frey

• Adérito Fernandes Marcos – interface culture
  involved with the Artech Initiative – Minho-Galicia area (Spain/Portugal border area)
  (tags: iberia art)
• FRONTEIRAS 2007
  Galicia and Portugal collaborative project
  (tags: iberia art)

• S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System
  slideshow that runs xhtml/javascript on a webbrowser.. nice
  (tags: slideshow presentation)

Over the last two and a half weeks I have been at Visualizar, a project hosted by the ever-awesome Medialab Prado in Madrid, Spain, the same people behind the Interactivos workshops, one of which I participated in earlier this year.

I’ve been working on something called Mail Garden. Mail Garden visualises the contents of one mailbox (read in the mbox format for open goodness) on your computer as a forest of trees. Each tree in this forest represents an email, with the height of the trees reflecting the length of the mail. Moving your mouse over a tree shows some details about the email. The overall aim is to create a view of your mailbox that encourages a more reflective kind of consciousness.

Go to the Mail Garden project page for more…

• Human Computation
  Luis von Ahn – interested in using game-like interfaces to solve hard problems
  (tags: ludic human computation)
• The good-looking textured light-sourced bouncy fun smart and stretchy page
  computer graphics algorithms
  (tags: graphics code algorithm)
• Perlin noise – Wikipedia
  Ricard recommends Perlin Noise
  (tags: code algorithm graphics)
• Shadow Robot Company: Air Muscles overview
  Air Muscles work very much like human muscles, and are powered using compressed air. nice! £10 for the 6mm version, which ‘has the strength, speed and fine stroke of a finger muscle in a human hand’
  (tags: electronics actuators)

• Arabic Reading Course
  an online course – start with the reading, then do the speaking
  (tags: arabic learning)

I put this together this morning, hope you like it.

Zoom System in Processing

It’s a zoom system that operates very much the one in Ableton Live’s sample viewer. It’s written as a Processing applet. Click and drag to zoom and scroll: drag up and down to zoom, left and right to scroll. The little guide bar at the bottom also works.

• S. Hashimoto and the research about KANSEI in Japan
  KANSEI means the expressive/implicit part of gesture recognition
  (tags: art expressive implicit)
• Luxeon power supply
  (tags: electronics)

Here’s a nice algorithm to return, as a percentage normalised against the area of the first, the overlap area between two rectangles. It was originally designed to track blob bounding boxes over time: you’d call GetRectangleOverlap passing in the numbers for the bounding rect in the previous frame and the bounding rect in this frame, and if it returned you a number > some threshold (eg 0.5) you could safely assume the two bounding rectangles tracked the same object.

Note: there seems to be some problem with the return statement; thanks go to Almo for pointing it out. I’m sure I meant something else but with have to dig into old code to find out just what. In the meantime use this one..

float Util::GetRectangleOverlap( float minx1, float miny1,
    float maxx1, float maxy1, float minx2, float miny2,
    float maxx2, float maxy2 )
{
	float overlap;

	if ( minx1 > maxx2 )
		overlap = 0.0f;
	else if ( maxx1 < minx2 )
		overlap = 0.0f;
	else if ( miny1 > maxy2 )
		overlap = 0.0f;
	else if ( maxy1 < miny2 )
		overlap = 0.0f;
	else
	{
		// calculate overlap area
		int x_overlap = MIN( maxx2, maxx1 )-MAX( minx2, minx1 );
		int y_overlap = MIN( maxy2, maxy1 )-MAX( miny2, miny1 );
		overlap = x_overlap*y_overlap;
	}

	float area1 = (maxx1-minx1)*(maxy1-miny1);
	float area2 = (maxx2-minx2)*(maxy2-miny2);
	float area_norm = (area1+area2)/(2.0f*area1);

	// convert to a percentage
	// return overlap/area_norm;
	return overlap/area1;

}

• Anne Galloway – Ubiquitous Computing & the City (Draft)
  pervasive computing article from t
  (tags: pervasive comuputing)
• Proboscis | Diffusion eBooks
  books about spatial perception &c
  (tags: research)
• Paul Virilio – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  (tags: research speed)