Thinking digital

TDC 2009 (Thinking Digital Conference) took place last May:

Thinking Digital is an annual conference where the world's greatest thinkers and innovators gather to inspire, to entertain, and to discuss the latest ideas and technologies.

One of the speakers was a very well known researcher in HCI (Human Computer Interaction), Johnny Chung Lee, famous because his works using wiimote controller.

In the following video, Johnny summarizes his work with the wii controller, and then describes what's going on in HCI researching:
- Mixed reality devices (e.g. Microsoft Surface, augmented workbenchs)
- 3D displays (4D light field display)
- Flexible displays, ink paper displays...
- Haptics (e.g. touch in the air, vibrating screens)
- Tracking the position of the camera using computer vision
- Brain sensing (e.g. a car monitoring the human brain to use its answer against dangerous situations)
- etc.

Thinking Digital 2009 Talks: Johnny Chung Lee - Research into Interface Technology from Herb Kim on Vimeo.

A very good BBC article about AR applications

With the title Mobile phones get cyborg vision, BBC describes the present and future of some current Augmented Reality applications. It is worth seeing it.

Some interesting videos about the history of CGI

Looking for new material for my students I have found some interesting videos about the history of CGI (Computer Generated Images).

This first one summarizes the use of CGI in the film industry:



The second and third, two parts of the same, describe the evolution of CGI from its beginning to nowadays:



Click here for the second part of the documentary.

An online Augmented Reality application really useful

Although we have been able to see a lot of Augmented Reality (AR) applications recently, some even online (based on Flash, for example), it is not common to see some real useful examples. I mean, examples where the use of the AR is really interesting and contributes to the final product.

A good example of this is the U.S. Postal Priority Mail with its Virtual Box application. Visit their website, and see the demo video to get the final idea.

"Which box fits your shipment?" By using AR, the user can print a pattern, and can visually explore if the different box sizes are or not appropriate for the object the user want to send. The boxes are visualized with transparency, so they can visually compare the size of the object to send vs. the box. Great and useful.

Another video about Microsoft's Natal project

Another video of a real demo of this new project from Microsoft called Natal project.
This time, it's not an advert but a real and live demo.

'We' are the interface !

It's really impressive what Microsoft is preparing under the codename 'Project Natal'.

Is this the Wii killer ? I don't know but if it works as in the demo, we are going to go beyond the actual standards ...

Processing at Eurographics 2009

I'm still attending to Eurographics 2009 at Munich. Eurographics is the most important conference on Computer Graphics in Europe, and this year, in the education programme, I was showing to the audience the benefits of using processing in an introductory computer graphics course.

The material I use in this course is here.

The slides I showed at the conference here.

There's no doubt that the advantages of processing in a lot of different areas are awesome, but it is especially worth when we talk about teaching computer graphics. I'm still working in processing and learning as much as I can.

Envisioning the future ...

If there's something really difficult is to predict the future. Microsoft has tried to do it in this video.
What it seems true is that pervasive computing and advanced GUI are going to be an essential key.

Enjoy the video ... what's your opinion ?

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&amp;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5&amp;showPlaylist=true&amp;from=shared" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage">Video: Future Vision Montage</a>

An introductory course to processing at Lahti

This February, from the 5th to the 12th, I have had the wonderful opportunity of being in a awesome country, Finland. In particular, I was invited to teach a short course in Processing, at the Lahti University of Applied Sciences.

It was a very good chance to see what a student is able to learn about processing in just 10 hours. My finish students didn't have any computer graphics background, but all had previous knowledge in programming.

The result has been very satisfactory, actually, I am now correcting an exam they had to solve after the course. Good marks.

It's clear now that processing is a very interesting alternative in any introductory course in computer graphics.

Two interesting OpenGL links

Although I'm not working on OpenGL recently, I have just found today two interesting links.

When I have to develop in C++ and OpenGL, I have to do it normally for Windows, so I have to deal with MFC and OpenGL. I have a sort of an initial template, but it is much better to let the VS 2008 wizard to allow us to create an initial OpenGL + MFC project. Thanks to Dave Kerr we have here how.

From time to time, I also develop in C# and it is always interesting to use OpenGL. There are several alternatives, but SharpGL seems to be all the majority of us need. Here a brief article about it.