IMM Class at GestureTek.
Perhaps one of the best things around Interactive Multi-Media (the program that I am swimming through - don't be fooled, swimming is neither easy nor graceful) is that we have the opportunity to develop real projects.
Last term my group (a team of four classmates) made a game for the Girl Guides of Canada. Here's a link to the Girl Guide site but I don't know if our game is up yet. It's called Cookie Frenzy. If you're older than 12 expect to have trouble with it. If you're younger than 12 expect to finish in about 15 minutes.
This term we will be using the ground breaking technology from GestureTek. I enjoyed Vincent John Vincent's history of the company because it reminds me of the time when when bands used to incorporate light shows with their performances. Jefferson Airplane would have huge globs and swirling shapes on an enormous screen behind the band. Early GestureTek consisted of virtual instruments which Vincent John Vincent played from a virtual environment on the stage. Same sensibility. (insert your own reference to drugs here).
From art to advertising, mostly. GestureTek software and hardware is now used to delight children enough to pester their parents into buying the latest toy. But not entirely. The ability to capture real motion in real time and to apply this to virtual worlds will appear in the Vancouver Olympics where users will fly through British Columbia. It's used in educational settings and in rehab medicine; soon to surface on massively multi-player games where it will capture the player's real motion and apply it to an avatar. Yikes! We are the future.
In 1983 with Francis MacDougall. Vincent John Vincent is the “ideas” part of the company while Francis MacDougall leads the development of technology. The company really came into it’s own around 1985 with the introduction of the Commodore Amiga. It was a brilliant machine, and was the first machine that could manipulate a color image from a video camera in real time.
I remember when this machine came out. It was amazing - an entire color television studio control room in a box. It put anything from Apple to shame.
At any rate, when they bought this machine Francis, who studied Psychology, played virtual instruments in a band that eventually toured the world.
I will have the pleasure of using this technology as a member of a three person group which will develop an application for the Ontario Premier’s Awards, a lavish ceremony where awards for the most innovative companies and people are announced. About 300 people will be in attendance, most of whom live their lives on the edge of current technologies. We want to show them a good time and we want to push the GestureTek system into new territory.
It is important to stress that the GestureTek system does not replace or replicate a computer mouse. That is, it does not work well with clicking and dragging. What it does do well is to recognize motion with a rough idea of where that motion is and some idea of where it is going. In short, the system excels at capturing broad movements.
Here’s, roughly, how it works. A video projector throws a computer generated image onto a screen – floor, ceiling, front or rear projection. A digital video camera takes in that same scene as an infra-red image. It helps to have infra-red lighting. When something blocks the infra-red light the system picks it up and the computer software places the motion on the screen.
GestureTek has developed some powerful, yet easy to use software called “Dazzler” that lets anyone project their own images and program what will happen when the system detects movement. Even better, the images and effects can be stacked so that there are many images and effects happening at once. While GestureTek’s pre-made effects work well, it is also possible to develop custom effects in Flash (cs2 only) and to layer these custom effects into the image along with GestureTek’s.
We are looking into the possibility of installing cs4. More to come on that.
All of this means that whatever we make needs to be somewhat simple. I’m sure we will have no trouble learning GestureTek’s technology. And I know that we’ll get great support from Chris Watts. Working in as2 might be a little freaky. It’s a new language and there isn’t really time to learn it. So, in the end, I think we will be working with some simple graphical routines (I found a nice one that draws trees). It helps that there are some nice tweens available in as2.
Our project will be like Chanel – simple and elegant.
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