Day 25: Animation13

It worked

Surprised I am.

Coding

I coded in space for 70 heads, 12 were taken up with heads of our people, leaving 58 for kids and others. Amazingly it actually worked out - the animated gifs came up fine (view the masterpiece here) and the heads popped up in the AR software as it ran.

The actual photographing for the 123D heads stuff was taking place at a cheetah's pace by Xin, but the 123D processing itself turned out to be the weak link in the workflow. At one point there were 50 complete photo sets, but 123D had only processed 20 of them and anyone getting captured after then would never actually see their head on the day. If we had tested the workflow at full speed beforehand with an eye for efficiency, we would have realised this and perhaps set up multiple computers uploading demos to the 123D cloud, but alas there simply wasn't the time or inclination - it was the last thing on our minds! We were far more concerned with getting the system to actually function. I still can't believe it even worked, I distinctly remember the day I emailed Toby mentioning "oh, wouldn't it be nice if we could incorporate those 123D captures of heads into the AR so the kids can play about with their friends heads...?". In all honesty I never for a moment thought such an idea could actually happen, it was a purely "wouldn't that be nice" moment. Because the amount of updating and automation and coding and improvement the AR software would have to go through to get anywhere near a stage where something like that was feasible was just unthinkable. But we did it, in the end it all just fell into place.

If today has proved anything, it's proved that you can do anything you want to, if you just put your mind to it. Positive thinking and all that gubbins.

Animation13

Animation13, what an event! There were all sorts of crazy things going on. I heard only the highest praises for Gavin's presentation talk thingamajig in the main theatre. Our Raspberry Pi devs turned up at the last minute with some hilarious little toys, the amazing iCub robot came down from Plymouth University (they had immense computers with triple graphics cards and such), the University's Flight Simulator was up in action, you could view the earth in 3D with 3D Google Earth, a 10-year-old showed off the banana piano he had developed, and then you had 123D catch, Robot wars, Raspberry Ripple (people bopping lights dotted about a giant raspberry as they light up), Kinect Music Visualizer, Tom's interactive table, 3D printer, Autodesk demoing astounding graphical jiggery and so on and so forth.

It was quite enlightening to watch the work you had been slaving on for the past few weeks finally burst forth to fruition, with kids having a great time messing about doing various things with people's heads, and the cries of "wow", "amazing" and "that's so cool" reverberating throughout the theatre.

Everything was so full of life right till the end - after it was over the removals team took absolutely everything apart in 45 minutes flat, loaded up and ready to return to Kilburn and the like. I am fairly certain everyone there today will eventually trundle into their homes tonight and just fall flat onto their couches/beds/kitchen sinks in a state of pleasurable exhaustion.



Another episode in the Saga of the Augmented Reality demo draws to a close. Join us next week, as we move on in earnest, to bigger and better things!