up the reactivision grid, with the printed grid, like this:

This is a really slow process, you have to move it slowly point by point to try and get it as exact as possible. I had to flip it around completely since the projected image is mirrored, and flipped. It works ok, just need to get it as spot on as I can. All I need to do is get the projection aligned as much as possible with the working area. I need to make the tree images smaller too I think, they look a bit over powering the size they are at the moment.

Today I had all the project elements together to set up a sort of test run. It went suprisingly well, The projector didnt seem to effect the blocks much. Except one block was a bit funny, I used the same 3 differently set up blocks, one of them didnt want to work too well, it flashed on and off. It was the 'bird' block so it's either the birds messing with the tracking or more likely, how the block is set up. Turning the lights off in the room will probably help loads too, with the blocks and how well the projection shows up. Since I now know which block set up works best I'll bring in a full set of well working ones tomorrow.

I also need to callibrate reactivision with the set up too, the marker positions and where reactivision thought it was, was a bit off. I'll look into that more in a bit. I didn't really want to do it today since I think I can get the mirror, projector and camera position a bit better. It actually doesn't look too bad with a rough placement of things, the top of the projection is cut off, and I think the sides weren't right. The mirror keeps slipping down too, which isn't great, it just needs to be supported a bit better.

For this testing session I have:

3 different block set ups

And 3 different types of cameras

Modified PS3 eye

Microsoft H5D-00003 (hd cam)

Microsoft Lifecam VX 500

I wanted to see what would work better, and try out under the table and top down to see which would work. Last time I noticed that it may be possible for the marker to be read through the tracing paper with a non IR cam. So I tried that out first with the hd camera.

This is with me pushing down on the block to make sure the marker was flat and as readable as possible, obviously not going to work. The problem with the microsoft cameras is that you can't play around with the settings on a mac, so the brightness is stuck on being stupidly bright. Maybe if I could do that it would work but I doubt it. On the source camera feed you can see the marker clearly but for some reason reactivision doesnt like it.

Next I thought I'll try it top down, it's fine close up but after a small distance the block became unreadable in reactivision.

So next up was the other microsoft camera, which is a lot better brightness wise. When I tested out the distance it seemed fine, if a bit blocky.

So I tried an under the table set up with this, and it was pretty much the same as the HD cam. So I tried top down, when I putthe markers on the table it wasnt picking them up at all. Again, it was fine on the source feed, just reactivision being picky. It had this weird interference on all the small dots, I have no idea what caused this, so I just moved on to the ps3 eye.

Now for some reason D9 messes up my ps3 eye with the bandpass filter on. Not sure why I'm guessing it's something to do with the lights they have in there? It reads blocks totally fine in pretty much every other room except this one, it's a mystery. I decided to try it without the filter on.

I thought i'd have a go with top down first this time, this camera picked up the blocks so much better than the others, but it was still not picking them up perfect. I realised that even though I had taken off the bandpass filter the camera still didnt have an IR filter. Turning on the blocks LEDs made them be picked up perfect.

The top one in the photo is the only block that has it's LEDs on, that one has the best set up, its pretty much perfect. the bottom left is too bright, and the bottom right had run out of battery so I don't know, oops. Thankfully I have all the other blocks set up like the top one, just need to sort out the bottom ones.

I thought that maybe since it worked so well top down, it might work with the camera under the table.

Nope!

 

On the weekend I went around the shops trying to get a hold of some reflective tape. I tried B&Q, Homebase, Wickes and Smiths but no where had any. The only option I have is to order online, but by the time that gets here it'll probably be too late and it would just be a waste of money.

I did manage to get a big mirror for quite cheap. This should help with projection.

Aswell as transporting my frame last week, I also picked up my LEDs. Even though I don't have enough time to set up something that would be reliable with touch and reactivision markers I thought it was well worth trying it out to see if they'd work, and it may even help the camera to pick up markers.

Like before I started the slow process of taping them around the acrylic. This took a really long time, for something so simple it was quite rediculous. After a bit of time and a roll and a half of tape I got it sorted.

So I turned it on and set up the camera, and nothing was being picked up. After playing around with the cameras focus and the settings on CCV I had a look at the LEDs. I decided to show you a comparison of how bright the LED shines in my pen and how bright the FTIR ones were shining.

Pen:

FTIR LED:

I'm thinking its a power problem, there isn't enough to make them shine bright enough for what I want. I guess it's possible that there's a fault somewhere in the line, something may have come loose during the move. I'm sure that if they were all shining as bright as they should it would work. When I tested them before (when they were really bright), it worked, and there were only 20 of them. Knowing that it would work is annoying, it wouldnt be reliable but it would work and I could probably get it stable enough to try it out on some touch screen apps.

I've been thinking about how I can fix the block issue I've been having. One thing I need to do is get a clean sheet of tracing paper and see if that helps. I'm wondering if some plain normal paper might be better, the tracing paper I've got has a bit of a texture to it.

Another way is having the LEDs lower down and more secured. I made this quickly:

It's just a piece of cardboard with LED sized holes, which I then covered in gaffertape. This will go inside the box, and the LEDS will poke through the holes. This makes it more secure and stops the battery holder from falling through and blocking any light. I can easily cut another hole in it for another LED, and it's easier to move about and take out of the box than my current set up, where the LEDs are taped the the sides. I should be able to change the positioning fairly easily, cover the old hole and just make a new one.

Next i've been thinking of getting some reflective tape and cutting it into a marker shaped pattern. I've found it quite hard to find how other people have made a marker readable through projection sheeting, and this is my best guess. The LEDs I have left over from my FTIR touch screen may be enough to make it reflect enough. I'm not sure if the LEDs inside the box will help or not, probably not. I'm not really hopeful on this working, but it's worth a go.

The last option is to just use a top down normal camera, rather than an IR one under. With this it means I'd have to get rid of the whole touch aspect, but if it means it's a lot more reliable and actually works, it's the best way to go.

Background

I thought a good idea would be to have a changable background.. Multiplying the rotation value by 10 for more range and accuracy. All the images are loaded on the stage, all except the one you want to display has its y position as -9999, an if statement checks how far the block has been rotated, and changes the images position to go on or off the viewable screen. It's set up in the loop function, so it doesnt get moved around when the marker is moved, it's always on screen, just changes when the block is rotated.

Some lovely place holder images there.

 

 

Trees

I realised that since it worked for the background, it's an easy fix for the tree issue, the trees are set up in the marker array so they only appear when the block is placed down. Now I can use pngs instead of movs which sorts out the transparancy issue easy.

On Tuesday I found out that my blocks weren't working too well with the table top. Today I've been trying to narrow down the cause. First I thought it might be the light levels, but trying it without the table top the block was being picked up fine. The distance I can get on it isn't too great, I'm wondering if another centered LED in the block would help. It may just be a case of positioning, the black dots on the top get whited out after a certain distance, while the white dots don't get enough light. I've moving the led on the black dot side into the middle, but that just means that the top corners arent getting enough light. It could be the camera, a higher quality webcam may give much better results.

The distance I can get seems ok, It looks like there should be just enough to get the full projection in.

I was worried that it could be the acrylic throwing it off, since the acrylic is quite murky and has a few scratches it may be disrupting the IR light as it shines through. But after testing with projection sheeting off it seems that the acrylic isnt the cause. That leaves the projection sheeting. trying with the projection sheeting on gives me this

Again, another LED may help with this, but not enough light is getting through the sheeting. Since projection sheeting was too dark I had a go with the siliconed tracing paper.

Better, but I wondered if it was the silicone throwing it off. I didnt have any plain tracing paper with me, so I had to use the border I left on the siliconed tracing paper.

It's a lot better, but just looks slightly too dark. What I need to do is try it properlly with plain tracing paper, and fiddle about with positioning and an extra LED. Getting everything mounted properlly in the box might help, but I'm not sure if its wise to do that as I'm still unsure about how I want them mounted.