Sunil's Blog

Welcome to my first blog post, in the post-IMM era! Right after the IMM Open house and volunteering at FITC 2008 Toronto, I parachuted out of Toronto with my girlfriend for a much needed vacation to Paris (France not Ontario). I had a relaxing vacation away from my computer for 8 days.

While I enjoyed the wine, crepes with nutella and croissants, I also stumbled across something neat at the Adidas Store on the Champs-Elysées while I was there. They had what looked like a Gesture Tek installation right in the middle of the store, where you could design your own shoe. These kids ran up to the screen thinking it was a touch screen, a la iphone. They were clearly lacking the appropriate training required to operate such a display! Having come across Gesture Tek displays before in our multimedia pioneering class, I decided to put on a clinic. It was funny seeing people stop in their tracks while I created my own personalized Toronto Raptors sneaker, using a user interface that screamed Minority Report. After you create your shoe, you could save it in a gallery and walk over to a “virtual mirror” and see what it looks like on your foot. Unfortunately, the “virtual mirror” was broken, so I only got to play with the interface. Thank you to my wonderful girlfriend Kerrie who filmed me looking like a dork.

embedded by Embedded Video

I’m already thinking of ways to port this over to a Papervision 3D project using Dan Zen’s motion cursor classes as a user interface. You have already seen examples of the motion cursor classes used in Rock Revolution a project I built with my classmate Nick Poison. I don’t think motion cursors have been implemented with Papervision 3D yet, so hopefully I’ll come up with something neat.

So here’s my first attempt at creating 3D panoramas in QTVR and Flash using the Interactive Multimedia Lab as a demo. I used a “point and shoot” Canon PowerShot and a tripod.

Things to note:
- Flash file isn’t optimized for the web
- The top and bottom panels are blank
- Limited to a cube, which forced me to squish the photos
- The QTVR file is a lot lighter in file size

QTVR: (Needs Quicktime Plugin)
http://www.suniljohn.com/projects/panotests/qtvrs.html

Flash w Papervision3D and AS2:

http://www.suniljohn.com/projects/panotests/simplePanorama.html

I would like to figure out how to shoot the ceiling and floor to make the cube complete.

Here’s a link to my portrait assignment. It’s still a work in progress. The beat animations and song choice are a more of a commentary on the hip-hop world reaching back and getting great vintage stuff, than of my personality. The picture is my take on Jay-Z’s “The Black Album” cover art. I took it with the webcam on my MacBook Pro. The hat is a Michigan State Spartans hat that I picked up in a bargain bin for $5. I just liked the “S”. The song is “Can’t Forget About You (Featuring Chrisette Michelle)” by Nas. Carlos mentioned that the record looked like a coin, so I replaced that bitmap with a better bitmap. I chose a Decca LP, because that was Nat King Cole’s label (the sample in song was taken from Nat King Cole – Unforgettable). If you press shift + d you can see the records spinning clearly. I used shape tweening to morph between the cards suits (clubs, spades, diamonds, and hearts). My portrait is interactive in that you can drag the beats around the stage.

http://www.suniljohn.com/projects/portrait/portrait2.html