Thought, research and discussion about 3D space
I visited the Kinetica Museum recently, where I saw lots of interesting artistic pieces. I have some pictures and a video to show of that visit.
Gregory Barsamian piece
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| Kinetica exhibition |
These are some pictures I took, they link to my Picassa album.
For my 3rd etude I will explore different ways you can interact with applications. Here I will focus my work on Google Earth, but will also look into other applications like games, hardware(Nintendo Wii)etc. The reason for this etude is that I think it’s important to have a an easy and simple interaction with the application you use, and I will explore different interfaces and look into different platforms that use interesting and new form of interfaces.
I think the nintendo Wii remote is a really interesting device, and a lot of people have hacked to to make it work for various applications. I will try researching about using it for Google Earth. People have already done this, so let me first show a video of how this guy is actually controlling Google Earth with a Wii remote:
After doing some digging, I found out that you need a programme called GlovePIE which is a free programme created by some people that are interested in controlling a computer/programmes with various devices.
After having watched that video with the person controlling Google Earth with the Wii remote, it doesn’t seem that intuitive..so I tried with my Wacom pen tablet instead. And I must admit is really is quite easy and fun to control Google Earth with this device. You just move the pen around to drag the earth and move it around. I click the button on the pen and do a up or down motion, which is currently configured as a right-click, to either zoom in or out depending on the movement of the pen(up or down).
Apparently the city of Berlin has created 40.000 3D models for their city, covering about 10% of the city in Google Earth! This is very impressive, and I have posted a video from youTube to show 3D Berlin. The official site for this project is http://www.3d-stadtmodell-berlin.de/3d/en/seite0.jsp
The 2nd etude will be about Google Earth, and how I could implement 3D models on google map. Ian Grant showed us SketchUp in the class, which seems like a really nice and easy program to design 3D models of buildings.
It’s a tool which is designed with Google Earth in mind. You design the 3D models, and can then share dem online for everone to have a look at, inside of Google Earth.
I have posted this video from youTube to show how to work with SkethUp:
I have decided that my first etude will be about animatronics, because I think it’s an interesting subject.
To start things of, I will define what animatronics are with the help of Wikipedia and an online dictionary:
Dictionary.com has the following 3 result:
- the technology connected with the use of electronics to animate puppets or other figures, as for motion pictures.
- The technology employing electronics to animate motorized puppets.
- the construction of robots to look like animals (developed for Disneyland)
Wikipedia.com has the following info:
“Audio-Animatronics is the registered trademark for a form of robotics created by Walt Disney Imagineering for shows and attractions at Disney theme parks, and subsequently expanded on and used by other companies. The robots move and make noise, generally speech or song. An Audio-Animatronic is different from android-type robots in that it works off prerecorded moves and sounds, rather than processing external stimuli and responding to them. Animatronics has become a generic name for similar robots created by firms other than Disney.”
I think those two sources gives a pretty good idea of what animatronics are, I found a video on animatronics.org which shows it as well.
