At the media computing group I was asked if it would be possible to detect 3D objects in the video stream of the Kinect camera. There is previous work by Chavdar Papazov and Darius Burschk on detecting 3D objects in noisy and occulded scenes, which uses a RANSAC based algorithm to detect objects in depth images.
3D Object recognition in 3D scenes using CUDA
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Talk: User Experience Design in Games
Back in 2009 I have attended the first Devmania conference. The Devmania is the successor of the famous Dusmania conference of hobby and indie game developers, and there were a lot of interesting people and cool talks.
I decided to get over myself and give a talk on my passion: User Experience Design.
So I wrote a lot of emails to game developer gurus and teams of professional UX designers to receive some great stories about how UX design is applied in computer games. I received a few answers and with some more research I put up a nice talk about my findings.
I gave a short glimpse into the work of professional user testing studios like Microsoft User Research and Bolt Peters, followed by a few tools that could be applied by the audience in their own games.
These tools were taken from a very diverse set of professions. The first is inspired by Katy Sierras talk on creating passionate users, which was held on the south by southwest conference. The second one is based Seth Godin’s concept of tribes in modern marketing, while the last one is taken from robotics, where the phenomenon of the uncanny valley was first observed.
The slides look very simplistic, but it was a hell lot of work to achieve this. I still think this is my best presentation design so far.
Unfortunately the video recording of this talk is not online anymore.
Pencilcase on a birthday party
Interesting alternative to rock concert photos. Yesterday my favorite local band from Aachen was playing on a pretty big private birthday party. Energy saving garden lamps instead of an array of 500W concert lamps, and a relaxed acoustified set instead of rock action. But still Pencilcase was awesome and I even got a few nice shots.
The early shots were still pretty easy technically, with F/2.0-2.8 I got perfectly lit pictures even during dawn. They look like I shot them during daylight, but it was already in the middle of dawn.
But as it got really dark, I had to switch up to ISO3200 even with F/1.4. The pictures got noisy and the lamps in front of the band were causing glares.
I used my usual trick for noisy concert pictures, and gave them some kind of grunge look. That means:
- Boost clarity
- Boost Sharpening
- Adjust B/W mixing to highlight the musicians and create strong contrasts
- Adjust tone curves to give a very strong contrast
My favorite pictures from this shooting:
The whole set is on facebook: Pencilcase on a 50th birthday party
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Talk: Progressive Photon Mapping
A few weeks ago I had to give a talk at the seminar of the computer graphics and multimedia institute of Prof. Leif Kobbelt. He chose the topic Progressive Photon Mapping for me and it turned out to be a really interesting technique for global illumination.
I used my usual presentation template as I really like the style and up to now it proved to be very well accepted. The hardest part was to visualize the algorithms, especially the light paths. But I think I did a pretty good job, as people told me that this was much easier to understand than the usual bullet point and textual description.
You can find the original paper for this technique at the website of the University of San Diego: http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/papers/progressive_photon_mapping/
And here are my slides:
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Interactive Particle Tracing for Ventricular Assist Devices
This was one of my first big projects during my work at the Virtual Reality Group RWTH-Aachen. The DeBakey ventricular assist device (VAD) is basically a blood pump which is implanted on a human heart and the big challenge for engineers is to provide a pump layout that does as little damage to the blood cells as possible, while still providing enough flow to assist the heart.
To improve the engineering workflow the Virtual Reality Group developed technologies to visualize the blood damage of cells flowing through the VAD. As the blood damage estimation is a complex calculation, the software was not able to allow interactive seeding of particles, i.e. placing new blood cells into the device while the application is running. This had to be defined beforehand followed by a few hours of pre-computation.
Create your own Marketing WordPress Network
In the last days I have been experimenting with WordPress Network, to get them running for my marketing blogs. A WordPress Network allows you to host many blogs in one WordPress installation. So it is perfect when you have a lot of blogs to manage.
Good thing is, you only need to install and configure your plugins once for the network, so you can setup a new blog within minutes.
So what are the requirements?
- File Caching – We will have many views but not much dynamics. So I want each page to be pre-cached automatically.
- Fast Indexing – The faster I get indexed, the sooner I can rank
- Spam Filter – Especially marketing blogs get a lot of spam by people looking for backlinks. I don’t want to care about those.
- Domain Mapping – A new domain for each blog
Of course we will need some additional plugins for Google Analytics, On-Page SEO, etc but they have to be configured for each blog separately.
Setup a basic WordPress Network
Okay, first we need a clean wordpress installation. To enable the blog network functionality we need to adjust the wp-config.php file and add the following line:
define(‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, true);
After this you can log in into your backend and will find the Network page in the Tools menu. Use this to install your network and follow the instructions on the next page, as you need to make some changes to wp-config.php again, as well as to your .htaccess file.
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Instant Public Link for Dropbox
I love dropbox! And I found it to be extremely useful to quickly share a file with someone I am chatting with.
But still the process could be even easier. So I created a small, but useful tool.
Drop a file to InstantLink and you will have a URL to that file in your clipboard. Ready to paste in a chat windows.
That’s it.
Features
Well it’s a simple application. So don’t expect too much.
- Automatically Detects Dropbox Path.
- Sorts files into Public/year/month folders. To keep some order.
- Effortless setup. No config files editing or whatever.
Setup
Just use this link to install it:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/346381/InstantLink/InstantLink.application
It will ask you to paste a some public link of yours to find your Dropbox ID. That’s all, you will find a shortcut to use on your desktop and in your send-to menu.
Usage
Well. Just drop files to InstantLink.
- Drop a single file: Uploads the file via Dropbox and puts the link to your clipboard.
- Drop multiple files: Well, the same. You will get multiple links in your clipboard.
- Rightclick any file and select SendTo->InstantLink will get you the same results.
- Just run the tool without dropping a file: Will open the explorer in the current Public/Year/Month folder.
That’s it. Have fun and leave some ideas suggestions in the comments!
New Psycho-Cybernetics
I started to listen to the audio book version of the New Psycho-Cybernetics. The description and reviews looked very promising, describing Psycho-Cybernetics as the grandfather of all self development techniques. Hearing the first 1 1/2 CDs (about 2 hours) I found myself more annoyed than inspired.
Until now I did not hear not much more than:
- Psycho-Cybernetics is the miracle that helped million of people
- It is the base of absolutely every self-development technique
- Whoever is successful is applying this, he maybe just does not know
- At works without exception for everyone
- Your self image controls who you are and who you become (the only hint what Psycho-Cybernetics actually is about)
I love self development as well as life hacking, and yeah sometimes things are oversimplified or at least simplified models for the brain or our bodies are used to create simple and useful results. And yeah sometimes this even sounds a bit “esoteric”, but it is usually all backed up by scientific research and studies.
But seriously for me this book is one step too far into the “esoteric” direction. The book did not mention any scientific studies backing up the mentioned thesis, up to now there were only examples of people who used these techniques and that is, at least for me, not enough. Finding explanations that “sound nice” also does not do the trick for me.
The extreme and absolute formulation of the results of this book confirm this conception for me. There are no dead-simple solutions that work every-time, everywhere and for everyone. This sounds way too oversimplified for me, yet it is repeated over and over again.
Has anyone read this book? Am I wrong with my rating of this book from the first parts? For now I am not motivated to hear the book any further.. but please correct me if I am wrong.
Dan Pink – Drive
“The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”
Is actually not surprising to me at all. I have heard the first 1.5 hours of the audio book and find myself annoyed by the repetition of the same argument over and over again. Extrinsic motivation (mostly.. paying someone to do something) can have negative effect on motivation, performance and creativity.
Well this is something I experience day by day. I cannot force myself to do creative work just because I am paid for it, I rather perform best when I feel like doing so. When I am in a creative flow and you just can’t buy a creative flow.
Anyhow, as it seems this book is rather directed to business owners and managers who stick with the classic business models. Not to a student who spends lot of his time to work on projects he deeply enjoys.
Has anyone read this book? Are there any thrilling insights in the later parts of the book? I am definitely not motivated right now to read/hear any further ;)
C# Style Properties in C++?
I was in experimenting mood again. I got annoyed by writing the following code over and over again:
class Test {
private:
int myVar;
public:
int GetMyVar() { return myVar; }
}
Sometimes additionally to that a Setter method which processes or checks the values.
So how to make this more compact? With macro hacking! jippie! Yep macros are bad, but sometimes its nice to make some experiments, so here we go.
Posted in Experiments 2 Comments