The video of my Introduction to Games Programming (Grundlagen der Spieleentwicklung) is now online and available from www.macoun.de and on iTunes. Macoun is the largest iOS and Mac OS X developers conference in the german-speaking world and takes place on an annual basis in Frankfurt, Germany. This session was held on October 28th, 2012 and is in German.
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Pantomime 2.0 in c’t 10/2012
The six page article about gesture recognition has finally come out in c’t issue 10/2012. The magazine is seen as one of the most prestigious technology journals in the German-speaking world with a range of over 1 million readers (Source: Wikipedia).
The article is written in German, here a brief abstract:
“In der von Nintendo, Sony und Microsoft beherrschten Konsolen-welt gehört die Steuerung per Körperbewegung bereits zum Alltag: Von der Pflege des virtuellen Haustiers bis zur Gymnastikstunde im Wohnzimmer gibt es reichlich Einsatzmöglichkeiten. Bei Mobilgeräten wie dem iPad bleibt dieses Potenzial bislang weitgehend ungenutzt. Dabei fällt mit den passenden Frameworks die Programmierung passender Anwendungen gar nicht schwer.”
Preview: www.heise.de/ct/inhalt/2012/10/154
Links to additional content: ct.de/1210154
Video: Visuelle Gestenerkennung @ Macoun 2011
The video of the talk about Visual Gesture Recognition (Visuelle Gestenerkennung) is now online and available from www.macoun.de and on iTunes. Macoun is the largest iOS and Mac OS X developers conference in the german-speaking world and takes place on an annual basis in Frankfurt, Germany. This session was held on October 2nd, 2011 and is in German.
The game demonstrated in the end has been further developed and is available now: Meteora+ on the App Store.
That was SIGGRAPH Asia 2011
This year’s SIGGRAPH Asia took place in Hong Kong and I was lucky to attend and contribute as a Student Volunteer. It was an amazing experience and we were able to attend many great events and meet a lot of lovely people from the industry. Us, that is 4 recent graduates from Bournemouth University plus around 120 other volunteers from across the globe. We also took the time to explore some more places.
More pictures can be found in my SIGGRAPH ASIA 2011 album on Facebook.
Coventry Alumni Speaker Programme
A couple of weeks ago, I got an invite from Peter Every to kick off Coventry University’s brand new Graduate and Alumni Speaker Programme. Peter is the Associate Dean of the Computing Department and one of my former lecturers. More pictures can be found here.
Andy Abgottspon Graduate Talk. December 2011. from computing@coventry on Vimeo.
For more information, visit the creative.coventry.ac.uk/~speakers:
The Department of Computing is proud to present this series of talks by our graduates and alumni. Our graduates end up scattered across the planet in some seriously cool jobs. These are their stories. Andy graduated with first class honours in Informatics in 2010 before undertaking a Masters degree in Computer Animation and Visual Effect at the National Centre for Computer Animation at Bournemouth University. Whist studying at Coventry Andy released the ‘Roll It!’ app for iPhone which went on to sell 6000 units. Andy has recently released Meteora, a mobile game which utilises a version of the gesture recognition library that he developed for his final year project at Coventry. Andy now works as a software engineer at The Foundry – The world leading innovator of visual effects and image processing technologies for the motion picture industry. Read about Andy on aaweb.ch
Meteora+ hits the App Store
The first gesture-controlled 3D airplane game has finally landed in the App Store. The objective is simple: Board the plane and collect the portals in the magical forest!
You can tilt your device like a steering wheel or, on devices with a front-facing camera (such as the iPhone 4/4S or iPad 2), even use gestures to manoeuvre the plane.
Gesture control works by tracking two objects and their respective position. Object recognition is based on color, so ensure the objects tracked have a distinct color from everything else in the picture (face, background, etc.) and you are in an evenly lit environment. For this purpose, colored gloves seem to work particularly well.
The game, originated from two University projects, brings camera-driven interaction to mobile devices in the form of an addictive arcade game for people of all ages. An early preview of this still very young technology was shown in Frankfurt am Main at Macoun 2011, the biggest iOS and Mac developers’ conference in the German-speaking world.
Meteora+ ($3.99) is now available on the iTunes App Store.
That was Macoun 2011
Macoun 2011 is over and I just arrived back in London. It was my first time and I was impressed with the quality of speakers and talks, people’s incredible openness and how brilliantly it was all organised. Also, thanks everyone for their lovely feedback on Twitter. I tried my best to retweet the most relevant tweets regarding gesture recognition, many more can be found using the #macoun hashtag.
The whole session was also recorded on video and will be posted soon. Meanwhile, here are some first pictures and the slides of my talk to download:
Norbert M. Doerner, @cdfinder
photo by @toastedtoast
photo by @kopf_marcus
photo by @kopf_marcus
photo by @futuretap
Last but not least, the video recorded on stage. Thanks Chris, Thomas et al. for this wonderful thing you created!
Gesture Library at Macoun 2011
Less than a week left till the biggest iOS and OS X developer conference in the german-speaking world starts. Macoun 2011 will take place on the first weekend of October in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. I’m proud to be one of the speakers in such an amazing line-up. My session is going to be on Sunday, 11 am (Grosser Saal). So for those developers who still want to sign up and attend, today is the last day!
The talk is going to be about the Gesture Library on the iPad 2 and is going to focus on the concepts and technology behind it. We will also look at some code samples. Here an abstract of the talk (Source: www.macoun.de):
Visuelle Gestenerkennung
Gestengesteuerte Interaktion mit einer virtuellen Umgebung — ganz im Stile von Minority Report — ist dank Front-Kamera auch auf dem iPad 2 möglich. Anhand einer Beispiel-App werden die spannenden Möglichkeiten solcher Anwendungen gezeigt und einige dahinterliegende Technologien und Konzepte erläutert.
I still have a lot to prepare, only so much: People who were waiting for Meteora might really like it 
Procedural modelling in Houdini based on Function Representation
Some of you might have followed the progress of my master’s project in the devlog. The project is finally done and it has been a great learning experience.
“In modern computer graphics, objects are mostly represented by boundary representation models like polygonal meshes. Such models only store information about an object’s boundary and are relatively easy to render and often highly scalable. While this is sufficient for a variety of applications like many types of computer animation and games, other uses require information about volume rather than just surface. Function representation (FRep) allows defining objects as a set of geometric primitives with certain operations and relations. Since objects are defined as mathematical functions as opposed to a list of points, models are resolution independent and can be polygonised at any desired level of detail.
Building upon the current library developed at the NCCA and its Maya plugin, FRep mod- elling functionality has been integrated into Houdini and its node-based environment. The library is developed in C++ using the Houdini Development Kit (HDK) and comes as a set of custom nodes.” (Abstract taken from the thesis)
Houdini Procedural City/Garden
Although this project dates back to February, I just did not find the time to wrap it up and upload it. Find below some sample images, an instruction video and source download.
The goal was to create a Houdini Digital Asset that allows the procedural generation of a garden and city. The tool created offers a variety of options such as scattering based on a map, loading custom geometry, control over height and altitude as well as further controls to visualise and interact with the output.
