Kinect Korner

Posted on May 18, 2011 by Joel Adria

Kinect Korner was an exploration of the capabilities of the Microsoft Kinect motion-capture device. At the time I had developed some basic functionality for possibly inclusion in The Gertrude Stein Project presented at the The Timms Centre for the Arts. While I assisted with other video technology development in that show, Kinect technology was not used.

Thus, the Kinect Korner project was a personal one, as I was interested in understanding the limits and capabilities of Apple’s Quartz Composer, as well as exploring what was possible with the Microsoft Kinect for submission to the annual Portfolio Show. Here’s a video I shot during development that explains a bit of how the interaction works.

The Kinect data is interpreted using some middleware to create skeletal points of your body in 3D space. Using the tryplex toolkit for Quartz Composer, a skeleton view of your body is easily displayable. From there, the software can check to see if your arm is moving through pre-designated boxes. If it does, it will send the signal to a separate composition that displays the Film Strip viewer to move forward or backwards on the film strip. If no person is available to play, the film strip will recognize this and advance by itself.

For the installation we had both a local Film Strip display on an LCD TV, and a second computer running view-only on the grid to a projector. At times they were out of sync, but each were controlled using simple OSC commands without any video signals being sent between the two. Cool!

Kinect Korner Main ScreenKinectKinect Korner Main ScreenLayoutSkeleton DetectionProjector
Mac MiniOreoBookProjection Screen

Be sure to check out Kinect Korner, a set on Flickr.

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The new jole.ca!

Posted on May 9, 2011 by Joel Adria

jole.ca on the iPad, while still under development

After almost a year of sitting on a fresh design for jole.ca, it’s finally here!

The first thing you’ll notice is the lighter, more magazine-style layout of the site. In some ways it is very reminiscent of my last custom-made theme for jole.ca (the one that came before aerogold), which incorporated the horizontal navigation and emphasis on non-blog content. Since then, I’ve learned more about web design, WordPress, modern web standards and conventions, all ideas that have grown out of working on WordPress sites in the past couple of years, notably with Trevor van Gorp of Affective Design.

Some of the goals for the new design were to include as many modern CSS techniques as possible, which is noticeable in the homepage where all gradients, shadows, rotations and image cropping is performed entirely in CSS. The homepage also uses the “Featured Image” feature in WP 3.0+, along with excerpts from any posts marked “Featured”. The bottom four panels are widgets that can be re-arranged and customized using a simple “Feature Page” widget I’ve bundled in the theme code.

In addition to these web-related features, I’ve also optimized it for viewing on tablets and mobile devices. Most image posts from the past 6 months are scaled so that they remain crisp when zoomed in on an iPhone, for example. The homepage was modelled after Flipboard, and serves as a “front cover” to the site. Text is well spaced and placed in narrower columns to make reading as enjoyable as possible.

One feature that is missing from the site is the Gallery, which has been officially retired. While the “jolephoto” brand is being phased out, my photography will continue to be developed on my Flickr feed. After purchasing a Pro account, I’ve unlocked a number of older pics that are available once more, and I’m working to build up Sets, Tags and Collections. I also plan to post entries on any major contributions to the feed.

Other special feature you’ll notice is better integration with social media and outside services, including the transition to Disqus for commenting. Disqus allows you to maintain a single account for all your comments across multiple blogs, and also allows for single sign-on with Facebook or Twitter.

While a refresh was certainly overdue, this shift also represents a new mission for the jole.ca domain, which is to promote the Joel Adria Technical Services brand. JoelAdria.com has redirected here for a while now, but I can now say it represents my work and brand more appropriately for current and potential clients. Be sure to take a look around, and I hope you enjoy the new jole.ca!

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Soundflower artifacts workaround

Posted on May 9, 2011 by Joel Adria

If you’ve never discovered the wonders of Soundflower, you are truly missing out. Soundflower allows you to route audio within your Mac with unparalleled simplicity, and is a free download from the guys behind Max/MSP (Cycling 74).

Unfortunately there is a rather annoying glitch where horrible noise starts to develop after about 5 minutes of use. (It starts out starts to make things sound like Darth Vader.) This makes it practically unusable for any live or extended use, and has been recognized on the Google Code site.

You can go read through the thread and find out for yourself, but here’s the workaround, in Snow Leopard.

1. Create an Aggregate Audio Device in Audio MIDI Setup (Applications > Utilities > Audio MIDI Setup) by hitting the Plus (+) button.

2. Add Soundflower and your main output (in this case Built-In Output) to the Aggregate Audio Device by checking their ”Use” boxes.

3. Set the Clock Source to “Soundflower”.

This will make sure that Soundflower is governing the timing of your samples, which seems to prevent it from tripping up. Good luck!

 

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TV Wall on display at EIA

Posted on May 2, 2011 by Joel Adria

As part of the McLuhan Centenary 2011, the Vintage TV Wall is now on display in the departures area at Edmonton’s International Airport. The Wall plays back a variety of clips from McLuhan’s legacy, encouraging patrons to reflect on his well-known themes of “the medium is the message” and “the global village”.

Originally put together to promote the final Wave installation, the TV wall was shown at the Cool Media event at the Art Gallery of Alberta. TVs and equipment were contributed from Kevin Lau’s personal collection, and content and design were my responsibility. The display case created for the airport was put together by Cezary Gajewski, an industrial designer at the University of Alberta.

The display is in the domestic departures area past security, so you’ll need to take a flight sometime between now and November. After that it will be viewable in Enterprise Square downtown until January, alongside the final Wave installation.

Be sure to check out the Flickr set I’ve posted of the entire process, along with a video or two on the YouTube channel.

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Design For Emotion book site launches

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Joel Adria

After a several months of development, I’m pleased to announce the launch of Trevor Van Gorp‘s new book site, DesignForEmotion.com. Based on the theme from AffectiveDesign.com, I helped Trevor redevelop it with a new style and theme while still maintaining the visual connection to AD.

The backend is still WordPress, and works around the same concept as the AD theme, with a few improvements here and there. A number of recent innovations in WordPress will come in handy for next time round however. Featured images help simplify associated a thumbnail with a particular post or page, and content types allow you to separate calendar dates from blog posts within the UI.

One thing I noticed first on this particular WordPress install was that Dreamhost likes to turn off post versioning (presumably to save on database storage, and since disabling it inside wp-config.php is hidden from the user, most people would never notice its absence). However, when you are looking for post versioning and can’t find it, double check that it’s not disabled in your wp-config.php. You might want to turn it on now just in case!

Be sure to check out the Design for Emotion for details on the book and your chance to be involved in the creation of the book.

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Wave II underway

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Joel Adria

Remember the McLuhan TV Wall? That was part of a larger interactive installation project that is now making its way out to the Edmonton International Airport. More on that soon, but more to the point: Wave II (TV Wall was Wave I as I liked to call it) is now underway.

Wave is an interactive installation project with the goal of encouraging inter-departmental and inter-disciplinary involvement, as well as to celebrate the centennial of Marshall McLuhan‘s birth, a Canadian communication scholar who was born in Edmonton 100 years ago. The final project will be unveiled on June 23 at noon in the atrium of the Enterprise Square (old Bay building) downtown as part of the Media Ecology Convention 2011.

The final design is still under heavy development, something I’m very excited to be a part of. I’ve been working with Cezary Gajewski in the past few days, setting up our shipment of equipment and new toys in our development lab. Here’s a few images and stats on the project.

Equipment:

  • 1x Mac Pro (8 Core)
  • 1x Mac Mini
  • 1x MacBook Pro (mine)
  • 2x Sharp 60″ LCD TVs
  • 2x Acer monitors
  • 8x KRK Studio Monitors
  • 1x M-Audio ProFire 610 audio interface

University Departments involved: Drama (Tech), MACT/Extension, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Industrial Design, Music, English

Number of alphanumeric displays to be manufactured: 300 (by hand)

Video after the jump.

Continue reading →

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Bearbook Feature Update

Posted on April 8, 2011 by Joel Adria

Bearbook has been under steady development over the past few months in preparation for next year’s flow of schedules. A few new features that you may have noticed cropping up include:

  • Enhanced cohort tooltip
  • View friends on friends’ timetables (not just your own)
  • New Facebook iframe architecture
  • Manual timetable uploader (new!)

The last one is pretty exciting, because it means more users can upload their timetables, including draft timetables from Schedule Builder. Users who have trouble uploading their ICS file from Beartracks, who cannot enrol because their registration hasn’t been confirmed yet (High School students), or if you simply don’t want to click “Enrol” yet but want to share your timetable around.

We did our best to make code entry as simple as possible, to make avoid mistakes before you even hit “Done”.

Happy Bearbooking, and have a great summer!

 

 

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Upcoming: Portfolio Show 2011

Posted on April 1, 2011 by Joel Adria

It’s been a quiet time for me on jole.ca the past couple months, but I wanted to let everyone know about an upcoming event at the University featuring work by some of my cohorts as well as a special project I’ve been working on as part of the University of Alberta Portfolio Show & Silent Auction.

Promo Postcard for Portfolio Show

Portfolio Show is mostly geared towards the BFA Design students that us Techs and SM’s work with throughout our 4 year program, but we will have a few things to showcase as well, and my experiments with the Kinect platform will be incorporate as part of my official title as “Projection Designer” for the show. I’ll be posting about that project soon after the show goes up.

So when and where?

Where:
Second Playing Space
Inside the Timms Centre for the Arts
University of Alberta,
87 Ave & 112 Street

When:
Wine & Cheese Reception
April 6th 7pm-10:30pm

Gallery Open
April 7th 2pm-8pm
April 8th 2pm-8pm
April 9th 2pm-7pm

Silent Auction
April 9th 7pm-10pm

What:
A showcase of Theatre Design work from BFA/MFA designers, with work from BFA Tech and BFA Stage Management from the University of Alberta.

I hope to be around during the opening on April 6th if anyone wants to come by to say hi and talk tech! Hope to see you there! (I’ll post any FB events as they are available)

EDIT: Facebook event here!

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CSN Website Launched

Posted on February 25, 2011 by Joel Adria

Reading week is just wrapping up in my world, but there’s been a flurry of activity to get a new website out the door for the Canadian Society of Nephrology (CSN). It’s been an interesting journey for them, as they’ve been working with Blackbaud, a huge SaaS provider targeted at non-profits and fundraising outfits. 

The product they’re using is called Kintera Sphere, which provides CMS and member/donor management in one. They’ve had the member management working quite well for a while now, but the website kept getting delayed because there wasn’t a lot of time or know-how to get all the information into the CMS for them.

My task was just that, and overall it turned out quite well. Much of Kintera’s management is a bit antiquated, with some interesting interface quirks, and many traces of legacy code that isn’t quite in line with modern standards. The separation of theme and content also wasn’t quite well developed, which meant it was hard to output content in a logical way.

I did however manage to figure out a few of the many tools the CMS offered, and use them to my advantage. The launch was relatively smooth, and now the job of optimizing, tweaking, and keeping the site fresh over the months begins. Congratulations CSN on your new website!

Visit CSNSCN.ca

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Duck Podcast 15 & 16 Uploaded

Posted on February 25, 2011 by Joel Adria

Duck Podcast 15 & 16 have been uploaded to the Duck Podcast website this afternoon.

Duck 15 was recorded back in October 2010, and consisted mostly of an impromptu teleconference that has a few twists. Simon Kully makes an appearance in this one. Finally uploaded here, I really can’t remember what was discussed, other than that part of it was recorded while I was driving home.

Duck 16 was recorded yesterday morning (Feb 25), probably the first time we’ve recorded an episode early in the morning (and after having slept). We cover the latest MacBook Pros, telecom, and many other topics. Check out that episode here, and set aside some time, as its definitely a new record length, consisting of almost 3 hours of straight tech talk!

 

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