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FTW coding competition

// July 25th, 2010 // 2 Comments » // Games, Thirdimension

My last semesters project along with Manpowers won first student prize for the project “Taxicity”.

Taxicity is the taxi driving mission based game which runs on the real map of Vancouver.

TaxiCity is a game created using Silverlight development kit. The game resources are generated using Open Data from the city of Vancouver. Our team is working with Microsoft Canada and David Eaves to create an engaging and interactive display of freely available/Open Data. The Open Data is used to create the map; Bing Maps acts as a sort of GPS mini-map for the player; and Silverlight is our main platform.

This project is a four month long project at the Centre of Digital Media. Our Client for this project is Microsoft Canada and our mentor for this project is David Eaves.

Game Description:

In the game players will play as a taxi driver in Vancouver, picking up passengers and delivering them to key landmark locations in the city. Real world geometry creates the game map and the route tracking services provided by Bing will be used to guide the player to his/her destination.

Opensource resources that came out with project

You can download the 2d game engine to create silverlight games at http://manpower.codeplex.com/ and other elements of the game and game itself! at http://taxicity.ca/2010/04/download-game-resources/

You can also download a little conversion tool that I wrote in C# to convert from Lat/Long coords to UTM and vice versa.

http://taxicity.ca/2010/03/silverlight-class-for-conversion-from-utm-to-latlong-coords-and-vice-versa/

Generative Art

// July 12th, 2010 // 2 Comments » // antarikShamM, Nature, Technology, Thirdimension

Here is the Generative art that I did for Vancouver Olymics as part of prototyping the concept that our team from GNWC had put forward.

Here is the video

Generative Art from Dhruv Adhia on Vimeo.

This was one of my part of the prototype for CODE live on the ground, Vancouver Olympics. It was for the Dharma project combining the elements to move from abstract to known as defined in our first brief concept.

I used Mandelbrots recurring equations concept, starting from simple circle which forms out of itself forming a bigger circle as a group of complex circles. I was also trying to capture the concept of stars and universe. Universes(group of circles) moving apart and stars(individual circles) bursting forming into new glowing ones.

How wonderful to see math being involved in this wonderfuly driven dynamically moving art.
Created using processing library inside Eclipse
Music courtesy : Karunesh – Call of the Tribes

And here is some inspiration to take from master himself.

Benoit Mandelbrot: Fractals and the art of roughness talk on TED

Organic Interaction

// June 27th, 2010 // No Comments » // antarikShamM, Biomimicry, organic media, Technology, Thirdimension

My pursuit for happiness found in nature continues. I am learning how is it connected to technology or how technology can be tied in the ways nature is? Biomimicry is already on its way. The people at biomimicry institute believe that all the problems that are technical and design challenged are already solved in nature. We just need to know how to translate them to human made technologies. This reminds me of how nature is not just “Nature”, nurturing all of us? Its a intellectual treasure. Answer to most of technical designs are already out there is what I believe too.

For example, let us consider the example of Object Oriented programming in the field of computer science. It consists of 5 things basically,

1) Classes and objects
2) Data encapsulation
3) Data Abstraction
4) Polymorphism
5) Inheritance

All of these are basically found in nature. Everything in nature is in some form of inheritance. Some might have single name but multiple forms. Considering the human body as a form of nature, look how many forms humans have? Infinite?

Also look at the way I interact with daily objects and natural life around me. Its like “I don’t have to think at all”, data abstraction isn’t it? And that’s because everything in nature is encapsulated in the form of objects which has behaviours and properties.

Though, what I wanted to discuss in this post was about what are different aspects of natural interactivity compared to that of today’s cutting edge technology.

Today’s technology, is about seamless interaction which provides information on time. Today’s technology is immersing out like mobile web. Information connected on the go.

But what about nature? For example without the help of any technology, if I plan to go for hiking or travelling across the mountain. It takes effort, adventure, thrilling moments to experience, learn, feel and understand that very interaction. Its result is gradual. Why? I don’t know why. But it reminds me that “Process” is more important than results. I also learn that smiling through struggle = Process

So let us now analyse, what did I learn from that natural interaction. I did not only learn, but also felt which was a bigger learning for me. I learnt about the process and learning about the process. I learnt Struggle is a form of smile . Isn’t that interaction worth while having?

Here is some inspiration to take,

Operating networked devices through natural gestures

// June 23rd, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Networking, opencv, Technology, Thirdimension

Recently I performed a little experiment in combing couple of libraries. My first experiment involves a networked implementation of different applications (device IDs interms of hardware) in time and space. I used MPE and OF to do that and running java server in the back. I wish to combine this with natural gestures to create a small experiment similar to GSpeak which was done at MIT. My intentions are to get rid of gloves. Purely natural gestures without any color caps or gloves. Computer vision has surely come to a point where it can do accurate computation based on patters and depth of any given matter(object).

Demoes

Networking in Time and Space

Networking in Time and space from Dhruv Adhia on Vimeo.

Natural gestures through finger and hand detection

Manipulation of virtual elements through natural gestures from Dhruv Adhia on Vimeo.

To end with a quote from Albert Einstein on the definition of time

“Time is the interval between two thoughts”. I could notice this through the experiment that I did.

Lets say first OSC message represent 1st thought and 2nd osc message represents the second. What if I closed the application before second osc message executes? The other two screens will freeze leaving only partial space into existence. The actual definition of time no more exists.

Humanizing Technology, Part 2

// June 3rd, 2010 // 7 Comments » // opencv, organic media, Technology, Thirdimension

At my company we mostly work with wireless technologies, and by wireless we open our minds to ambient intelligence, computer vision, sensors and so forth.

Today I was performing a small experiment by connecting Unity which is a game engine, openFrameworks which combines all the opensource libraries and Arduino which is a microcontroller. I wanted to tweak animations with analog and digital sensors as input. So today I set a task of playing the animation when LDR (Light dependent resistor) has certain value. I had a threshold as a condition above and below which animation will be played and stopped respectively. In arduino I had a circuit setup with the code and it basically turned on the LED if value of analog sensor was above certain threshold. I had set the threshold to be 512. The value increased if the surroundings were darker. So basically if you place your finger on the sensor, LED will turn on and when LED turns on I wanted to play animation inside Unity.

Videos are in two parts as I had to capture both tangible and non tangible aspects of my experiment. Today I was also trying to combine smile recognition, so that is also included in the video.

Part 1

Arduino+OpenFrameworks+Unity Part 1 from Dhruv Adhia on Vimeo.

Part 2

Arduino+openFrameworks+Unity Part 2 from Dhruv Adhia on Vimeo.

In short the whole experiment is divided into 3 parts.
1) Arduino which serves as input in the form of digital and analog sensors
2) openFrameworks which serves as middleware like a controller between input(Arduino) and output(Unity)
- In this program it takes analog light level inputs from arduino through serial bus and passes the information to Unity. This is one of connecting arduino to Unity which can bring interesting results.
- openFrameworks is passing the center of the human face detected and is also detecting the smile.
3) Unity, which is were we would see output at least in our case at Dsign Interactive. My team consists of creative and art director, so taking advantage of all our skills we thought of integrating our interactive elements with Unity which is a good game engine for doing 3d programming. It can serve for other interactive 3d elements as well.

So now I can think of tangible interfaces to control interactive elements inside the game/animations/digital art exhibit.

This is what I vision in future of hardware and virtual elements integrated seamlessly to bring unique experience. For me the unique experience are more inspiring to create rather than addictive ones. This is one thing that I have learned from Nature. Don’t get attached, but grow with unique experiences. And I think that’s what makes us humans a technology should be mediator driving the purpose. This is in a way an example of biomimicry. A design that is inspired by nature.

Signing off, Humanizing Technology part 2. More parts will come soon.

Bridging Intellect and Spirituality

// May 26th, 2010 // No Comments » // Thirdimension

“Every breath is a new birth” – An interesting thought I came across while I was discussing about smile with a professor named Jagdeesh Arya. His research mainly lies into the field of Quantum Mathematics.

I often have interesting conversation with him as I too am inclined towards Maths from different dimensions. In short, we see math everywhere . Today’s topic was to see Math in a smile , yes a smile! We were wondering what are the conditions for optimizing smile in our life?

Think of three things
1) We don’t know if we are going to have next breath
2) Hence, Every breath is giving new life – A new birth in itself
3) As we celebrate our birthdays and as every breath is a new birth = Celebrate with every breath

During my 3rd term of Masters, I had proposed P_E_A_C_E proposal to the university where I study, to carry out research and development in the field of breathing and creating tangible experience out of it. It was mainly targeted towards those people who wants to have unique inner experiences while doing yoga. To help them do creative meditation while controlling ambience just through their breathe.

For more information, you can download the proposal here.

Organic media – THE WAY FOR HCI

// May 6th, 2010 // No Comments » // antarikShamM, Biomimicry, organic media, Thirdimension

As I talked about Organic media in my last post, What is that organic media has to offer that HCI of today lacks? I think most of the HCI lacks HHI. HHI means Human Human Interactions. HCI brings all the wonderful interactions of providing information just in time with seamless gestures which are so easy to use by any layman.

On the other hand what it lacks is, the consequences of the interaction. What is the takeaway from the interaction? Yes information, maybe not health, maybe not inner joy.

I think of organic interactions in which interactions are answered for the inner world. I think of interactions through computer which would better help human human interactions. I think organic media will help us answer when the technology be used? is it really necessary in time?

There are many questions and its answers which I am after. Its a wonderful journey of interactions when I think of both HCI and organic media and how they are connected or how they can be?

Biomimicry, ecology media and organic media

// May 4th, 2010 // No Comments » // antarikShamM, Thirdimension

There are flood of all these devices in which information is provided just on time, just on need and in a seamless manner with natural gestures. There is yet something to be found in those devices. Its something I experience while meditating 4:30 A.M. in the morning, while playing physical(real) sport, while hiking, while biking, while being with nature. What is that natural media offers and that digital media yet does not offer?

I think possible solutions lie in the field of biomimicry, ecology media and organic media. The last one is something which came off the top of my mind after years of practice of meditation and pranayama. The difference between digital interactions and natural interactions that I find most of the time are

Digital Interactions provides addictiveness in the environment. I can anticipate about what I need, the information, the people, the color and so on.

On the other hand Natural interactions takes time and effort to gain some result. The result is the most unique experience. Its not the addictive one but the unique experience.

So should digital interactions involve unique experiences? I think the answer is certainly yes. Because after all we, our body is made up of organic material and for us to interact fluidly, more organically the interactions should be more natural over time. They should involve some effort, some area of unknowings, some mystery. The humaness of technology.

After all we all question, what is the mystery behind the universe? and that very question drives us forward to look out for the mystery and it reveals over time.

In short, nature is inspiration not only in terms of physical biomimcing but also in terms of process, design and inner engineering.