The first babysteps were made in 2005 with the presentation of my final exam:

The Idea was to create a billboardlike display that would “recognize” a person coming by, and start playing interactive content. That content was supposed to approximately be in line with the “customers” needs. Therefore we would have had to categorize people into target groups in realtime only by a webcam and recognition software. That was, I must admit, at least one step beyond of what me and Marc Isele were able to do in a couple of months. So we decided to focus on achievable things: Basicly realtime Effects like Motion tracking and keying.

We dicided to start our work with Processing, an open source Framework for digital artists based on Java. Our first success was realtime keying. By taking a reference picture we were able to separate “new” pixels from the reference pixels. But one had to be out of the cameras range for a while, and it didn’t work with complex backgrounds. We improved the Algorithm so that a reference image was no longer necessary, but the background problem seems to be a very complex one and couldn’t be solved until now. If anyone has solved that Problem and is willing to commit solutions to the Community, he or she can do it right here!

The next step was to program a solid motion tracking Algorithm. Due to the lack of time we decided to keep it simple: We took one single line of pixels out of the webcam image (exactly in the middle of the image). With the keying function we could mark those pixels that were “active”, so it was easy to calculate the middle of the Silhouette of a person standing and moving in front of the Display. Unfortunately it didn’t work with people below a certain height, for example little children. But for the upcoming presentation that was totally ok. I was studying Communication Design. Presenting a work, based on a moreless self developed software was quite unusual (back then), so nobody there would mock about the rather horrible code we wrote or about some teething problems. Now that we are going public this is different. So please be lenient towards us. We are working on object oriented Versions of I.D.

some more and some less interesting HCI’s at CHI 08 (http://chi2008.org/)

Interesting…context-free Television…for my taste to unrandom..but still interesting…check it out

http://www.neave.com/television/

…Nah…Papervision3d is in the focus due to its popularity, but it is by no means the only 3D Flash engine out there. Just last week roxik.com shockt us all with he release of http://ecodazoo.com/.

A very emotional, fluid and engaging experience…which at first glance looks like papervision. Performance wise brilliant site…but in the end its powered by a self-written engine named “Sharikura”.

(http://temp.roxik.com/datas/physics/index.html )
Check out the samples and you will be surprised!

Truly stunning: http://temp.roxik.com/datas/max2007/index.html

Apparently the engine is going to be released open-source soon! (src)

Other 3D Engines out there include the following:

• http://blog.papervision3d.org/
• http://www.flashsandy.org/
• http://away3d.com/

Image Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/oskay/420878465/

Displays are solid. Says who? In the near future a flood of “flexible” Displays will reign in and change the way we look at media. Analyst predict a Billion Dollar market in the area of flexible Displays.

So….flexible Displays producer…if you want to have some talented people really get the most out of your flex-displays…send us some samples

Flexible display market to reach US$2.8 billion by 2013

Source: http://www.fujifilm.com/

Today I saw an interesting article about Face Detection in the German Magazin c’t (http://www.heise.de/ct/08/13/006/). Its one of the topics which is going to play a very important role in Intelligent-Display as well. At the moment there are many applications in C++ and JAVA doing Face-Detection. In the Web-Area (AS3 and Processing) it still seems a bit quiet…most likely because the power of the Languages just doesnt suffice…

In any case some interesting links regarding this topic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphological_image_processing
http://www.face-rec.org/source-codes/
http://wwwiaim.ira.uka.de/computer-vision/ (german)
http://opencvlibrary.sourceforge.net/ (The openCV project is a library which provides function for real-time computer vision)
http://ivt.sourceforge.net/ (Integrating Vision Toolkit)
http://www.fujifilm.com/products/digital_cameras/f/finepix_f50fd/features/index.html (seems that FujiFilm hast integrated a very capable FaceDetection technology in its newer cam models)

Some examples and experiments will follow at some stage…

Very interesting Project powered by Philips. Its called Active-Glass. Basically an “In-Air” Touch Interface using Glass as the display area. Awesome possibilities available here…need to get my hands on that

Nothing new, but something I came by again today and thought, this has to be posted.

Its about the WiiFlash project including samples. The sample seems to include SMS (Motion sensors) as well as the Infrared Sensor capabilities. Interesting stuff for HIC.

Read more

There we go…after months of not presenting our work and Ideas online, we finally decided its time for our own place on the web.

No biggy…we are starting up small and are growing as we go along. We invite everyone to comment, ask, discuss and do whatever seems productive for the cause.

This will be our little playground on the web. We’ll be posting our Project progress here, talk and discuss about new innovative experiments we or others are working on and generally try to generate a dialog between people who “tick” like us.

Lets see where this is headed.

I’m looking forward for some juicy discussions I hope so are you.