Usage: Move the mouse around in the flash window to rotate around the model as it assembles. 

Summary: This is for designing boxes and printing out the plans for them. The white frame is an A4 page. Follow the help in the app if you’re confused. Enjoy!

I really like playing with computers and finding out what they can do. Between the power of a modern machine and the wonder of the Internet there’s a vast array of possibilities. But ultimately, if a computer’s outputs are only a monitor and some speakers, all we can do is make coloured pixels or make some sound. That’s starting to change, though. People have built machines that can take a design from the computer and ‘print’ the finished object out of materials in the real world. On top of that, there are services like Ponoko and Shapeways. They take your design, print it out and post it to you for the cost of the manufacture and shipping. If you want one of these machines for yourself , there are even free designs available for the Makerbot and the DIY lil’ CNC, so it’s possible to dabble in the field without sinking tens of thousands of dollars into equipment.

One major point that this movement fails to take into account, though, is that Time Is Not Money. Not quite. That’s why when you offer a service to the public and they ask how much it costs, you need to think about the cost in minutes as well as in dollars. While digital fabrication opens up amazing possibilities, people still need to understand quite a lot in order to do anything useful with it. That takes the kind of time that a lot of people don’t really have. Even if fabrication costs can drop into the single digits of dollars, it’ll only be ‘cheap enough to use’ when the time it takes to put together an order can be measured in minutes instead of days.

Introducing Housifier

That’s why I’m building Housifier, a website and a set of tools to make the act of creating designs as easy as it can be. Toward that end it’s still an experiment – there are trade-offs between control and simplicity, striking a balance between Do As I Say and Do What I Mean. The first app will be a close relation of the box maker on this page, but it’ll allow you to make snap-together boxes like my Arduino enclosure – from there I’m hoping to get more elaborate shapes composed, though some of the math is a little difficult. It’s going to be fun!

A friend of mine bought a Fujifilm W1 a while ago, and has been taking very entertaining stereoscopic images with it.  The only problem with taking stereo pictures, though, is that it’s next to impossible for anyone without very special hardware to appreciate them.

Enter the “Jitter Gif”.  If you take the two images that are captured from the left lens and the right lens and put them into a fast-looping animation, you can get some sense of the space that they capture.  It’s demonstrated really well at 3erd.  While it’s possible to make such Gifs in Photoshop or a specialized tool, it’s often too much of a hassle for people to bother with – Photoshop has a serious pricetag and is total overkill if you just want to see what it will look like.

Toward that end, I have made this generator. Feed in your jpg frames and get out your gif movie.

This is an example of a jitter-Gif of the junk on my desk, although not taken with a proper stereo camera. Even so, you get a much more interesting sense of the objects in the scene! Note that you will want to shrink your pictures down to a manageable size before constructing the animation.

Like many people, particularly technical people, I have a great fondness for Lego that goes back to my earliest memories. It was an endless source of entertainment to design and build my own world out of parts that could be replaced at random. Since I began 3D modelling, programming, and designing interaction, this kind of expressive freedom has remained an important reference point. So when I started thinking about an appropriate context to explain OpenAvatar, it seemed like the best place to start. Before I could make a program that would let you customize a Legoman, though, I had to build a model that was worth customizing – so here it is!

Move the mouse around to view the model from different angles.

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

I’m not the first person to think it would be neat to do this – some people at “Devbook” made one a few years ago which makes a good start, but I think that having a fully-3D version could be a lot more pleasing.

This is what a high-quality render with Depth-of-Field (DOF) and Final Gather looks like. Click on the picture to see the other renders I have done on Flickr. The current Unity3D render is some way off that but I’m confident that I can get it looking closer to this. Watch this space for updates!


[UPDATE] I have also been made aware of the Lego Universe MMO – which looks awesome – but I don’t think it undermines my point about customization. If it becomes necessary to remove this or change the imagery to be more generic then I can cope with that, but for the time being I’d really like to play with the Lego representation!

On a slightly sillier note, since beginning to dabble in Unity about 6 months ago I have been trying to devise small interactive sketches – tests of functionality that represent blocks that could be integrated into a larger project or be expanded upon in order to create a more comprehensive system.  One of those sketches began as the question “How would it look to have an animal that looked at the cursor but in 3D?”  (It turns out that when the Japanese do it, the answer is “very creepy“.)

Though when I do things it often ends up pretty creepy too.

Initially my animal was going to be a cat but after fighting with the Unity3d engine for a while trying to import the skeleton, I gave up on the relatively high-poly model I had and decided to go with something slightly simpler, so I built a dog.  It turns out, though, that the issue was related to Unity (both Indie v2.6 and v3) had problems importing more than one Maya-generated .DAE file per open session. As far as I can gather the issue happens every time, but if anyone knows why it’s happening, or if there is a workaround I would be very interested in hearing about it!

One of the things that computing can enable that has always fascinated me, as I have mentioned in the past, is working on pieces of technology that remove the need to work on other things.  For example, animating character by making simple rules for their behaviour rather than doing keyframe-based animation.  So this is what I came up with as a first step! Move the cursor over the ground to direct the mouse, and the dog, to that location. The faster the cursor goes, the wider the dog’s eyes get. check it out!

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

Well, not the first first step.. the very first step was a tortured-looking stickman spasming as all of his joint rotations rotated against one another randomly but I don’t think anyone needs to see that.

I’d like to thank ‘Mats & Muffi‘ on Flickr for his wonderful photostream of fighting cats… he manages to capture them in a moment when all their grace and self-consciousness is given up for the sake of pouncing, and it makes for excellent texture references!

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

What I’ve got so far is not bad, but surprisingly noisy!
This much higher resolution than the mesh experiment, but Unity can’t get access to the webcam (without a struggle), so doing relief mapping from there will have to wait a while. As always, stay tuned!

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

The big downside, though, is that it requires Java (~17MB download) – and Java 3D (another 7MB) to run, and if you want to use it twice, chances are you’ll have to download it twice.

The only alternative I could really find was Unity3D, a relatively recent 3D engine and development platform.  It’s hardware accelerated, runs on Mac and Windows (no Linux build unfortunately), and has a browser plugin that only runs to about 2.5MB – about the same size as Silverlight or Flash 10, but a lot simpler to install.

Terrific!  The only problem is that it’s a Game Development tool with an emphasis on ‘Drag and Drop Everything”.  As a programmer, I only really started getting into Flash when I could produce stuff entirely in code – while the visual editor is good for animation, I prefer to be able to see exactly what the computer thinks I’m doing.

After mucking about with Unity for a few weeks, I have begun to see how to circumvent the visual editor and work entirely in code, and I have managed to get to this point.  Click in the blue region to draw points, click back on the first one to create an extrusion from it.  If you click clockwise it’ll come out inside out, but making it counter-clockwise will make it normal.

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

While this is pretty much the same as the Flash version I produced a few months ago, the fact that it’s in Unity means it can have realtime lighting and at least 15 times the polygons.  I’m looking forward to taking this further!

If you’re not familiar with what Unity can do, check out the games made by Blurst.  It’s hard to pick a favourite, but I highly recommend Minotaur China Shop!

I believe this could just as easily been produced in processing but I find the lack of assistance from the IDE to be too frustrating to manage.  On the other hand, though, processing / Java is apparently very similar to the kind of instruction set that can be compiled on to arduino micro-controllers.  Hopefully more on that later! In the meantime, here is a video of my anemone:

Note: the jitter is from the capture process – I am using CamStudio to grab the footage, which requires a little more of the system than Java wants to give up.  If you want to install Java3D, you can view the Applet at a much higher resolution.

I’m not sure whether this is re-creating functionality that other people have already put into papervision, but it was a lot of fun! There are some issues with shaded materials, but so far I have bitmap- and colour materials displaying and it’s looking good.  You can try it for yourself!  Like the pale text says – click in the window to add a vertex, press space to close the shape.  It seems to work even on pretty low-powered machines, so give it a try!