Natural Feature Tracking Awesomeness!
I put together a little natural feature tracking test based on the open source bazAR library. It actually works! This test detects and tracks an image of the iMed website displayed on a monitor (assures near perfect lighting conditions).
Flash Paper Snowflake Creator
Some talk spread through the office last week about creating a flash paper snowflake editor (kinda like this one by Barkley) for use on a viral holiday e-card. I've been meaning to dig into flash a bit more, so I thought I'd give this a shot.
Here are the results (download source here):
Some early tests
I think it's time to post a couple of my early AR tests for all to see.
Using ARToolkit, I was able to create and track some custom iMed glyphs and comp some simple VRML objects over them. Though the glyphs are in color, this is only the illusion of full color/natural feature tracking. ARToolkit is still just tracking a thresholded binary version.
AR strategy
I've started hacking away at this AR stuff by evaluating a whole bunch of different technical strategies. After downloading and testing different open source demos and libraries, I believe I've decided on one.
Let's play with AR
I was asked to do some R&D with augmented reality (AR) for future kiosks. The challenge is to match or outdo the AR apps that are already being sold commercially by production houses like Exhibit Engineering...oh, and we need that done in about a month...I think I can handle that (wish me luck).
Mad Tabber - Easier Tabbed Menus in Drupal 6
In Drupal 6 the menu system got a complete rewrite so I've been wanting to look at that for some time.
There were several things in the Drupal 5 menu system that always bugged me or were hard or impossible to do in a clean one.
- The $may_cache handling in hook_menu. This mechanism was confusing and had weird side problems like these items did not show up in the menu admin UI and so on. In Drupal 6 $may_cache is gone. The entire menu is built in one pass and only once for the whole website not per user.
Adding a New Table (Primary View Type) into Views2
Anyone who has done any serious development for Drupal has heard of and used the Views module. This article assumes you are familiar with Views basics and configuration.
Views2 is the updated version of Views for Drupal 6 and I think its fair to say its completely new. Sure a lot of concepts are still there but the UI is completely different and whats more is that under the hood its a complete rewrite. So throw out what you knew about Views because it is a whole new game.
Inline Form Error Display in Drupal
The Request:
Move form errors inline in the form next to each form input field that is in error rather then just putting all the error messages at the top of the page in the $messages variable output of the page.
Cooliris + Drupal = CoolirisIfy
I recently discovered the Cooliris 3D Wall add on for FireFox because my coworker, Michael, watches the new module releases for Drupal like a hawk. He pointed me to the PicLens module for Drupal which makes hooking up the CoolIris add-on to any Drupal site a snap. I hooked up Cooliris to a couple of our custom sites and Drupal modules in about 20 minutes.
I presented Cooliris+Drupal at the August meeting of the Iowa Drupal Group and another coworker, Jeff, suggested it would be cool if you could look at any feed in Cooliris not just ones your site was specifically publishing. Cooliris expects certain tags in the RSS feed and most sites don't have those in there yet so they can't be viewed in Cooliris. With that simple thought out load was born a little lab project we dubbed CoolirisIfy.
