spench.net

Here are some excerpts of the presentation Matt Robert and I gave at the October 2010 meetup of Dorkbot Sydney.

If you wish to see all of the photos from the set-up phase prior to the presentation on the roof of my apartment block, please have a look at the album in my gallery.

I a gave presentation at Dorkbot Sydney (24/02/2009) on the Eyesweb Visual Programming Language. It was an overview that exemplified some cool things you could do using live video, iPhones (with accelerometers), mrmr, OSC, and multiple Eyesweb nodes on a network.

09/01/2007 - SBS World News:

August 2006 - Channel Nine News:

This series of pages summarises the contribution I made to TVisionarium Mk II, an immersive eye-popping stereo 3D interactive 360-degree experience where a user can search through a vast database of television shows and rearrange their shots in the virtual space that surrounds them to explore intuitively their semantic similarities and differences.

It is a research project undertaken by iCinema, The iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research at the University of New South Wales (my former uni) directed by Professor Jeffrey Shaw and Dr Dennis Del Favero. More information about the project itself, Mk I and the infrastructure used, is available online.

I was contracted by iCinema to develop several core system components during an intense one month period before the launch in September of 2006. My responsibilities included writing the distributed MPEG-2 video streaming engine that enables efficient clustered playback of the shots, a distributed communications library, the spatial layout algorithm that positions the shots on the 360-degree screen and various other video processing utilities. The most complex component was the video engine, which I engineered from scratch to meet very demanding requirements (more details are available on the next page).

Luckily I had the pleasure of working alongside some wonderfully talented people: in particular Matt McGinity (3D graphics/VR guru), as well as Jared Berghold, Ardrian Hardjono and Tim Kreger.

This is the presentation we gave to demonstrate Teh Engine during the final Computer Graphics lecture in front of a full lecture hall of ~300 students.

(Thanks Ashley "Mac-man" Butterworth for operating the camera.) Please excuse my 'ah's and 'um's - it happens when I'm really tired. Was up for >48 hours.

It should be noted that I fixed the physics so the car behaves properly. Please read the previous page for more detail about the engine.

During lunchtimes at high school I created many time lapse sequences of the harbour and the evolution of cloud formations. I filmed on a video camera at then sampled one frame every X seconds to achieve the speed up.

The frames of the video above were actually captured on my digital still camera (for extra quality) using the accompanying remote capture software.

I own a Rocky Mountain Hammer mountain bike - it is certainly the best way to get around the city. I have had it stolen once (I was bike-jacked, which involves being pushed off while riding and then being punched in the face) but was very lucky as the police found it some months later. Thus we have been re-united!

I have published many videos on YouTube. The most popular one (in fact the first one I ever posted) was only viewed ~1,750 times. I'm not having delusions of grandeur, but I was wondering what sort of video could be more popular? Obviously if it's original content then that would mean personal success. However for the sake of this experiment, what subject would quickly attract viewers? One evening I was watching David Letterman and the answer struck me. Two words: Paris Hilton. (Forgive me: I never thought her name would be perpetuated in my webspace. I have my own...arhem...negative opinion on her rise to 'fame', what she symbolises in this age, etc, etc - but that's not the point of this experiment.)

I posted the following three videos (rather funny excerpts from Letterman). The first of the videos' view count quickly shot into the mid-thousands and now has come to relative rest at 20,000! That's popular culture (and many other things) for you.