Video of an augmented reality painting installation we been exhibiting around Portugal in 2010.
Credits in alphabetical order: Filipe Cruz, Marco Moura, Victor Martins.
Thanks to xDA / AZ & Espaço do Tempo for the support.
Soundtrack by Waste Disposal Machine
As i previously mentioned on my party report, we arrived at Sapo Codebits with plenty of ideas to abuse for the 48h hacking competition. One of them was this brainchild from Mauricio of AltLab. He had built this TV Pong kit a while ago. A completely electronic hardware version of pong which you can just plug into your TV and play. And so he was thinking on the next step, a pong version for the blind.
So Blind Pong is actually a proof of concept that we could be doing arcade games for blind. When you’re blind you exercise your other senses more, your tact, your taste, your smell, your earing. And it’s perfectly possible to do videogames focusing on those. OK, so maybe smell and taste is abit harder to do with electronics, and haptic interfaces are still under heavy research, but the point is you just need extra/smarter sensory input and most videogames could very well be adapted for the blind to enjoy aswell. This is nothing new if you got a blind relative. But most coder / hacker geeks don’t really realize it, used as they are to all the swish swash light and flash that overwhelms most videogames.
The mechanics of the game are simple:
- The ball has an intermitent sound, panning left and right as it crosses the screen. It’s frequency is calculated based on how high on the screen it currently is.
- Your paddle has a constant sound, panned far left. It’s frequency also matches the y position in the screen.
- When the ball bounces on top or bottom it makes a bouncing sound, letting you know it’s changing trajectory.
- When the ball hits your paddle it has a positive sound, letting you know you scored a hit!
- When the ball passes your paddle it has a negative sound letting you know you lost a point.
Simple enough i though to myself as Mauricio explain. And then added that he couldn’t code any software whatsoever. So what the hell, i thought to myself, let’s do this. Then i considered how many times i already coded pong and what a waste of my time it would be to do it yet again. So i headed over to openprocessing / sketchpad and looked for something working. I found this little hack, which had a few bugs and some very dirty spaghetti code, but it had a swing effect implemented – that’s fancy. i like fancy. So i picked that one and tried it out for size to measure how bugged was it really bugged. Well, it was tolerably bugged, nothing that could really jeopardize our dirty proof of concept.
I read up on some minim examples (thats a soundlib that has been absorbed into processing core in case you dont know) and made the ball and paddle go ‘piiiiiiiii’. Tried different wave types to diferentiate each other, and i think it was working ok, but we ended up settling for intemitent sound for the ball instead. Little tuning of ball speed, paddle size and register range and i passed the hot potato to Pedro Angelo.
Pedro’s mission was to connect the paddle to an 10k potenciometer connected to an arduino. I really have no clue what he used and how long it took him but next morning it was working and we cheered. Now all we needed was a controller box.
Luckily the guys in charge of the 3D printing machinery had also spent their whole night fixing one of the broken ones, so Mauricio designed a potenciometer handle and box to put the arduino inside. I was busy with other stuff so i have no idea how long it took him, but he was done in the morning of the project submission.
Quickly did a few extra polish up and Mauricio headed out to talk with the pre-selection juries. Aparently they were abit skeptical but decided to let us present our work all the same. Mauricio insisted that i helped him present so i started conjuring an evil plan for world domination. Mauricio had mysteriously gone blind and we couldn’t figure out why, perhaps it was from the nightpatch from the conference sleeping pack, but we will never know since we didn’t have time to visit the doctor, we were too busy hacking. He had asked us for one final favor, to be able to play street fighter 2 again despite his blindness, i had told him no and instead coded him Pong. Important to point out that the recently announced live online gaming platform requiring fiber connection did not have any games for the blind. Don’t abuse dark humour too much, blind people could be watching hearing us, and that would be rude of us to mock them, not our idea with the proof of concept at all.
So we had our 90 seconds of fame, didn’t win anything from the compo, but we had fun and we now have a blindpong proof of concept prototype to show our friends. Source code available. Let us know if you improve it somehow. Would be cool to see a more polished up version of it. With different gameplay modes and such.
Hello,
I have created a wrapper for CLNUI to get kinect running on java and possibly processing (windows only). I’m in need of beta-testers so if you’re a kinect owner and have the possibility to give it a try, please do and report back.
You can find more information and a link at http://www.pixelnerve.com/v/2010/11/19/clnui-4-java-kinect/
Thank you
Been bottled up at Pavilhão Atlântico for 3 days attending Sapo Codebits 2010, the 4th edition of this event. For those who don’t know, it’s an invite only nerd party organized by Sapo / PT Inovação to push national creativity and talent in the programming world to fool around with latest technologies. 700 attenders were admited this year. 8% of them were foreigners. 3 days non-stop with plenty of talks and a 48 hour coding competition.
Last year i managed to pull off a last minute attendance acceptance to give a talk on the demoscene. I took that wonderful oportunity to learn alot from the other talks and had plenty of fun working on random projects with the rest of the AZ Labs folks present. I was really looking forward to this years event so i was quick on my feet to submit a different talk proposal – about our very own xDA – and follow the site more regularly! The talk was approved and so was my attendance! Rejoice ensued.
So i started a couple weeks ago to draft my talk, and then used last weeks’ tuesday meeting to beta test it with Tiago Serra and V*. Only had a few things left to polish, which i dismissed as last minute work for wednesday night. Unfortunately my wednesday night social life had other plans for me, and decided on a little kidnapping venture celebration involving chestnuts and Jeropiga at V*’s place. Futile promises were made of a sober and early return home whence i would finish up the presentation and pack my things for the next day. Attempts to escape appeared to be futile so i resigned myself to enjoying my chestnut and Jeropiga evening. As usual we did not return home sober nor early. Jeropiga hangovers are not fun. Packing in a rush in order not to miss a train while suffering one aint either. Won’t even bother mentioning about the train ride, you may imagine how cozy that might have been. Between tiredness, nausea and the lucid dreaming i guess intestinal problems were quite welcome. I survived those couple of hell hours somehow only to notice upon arrival that i had no real idea where the entrance to the event actually was. Yes, that was another thing that i was supposed to do on Wednesday, check the site for more concise instructions other than “Pavilhão Atlântico”. Following murphy’s law i considered completly normal that i had forgotten to pack my computer’s battery. Which wouldn’t be necessary if i had people’s numbers on my phone ofcourse. My new phone, since the battery of my last one had swallowed silly into unoperability, ofcourse did not have any relevant numbers to solve this particular predicament. I recalled the good old days of roaming lost in Hungary looking for signs of a demoscener rushing off a train station to assist me finding the bloody demoparty, took a deep breath and proceeded looking. Luckily i spotted a nerd having the same struggle while chatting on the phone with someone and redirecting himself. My cunning sense of oportunity surmounted my constant paramount nausea and i decided to follow him. Alas finally i managed to find the entrance!
Imediately met some familiar faces upon arrival, Filipe Valpereiro of inmotion was struggling to get his entrance, his name has a tendency to never be in a system he claims, so it seems to be true, but he had been indeed announced as giving a talk and holding a physical computing stand where workshops would ensue, so his name should be there. But it seemed not to be. Fortunately my name was alot easier to find in the system, even though we did attempt for some name pronounciation mishaps, the attending guy and I. Soon all was resolved and a nice lady pointed us Filipes downstairs where the event was occuring. Squared frogs printed all over the floor and staircase guided our way.
We descended to find ourselves in a green lit basement room with a few couches and plenty of computers with retro machines, we had entered the retro machine area it seemed. More exploring of it would ensue later. We proceeded directly into the main hall were the O’Reilly book stand and other product presentation booths were mounted, surrounding them were loads and loads of round tables. The 3d model preview was actually quite accurate. The room was rattling with the sound of computer nerds talking. We took a little look around and Filipe Valpereiro soon took off to find someone from Sapo to show him where to set his physical computing stand, while i decided to sit down and kill off my hangover in the first available couch at my disposal.
Following that futile couch resting attempt i decided to venture myself into claiming a resident spot of my own, or atleast get some water while looking around. Didn’t take me long to be recognized by the AZ Labs folks, they already had claimed two tables for them, one to work on projects, the other to showcase the 3d printers. I joined them, went to get some food, failed to eat it – still suffering from hangover – and tried to finish up my presentation somehow.
Finished preparing my presentation just in time! 14:00 was coming fast. Spent some time meeting a couple more demoscene folks who were idling around and when the time came i went to stage C to setup things and give the xDA talk. Not a huge crowd attending, but the people that were attending did seem quite interested. Some, afterwards, even claimed to have liked my presentation! And no one appeared to have notice my horrible hangover, so i was suddenly quite happy and feeling alot better. Well enough to attempt another go at eating something. A reporter for TeK Sapo had other plans and came by shortly after my talk was finished to ask me a few questions. She waited until i was done eating, and i happily replied. This little interaction resulted in an article at TeK, with a video interview of me and all.
Other talks occured simultaneously at the event and through out the three days. I could highlight a few but you’re seriously better off checking the official calendar. All of the talks have the videos linked, so do check them out.
Returning to the AZ Labs corner we decided to list the projects at hand and write about them on the wiki so we knew what we were up against, they were:
GML 1200 and Raphael Generative Content got canceled due to their members being absent from the event. Makerbot maintenance was a success. We started with 3 non working 3d printers in the first day and left with 2 working makerbots! Nothing to present at the compo but a success none the less. 
Leonardo’s project i honestly have no clue what it was about and how it ended up. Howhever, Hug@ree Virtual Hug was worked intensively during the party by all 3 members. Sadly it didn’t get pre-selected to be shown officially during the compo. Probably due to excessive prior art. Not sure. But it was a shame that the latest updates didn’t get presented.
The Enough Records dataviz was initially attacked by Tiago Henriques with a tool called Impure which was also presented in a talk later on. Very interesting tool, abit of a steep learning curve, but has lots of potential. I ended up playing with it some more but didn’t end up with anything worth presenting.
The only of our projects that did get presented at the compo was the Blind Pong idea by Mauricio that PA and i decided to help out with. The idea was to create a prototype of a blind pong, the typical pong with an important twist, the ball and paddle have sound frequencies associated with their vertical position. I got a more or less decent processing coded pong from the web (found on sketchpad.com), it was somewhat dirty code but it had some interesting features like the inercia effect on the ball, so i sticked with it, added some sounds with minim, made it playable for the blind (bigger paddle, less ball speed), passed it to PA to add a potenciometer arduino controller, Mauricio did a casing for the controller and beta tested it abit, i fixed up some of his requests and managed to get persuaded to lead the 90s presentation. People told me they loved the presentation, so cheers for that! We didn’t win anything but it was a project made for fun so we didn’t care much. Will try to finish an info page in the following couple days with code and schematics.
Other projects were also presented. A handful of them using the special version of an upcoming Lisbon API, a very cool initiative bringing Lisbon into the open data age. You can see the video of the whole thing online, but only 10 pulled through and took something home. Seems the top 3 was all folks from DEI, right here in Coimbra, as Diário de Coimbra reports. Overall there were quite some interesting ideas and sites with potential, in different departments.
There also was a security capture the flag competition at Codebits this year, and also apparently won by folks from DEI. Wish there was some sort of debrief session to share hints and tricks, would have been cool to follow. Guess i should also mention a few other activites which took place. I already mentioned the retro computing area and the physical computing workshop stand. Missing a mention is the unannounced DJ concert which i totally missed out but gathering from feedback it managed to upset some folks trying to sleep in the wrong place. And also the Nuclear Tacos ofcourse. I wasn’t brave enough to try them, had enough of a hangover to deal with myself, no need to add insult to injury; but the folks that did try it out managed to get quite a reaction so i reckon mission accomplished!
Other things worth mentioning is the product unveilment of the new smartphone from tmn and the fiber abuser gaming platform of the future jogos.meo.pt, a portuguese investment in the technology that is promising to revolutionize the game market. Also mentioning the games market, i guess it’s worth mentioning that kinect is already hacked and open sourced, So if you’re looking for a cool new interface for your projects, kinect is very fashionable to abuse right now, get it while it’s hot! They were demo’ing one at Codebits
Photos of the event available at fotos.sapo.pt. Props to the orgas for a very cool event!
ps gave a talk about xDA at Sapo Codebits 2010. You can check it here.
We’re sitting next to the 3d printing tables, feel free to come ask us things about our projects or use our swap shop bag
You can expect a party report soon 
Meeting again at the lab.
Things look more or less prepared for our talk at codebits in a couple days. Maybe just need to replace the background with something abit more light, the codebits presentation template feels waaaay too heavy.
V was showing us first hand his latest android .gml experiments that he’s been tweeting about.
Talking about .GML, it’s hard to imagine no one claimed the 1200 bucks prize project, might just be something we work on at the codebits 48h compo. or not.
Message for Evan Roth.
Just a little experiment by xDA at Coimbra DEI SenseWall.
Testing new .gml capturing systems. Without using light tracking! Only a touchwall. ;P
Touchwall tech by tserra+tony
Viscosity GML code by V*
Tagging by ps
Soundtrack by Firnwald (taken from his new album Likethere, available for download at Enough Records)
