First is a very brief video showing highlights from a portion of Wave’s development. View the full clips on YouTube.

Web App

The WaveArt.ca web app is the gateway to interaction.

Wave, the day before launch

When tapping on the “Interact” action item after scanning the QR code on-screen, they are taken to a grid of thumbnails representing the grid of cameras waveboard display. These thumbnails resize to fit the user’s device, and add labels if screen real estate permits. When tapping on the thumbnails, a request is sent to the server to “play back” the webcam on the waveboard. Should the webcams change, as they do every few minutes, the thumbnails automatically reload on the device to remain consistant with the waveboard.

When the user scans the QR code on-screen, a waveling ID and color, which is always visible at the top of the device, is assigned. Their session times out after a period of time to reduce conflicts. It is based off WebApp.net, a framework for developing mobile web applications.

Quartz Compositions

A Mac Mini running Quartz Visualizer

On the Wave Mac Pro (Wave-1), the webcams and poetry are rendered using the 8-core processor coupled with two high performance graphics cards. Quartz Composer is a visual development environment that allows complex graphical operations to be created without the need for traditional code. Despite the visual programming environment, Quartz Composer uses the same native graphics libraries in Mac OS X, which is entirely hardware accelerated.

The first composition polls a script on the local machine to generate the webcams, their names, and a word cloud related to the webcam. A MySQL database, stored on an external web server, serves as the central repository and communication between Web App, Quartz Composition, and the Wave Admin interface.

Real-time actions, such as a user tapping on a thumbnail or scanning a QR code, is activated by using the OSC patch in QC. When the user taps on their smartphone, a request is sent to a remote server, which checks the status of Wave-1, then relays the webcam request to Wave-1′s built-in web server. A PHP script on Wave-1 uses an OSC library to send out the message to the QC composition, and “playback” of the webcam is initiated. Despite the numerous “hops” needed to achieve this operation, interaction is very responsive.

Wave Admin

A view of the Wave Admin UI

In order to maintain state and store complex information about the 500+ webcam collection, an external MySQL database manages most of the data associated with the webcam composition. Scripts on Wave-1 poll all webcams worldwide every 20 minutes, downloading and storing their full size images, and generating appropriate thumbnails for the Quartz composition and web app. Each webcam’s status is verified, and cross-checked with their predecessors to ensure that the webcam is not dormant. If the webcam has not been updated in a significant amount of time, it is suspended and not checked for 24 hours to reduce bandwidth and polling time. Suspended cameras are pulled out of circulation so they do not appear on the waveboard.

Wave downloads about 1000 images a day, or about 1 gigabyte of data to keep its information current, and emails the creators when it goes offline or has an error. Wave changes colour throughout the day, and turns off automatically at night to save energy.

All of this information can be managed from the Wave Admin web interface.

Hardware

Wave contributors place the last cover, sealing up Wave

Two 60″ LCD displays are used in Wave, connected to the Mac Pro via HDMI. A Mac Mini powers a third, smaller display, which provides patrons with facts and information about the installation. Finally, a fourth monitor is setup inside for administering Wave both locally and remotely.

A private Wireless LAN is used to join the two Macs and allow administration. If one computer has become disconnected from UWS, the other one can be used to reinitialize its WiFi connection.

Diagrams

Connectivity Diagram of Wave (Click to Enlarge)

Audio Diagram (Click to Enlarge)

• New and improved Bearbook Books (buy and sell!)
• Fall poster campaign (plus over 8000 users!)
• Bearbook featured on UAlberta.ca (twice!)

We’ve recently improved Bearbook Books to allow students to list their textbooks for sale quickly and easily, with any ads being shown directly to students who will be needing them for their courses.

Listing a book for sale on Bearbook Books is quick and easy!

Our Fall poster campaign kicked off today, with about 100 posters being distributed all over campus. We even reused the old ones from last year to save paper! Around the same time, we pushed right past 8000 users on Bearbook!

A few of the 100 Bearbook Posters distributed during the Fall campaign.

As a last bit of news that came as a bit of a surprise, Bearbook is featured twice on the brand new UAlberta.ca website! Bearbook is listed under Student Involvement on the Current Students page, and under Featured on the Keep in Touch page. Thanks to Jennifer Chesney at U of A Web for all the support!

Bearbook featured on the new UAlberta website.

Bearbook listed as Student Inolvement on UAlberta.ca

P.S. Did you notice us in the recent post for Democamp?
P.P.S If you want to spread Bearbook too, download the poster and put them up wherever!

Via Flickr:
Folk artist Elise LeBlanc performs for LTDs (Leaders in Training and Discipleship) on the beach at Gull Lake Centre near Lacombe, AB.

I have been working at Gull Lake Centre for the summer, putting together videos and shooting photos for all the campers who come through the gates. It has been a wonderful opportunity to practice my photography, especially on days like these!

Via Flickr:
The Wave Art & Media Installation was launched on Thursday June 23, 2011 as part of the McLuhan Centenary and the Media Ecology Convention 2011 in Edmonton Alberta.

Wave was unveiled in the atrium of Enterprise Square (old Bay building in Downtown Edmonton, owned by U of A). Several convention attendees and students of the MACT program, along with friends and colleagues attended the launch and tried their hand at being a “waveling.”

Wavelings can connect via their smartphones, tablets, or traditional computers to a special web app, which allows them to explore webcams from all over the world, based on the McLuhan concept, “the global village.”

They can also view their image as a silhouette amongst a series of “renga” poetry written for Wave. This interaction explores McLuhan’s “the medium is the message.”

The Wave will be in Enterprise Square until November 2011, and will be continually updated and developed with software and hardware updates though out its stay. Stay tuned to the @wave_art twitter page for the latest news.

Thanks to Jeremy Keay for shooting the photos.

Via Flickr:

After about 6 months of waiting (which seemed pretty out of character) my Panic goods have finally arrived!

-Transmit (FTP client) stylized T-shirt

-”Loading” T-Shirt (been wanting something this geeky for a while!)

-Team Panic T-Shirt

-Full set of 4 Panic faux game boxes (so awesome!)

If you have never heard of Panic, they’re a great Mac software company that has been around since the beginning. Personally I use Transmit and Coda on a daily basis for all my website development work.

New Nikon 35mm F1.8 Lens

I contemplated between the new 55mm and the 35mm, since the 55mm certainly has a unique close-up perspective (and from what I understand a slightly better portrait shot) but since I already have a 55mm in manual form, and 35mm seemed a bit more versatile, I opted for it in the end.

Nikon E-series 50mm F1.8 (film, full manual) Tokina 80-200mm F4.5 (film, full manual) Nikon 18-55mm F3.5-5.6 (kit, full auto)

Most of my comparisons will be to the kit lens my D40 came with, the 18-55mm stock zoom that is pretty much the cheapest lens Nikon sells. My first impressions are that this thing produces very sharp pictures. Perhaps I just haven’t picked up my DSLR in a while, perhaps I just haven’t been using RAW often enough, but these look pretty sharp to me. Thanks to the F1.8 aperture size, plenty of light can enter the camera in low light, which makes it easier to capture a shot without dropping shutter speed to blurry-inducing levels, or increasing the ISO on the rather limited sensor of the D40.

To compare, check out the two shots below, first with the 18-55mm at about 35mm at F4.6 (largest allowed at this zoom point) and 1/200 shutter speed. The next is the same image shot wide open (F1.8) with the 35mm prime. Both were shot at ISO 800 on the D40.

Shot with 18-55 Kit lens (F4.5 1/200 800)

Shot with 35mm prime lens (F1.8 1/200 800)

My goal was to be able to shoot in lower light without being forced into high ISO ranges, so this should help out quite a bit.

Check out more shots of the day on the Flickr set.

I just performed a quick checkup on the TV Wall setup at EIA. Everything was running quite cool with no burnt out devices or overheating. I realize I didn’t checkup on the DVD equipment tucked away underneath, but they were running smoothly until now.

The three key tasks were to shift the TVs over slightly to improve symmetry (not possible before as we lacked a wooden wedge), flip the light strips to improve continuity and cable management, and adjust the volume on a pair of TVs so that it is audible through the case.

All of it took just under an hour, and I managed to wipe down the static-charged acrylic from dust at the same time.

Reactions have been very positive; as several people shot photos while I was servicing, and the MasterCard saleswoman told us it’s a big hit with travelers. She even picked up a book on McLuhan!

The TV Wall is on display in the departures lounge of the Edmonton International Airport until November 2011.

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!

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

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!

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!