The media lab contains a passive 3D stereoscopic projection system. The system consists of 1 MacPro workstation connected to 2 projectors using polarized filters that correspond to matching polarized glasses. A special screen is used to create a stereoscopic image with polarized projections.
The AVID LANShare is a high speed shared storage environment for AVID projects it allows multiple people to work on the same media files and share bins. This tutorial will explain the basics of connecting to the LANShare in the Digital Media Lab at the VUW School of Design.
The models you create in Blender can be printed on the rapid prototyper. But there are a few considerations you need to keep in mind if you want to do this. Below, I’ll show you how to deal with these issues in Blender.
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The Wiimote was designed my Nintendo as the main controller for their Wii console. But, because of its unique sensing capabilities, it has since been picked up for many uses outside of gaming. The Wiimote has two specialised sensors in it:
Even though it was designed for the Wii console, it is possible to use the Wiimote with a regular computer. (more…)
You can create your own tools and effects in Blender using the built-in scripting framework. For example, this Soundtracker demo, and these two scripts for adding detail to a mesh and crumpling a mesh. The Blender website has a page where you can download other examples.
The purpose of this tutorial is to give you an idea of what the Blender scripting framework is capable of, and how you can get started using it. I will reference online tutorials when appropriate, instead of re-writing them. I will also go through a few sample Blender scripts that I have written, to demonstrate different aspects of the Blender Python API.
The tutorial is here. (Unfortunately, I can’t include it in this blog post, becuase it contains code examples which WordPress munches.)
You may have heard of RFID, but what is it, and why might you want to use it? In a nutshell, RFID is a technology that lets a computer detect any tagged objects nearby. Such a system always has two parts to it: an RFID reader attached to the computer, and a number of RFID tags on objects. The reader uses Radio Frequency communications to read the ID numbers of the tags, hence RFID.
In the last tutorial (Physical interfaces: working with bits and buttons) I talked about what microcontroller boards were, and how you might want to use one in a project. I covered the four steps that you need to go through in order to use this board in a project:
In that guide, I showed you how to work through each of these steps, using a simple application (the digital egg-timer) as an example. That device worked stand-alone; that is, once the program was downloaded to the microcontroller, the computer didn’t have anything else to do (except, in this case, to provide power, though even that could be avoided).But what if you want to create something on your computer, and use the microcontroller board to interact with it? Say you have programmed some visual presentation on your computer, and you wanted to have it change according to how bright the room was, as measured by a light sensor. This guide will show you how to use a microcontroller board (in this case Wiring) to do this, with a program developed in the Processing language.
A simple example — light up the world
Our example for this guide will be a simple application that blends two images, with the blend amount depending on the value read from a light sensor attached to the Wiring board. So when the sensor is in the dark, we will see this:
In this tutorial we will be using an external library called JMyron for capturing the camera image. The JMyron plug in must be downloaded and installed into the processing folder for this program to work. JMyron library is available here. This is already installed on the classroom computers.
It is OK to test this program with a low-quality web-cam, but for final testing or presentation, a high-quality DV-Cam is highly recommended.
The program we are going to do is Falling Letters, a program by Dan de Waal. The concept is…
Have a bunch of ‘things’ that can be either letters or graphics. They start at the top of the screen and fall downwards. The screen is an image from the camera. If the ‘things’ hit the image of the person/object in front of the camera, the ‘thing’ will bounce up instead of falling. This will be acheived by detecting the brightness of the pixel at each ‘thing’ and determining whether it is falling or bouncing. This requires a controlled camera environment, such as a white wall for a background and adjusting some program variables depending on camera hardware and lighting conditions.
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