Thomas Niedzielski's Blog

July 31st 2008

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Well, trashing Vista got a lot of comments. Um... (Well-known video game of your choice) SUCKS!!!

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Sorry about my second sentence as a title in a row. This week has been an emotional roller coaster. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed with what we have for the demo tomorrow, but I'd also be lying if I said I wasn't happy with what we have now. Considering how good or bad it could have been, I think we have a reasonably interesting little application on our hands for the demo. There's something mesmerizing about working together to make dancing blocks form a neon sign or recreate Pong. At this point we only have one-by-one blocks ready to go, and until we figure out how to get OpenGL and Java buffers to play nice we can't stack blocks. However, there's still a lot to do on a 10 by 10 grid thanks to multi-touch interfaces and collaboration. I wonder what would happen if we made our grid bigger for the demo. I'll see if that works, or makes for a more engaging experience. There's just so much that could be done with the project. I hope somebody else is willing to pick up our pile of spaghetti after we're gone and make something even better. I'd have to admit that there are a few flaws in the design that I wouldn't do again, and some ideas I didn't want to do at first that turned out pretty cool. I'd prefer not to locate blocks at the center and use glutSolidCube again, because I don't know if that can be expanded beyond 1x1 in the ideal way. I do think I'd try to figure out how to get the color map working, though. That was a great idea. Thanks for that Steven, and thanks to all of you who supported our work, especially when I was nearly brain dead and useless from lack of sleep. As for the rest of you in the REU, I bet your projects are at least as exciting, and I'm excited to see them tomorrow!

TravisChristian - 01 Aug 2008 - 12:06

Vista is the worst thing to happen to computers since Dell. Or maybe Apple. Hopefully by the time XP is permanently phased out they will have finished Windows 7 or whatever they're calling it and it will be at least as good as XP. Or there's always Linux.

DesireeVelazquez - 01 Aug 2008 - 00:16

Still have to live with it in the future. Unless Microsoft brings out something better than Vista with the familiarity of XP before the end of XP's lifespan.

ThomasNiedzielski - 01 Aug 2008 - 00:07

By the way, it turns out that the lighting thing was an Intel graphics card issue.

Vista still sucks.

July 30th 2008

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I'm going to go ahead and blame Vista, since it can't defend itself.

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Well, we have a lull in the work here, until Cole gets back from his financial meeting. We need to make it possible to create blocks, but that functionality is missing from Baseplate for the moment. Without it, we'll just be pretending to pretend to play with building blocks. On a high note, I finally fixed all of the interface bugs that I knew about. Most of them were just caused by some trauma that occurred when the Baseplate and the InterfaceOverlay started using one GLCanvas. I also finally got my help overlays looking nice for the demo. They were a lot of tedious work, but I'm really glad we have them, because I think people will consider our project much more professional with them. We also finally got the Stantum hooked up, and that's where a whole new list of problems have surfaced. First, we discovered that OpenGL and Vista do not play well together at all. There could be some way that my code's not Vista friendly or something, but since the most graphics consuming thing I'm doing is lighting some rectangular blocks, I doubt that's it. I think it's either a problem with OpenGL or Vista, and since it sucks at life, I'm going to blame Vista. No one likes you, Vista! Go home!

DesireeVelazquez - 31 Jul 2008 - 11:12

this is true (what jenna said), xp's life span is until 2014 (if i got the year right), even if it's a bit far away, the fact that it has a life span means there won't be anymore xp after 2014

NizarKhalife - 31 Jul 2008 - 00:39

I like kind of like Vista! It's so vulnerable and sucky at life that I just can't help but like it. And Gadgets. Oh, Gadgets! I think that's how it tricks me into ignoring my desktop PC crashes.

PamShill - 30 Jul 2008 - 20:02

Is there any way you can use a computer without Vista so that you can continue to make progress?

JennaLanger - 30 Jul 2008 - 16:57

watch out, because before you know it computers won't ship with XP at all. VISTA will be the only option!!!

July 29th 2008

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Ch-Ch-Chaange-e-es

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Wow. We've done a lot of crazy stuff to the code lately, and I've yet to catch up with some of the biggest changes we made. The big news is that our interface and our view of the blocks are going to be on the same canvas now, which means that Cole and I have to be careful not to ruin eachother's drawings. Part of that is making my mostly 2D interface compatible with Cole's 3D view of the baseplate. I have to be a lot more careful with how I handle the Depth Test, that's for sure. There's also the mysterious Phantom Thread, which appears when the frame is made visible only to hit a NullPointerException, all with no visible effect on our program. I finally figured out what my problem with the help overlays was today. Illustrator had been cutting my image size down every time I moved my text further in, so I ended up just stretching the text instead of getting it out of the way. That'll be fixed for good tomorrow. Well, since I started typing this a while ago, I've gotten my stuff to display as expected again. Even better, in fact! Thanks to Vijay's help, our blocks now have more cube, less cubism. I like it a lot, actually. My colors look a lot brighter now. More importantly, I see Cole's widdle Basepwate in the middle of the screen. We're going to have to scale all of our blocks, I guess, because a 1x1 pixel block wasn't quite the size we wanted. Once we fix that and the Baseplate class starts handling touches, we'll have a very awesome project on our hands! I'll have to show you all tomorrow. It probably won't be ready in time for the demo class, but we'll still have a few things to show you.

July 28th 2008

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Integration

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Well, a week behind schedule we're finally putting it together, and we're having buckets of problems. Integrating the rest of the code with SparshBaseplate is the big sticking point. The darn thing isn't doing anything right, and even the development environment isn't working right anymore. We're going to have to pull some late nights to finish this off. I guess it's nice not to be the person holding back the team anymore. My InterfaceOverlay is comparatively flawless, but Baseplate refuses to display and SparshBaseplate is so messed up that the computer's probably going to explode. I still have a few bugs to work out, but none of them are system crashers. I'll just flag down Vijay sometime. I tried to get him last week, but he was too busy. We really, really need to fix my block issue before the demo, so I might have to drag one of you guys out of your chairs tomorrow. Otherwise, all of us will have to keep trying to fix Baseplate and SparshBaseplate.

July 25th 2008

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Presenting...

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Today's the big PWSE presentation! All of us in the Multi-touch team managed to crank out a passable draft of our paper just before Desiree had to take it to the presentation. It still needs a lot of work. Cole has a version of the paper covered in comments waiting for us to start working on the final draft. I'm interested in seeing what the other REUs have been working on this summer. I imagine a lot of them have actual data analysis on the posters, but hopefully ours will be interesting. I really liked seeing it blown up earlier this week. All I have left to do with the interface is making it do something when each of the blocks in the block pool is touched, and then it'll be ready for prime time. Well, it'll be ready for integration with the SparshBaseplate class, anyway. Oh, I also still have to fix the screwed up shape of the blocks, but that can be solved by a quick conversation with anybody who's willing to spend a little time to help me debug the goofy things. That said, I'm constantly making improvements to the code that I didn't expect to make. That's good news for us in the long run, though. There's no reason to call a function every time we display that only needs to be called once, for example. We really need to keep the code lean, because we expect to have a lot of objects flying around, and keeping track of them takes up a lot of space and processor time. I think we should be good for the demo, though. See you all at PWSE!

July 24th 2008

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Jigsaw Puzzle

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Not much progress at all on the interface today. I fixed one bug by accident, and that's about it. I guess that's okay, since all I have left is a 3D lighting issue I'll just ask Vijay about, and the drudge work following putting the blocks into position. Most of today was spent trying to figure out how we would all put it together, especially the dreaded networking. Our main problem is how to handle a certain race condition: Every block has a unique groupID that is chosen when the block is created. If two different users try to create a block with the same groupID at the same time, we have a problem. They obviously can't both have the groupID, so we need to resolve the battle in a way that all of the users agree on so that every block remains unique. We've thought about putting it in the groupID, but that would limit us to 3 users. Maybe we can manage both numbers separately and still keep them straight. We'll have to decide for sure tomorrow. The blocks are ready to be colored by however many different users we end up with, so it won't change our coding that much. It's more of a quality issue. I'm really worn out right now, and there's not much I can do until tomorrow, so I'll probably just ride the bus home after dinner. See you all there!

ThomasNiedzielski - 24 Jul 2008 - 17:42

By the way Nizar, we're still trying to shoehorn in the use of the iPhone for turning the scene, but no guarantees.

July 23rd 2008

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Touchably Soft

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Just so you all know, I fixed the texture bug I had going on yesterday. It was an issue with color blending. More importantly, I just finished putting in touch response for everything in the interface but the block pool which I haven't put in yet. I still have to make a little help display also. Things are coming together pretty well. I'm especially happy that Demo Practice has been moved to next Wednesday, because that means I can sleep tonight and still have something to work with for Demo Practice. My interface isn't as pretty as Jenna's mind-blowingly professional one, but that can be fixed pretty easily. The big concern is still getting it all working. Come to think of it, I still need to get reshape working. Also, for some reason my interface components still refuse to squeak up to the edge. I wonder what the problem is there? Oh well. I'm excited to see everybody else's projects coming along. For some reason I'm especially interested in Wap-it!. If I wanted to make this sound profound, I would say that I like that it has a lot to do with its simplicity. Really though, it's just fun and makes noises. I like that. I'm also curious about the results of the robot study. I was one of the participants, and also got to say the word you least want to hear during an experiment (Oops.) I still have to see John and David's work, and I haven't seen the space station in a while, but Team Gandalf seems pretty enthusiastic about it. I think we're going to have some really neat stuff to show people on the first.

SamanthaLevine - 24 Jul 2008 - 16:54

Yeah--it is pretty exciting to be almost done...but nerve wrecking.

BrianRussell - 23 Jul 2008 - 22:43

Help displays are quite important especially at an REU that deals with usability testing.

NizarKhalife - 23 Jul 2008 - 19:11

I'm actually quite curious to see your work as well. What ever happened to using the iPhone for rotation, by the way?

July 22nd 2008

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Almost there...

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I just have a few more bug fixes to go before my interface is ready to go. I learned that I'd set my interface up to be 3D instead of 2D, which was messing up my draw order, then that I'd only disabled some of the lights I needed to that were making my interface darker than I specified. The flickering is gone because I'm explicitly clearing the screen, and I'm about to put the block pool in place. The only bug left that I know of is that my textures are displaying with varying degrees of brightness, even though I have lighting turned off. I'll have to look that over more closely once I have the blocks in. Then I put in the functionality, and you can all try it out! After us, of course. Neener, neener.

July 21st 2008

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Stupid Bugs

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Well, I've been working on my project since yesterday, and almost nothing is displaying like it's supposed to. I've been able to fix some of the bugs, but more keep pouring in. The colors are darker than I told them to be, the interface isn't resizing, the textures refuse to appear even though they did earlier, object refuse to be where I told them to be, and on and on. I'm going to be staying here late every night this week at this rate, since we're supposed to practice a demo on Thursday. I still don't have the actual functionality in yet either! That's a bummer, because I was hoping to use the last of our time to do some networking like Ms. Harding suggested. Hopefully this project speaks well of me and I can send some emails after it's over. For that to happen, it has to at least look like it's supposed to. So, back to work.

NizarKhalife - 21 Jul 2008 - 22:50

But I already stole his milk!

ThomasNiedzielski - 21 Jul 2008 - 17:03

Hey uh, Tom? Your computer just opened an inter-dimensional rift here and, uh... I'm totally stealing your milk.

JennaLanger - 21 Jul 2008 - 16:51

Just keep debugging, that's the most important part!

July 18th 2008

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Out of Context

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Crud. I'm almost done with the interface, but my attempts to test it have run dry all morning. The problem right now is that I need to have a GLContext current when I'm creating new textures. I need to figure out a way to make a current GLContext without having the canvas our interface is on mix with the canvas our baseplate is on. I'll keep working on that. Hopefully Vijay can help me with that later. Aside from that, our Sparsh interfacing is underway, with Desire doing the coding on that. It's amazing how one more class can change our expectations for each part of the design. It also turns out that Dr. Gilbert got us IRB approval in case we want to have people come in and do some usability testing. I don't know if we'll have time for that, because we only have two weeks left now. That's incredible to think about. I'm having a great time, and I hope the last two weeks are even better!

July 17th 2008

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Eat That!

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We got our poster in on time! Yay! Not all of our images were 200 dpi, so we'll have to see what happens in the proof, but most of the annoying, stupid, vague, and boring stuff is done. I also made a lot of progress with my classes. I almost have the interface finished, but I suspect that like the block classes, I'll have to go back and make changes due to changes in the program and my own forgetfulness. I've also gotten pretty good with the displaying of objects, and I'm about to test out my interface. Everyone else is getting a lot of stuff done too, with the Robot Team doing their study and the iPhone Team deciding on the least offensive name for their iPhone Bop-it. That was pretty funny. I still haven't done the screen capture for Paul, so I'll do that after I display the interface. Yes! I just figured out what I was doing wrong with my Exceptions! I forgot to not throw them after I figured out a way to handle them. Simple. Our team meeting was very positive. The rest of our project is coming along well also, so we should be able to put together a pretty good demo. I don't think I'll be going to the band concert tonight, just because I still have stuff to do. That and there's a much higher chance of rain tonight. I'd better get the capture done and get out of here.

NizarKhalife - 17 Jul 2008 - 23:31

We settled on Wap It. Though Urban Dictionary did have some dirty meanings for it, we concluded that they were obscure enough to use it anyway. I don't know what's worse for our life expectancy: infringing Hasbro copy right or the offending Italians.

July 16th 2008

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Cherry Tomatoes are the Devil.

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I made a few changes this morning to make our pieces more accessible to the programmers of other components. I don't know why I hadn't done that earlier. Desiree is pretty busy on the paper, and I'm still waiting on the final images that will make our poster as good as the first print can be. I have the block pool almost finished, and once I attach it to my interface, we'll just map functions to the button locations and be ready to go. We all survived today's etiquette luncheon at PWSE today. It was a lot more complicated than it first appeared. I already knew some of the things from eating with my mother and glancing through books, but there are still a lot of little details that make the mealtime interview an epic journey of sphincter loosening terror. I hope I can keep all of my professional contacts away from the table, but that's probably unrealistic. There were some funny moments, like the speaker's explanation of how doing something wrong told the employer that a person was sub-Curly Howard in worth as a human being. Oh well. Some of us had fun throwing around the Frisbee last night. I hope we get to do some night Frisbee and capture the flag before we have to leave. By the way, I broke down and got on Facebook recently, so if someone could invite me to the group that would be great. Oh, I need to get on that video capture for Paul. I'll do that right now.

July 15th 2008

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Posterrrrrr!

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Thanks to the extension, it looks like we'll be getting our poster out on time. Prasad came through in getting us a great picture of the new gesture, and Cole has all of the images we need to make transparent ready to go. With a few more little changes, our poster will cause fewer than half of the people that look at it to begin vomiting uncontrollably. I still feel bad about little Regan. Anyway, I've also gotten the cubes to appear in the right places, which means that I'm almost done with my Block Pool. Hopefully I can combine it with the rest of my interface with little fuss. At worst, I can just make nine differently colored pictures of the blocks against the gray background of the tab and slap them in there as a texture. I'm going to have to put a lot more work in from here on so that we have enough time to debug. The main professor behind Meta!Blast came in and spoke today, and it was fun to talk to her. Biology is obviously her main area of interest, but I was glad to see that she was very enthusiastic about every element of the game. I hope they can make it really good and actually make a mark with it. Get working Meta!Blast team! Actually, you guys should play ultimate today. That should be awesome.

NizarKhalife - 16 Jul 2008 - 00:26

Practically any poster makes me vomit uncontrollably. Or maybe it's just a placebo effect of my hate for Science.

July 14th 2008

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Getting it Together

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We're getting closer, but there's still a lot of work to do. We need to get the poster finished, so I'm having Prasad come over at 2:30 to help us with that. I figured out how to get the interface and the block view to work together, and now I'm just drawing the block pool. With some help from Vijay, I solved most of the problems there and just need to do it. Also, Cole decided today that we should go with some of the built in ray functions of JOGL instead of the background color-map. This has the advantage of letting us use a much greater range of numbers as groupIDs, reducing the chances of race conditions. Number assignment will also be much easier. So, things are looking up, but we're running out of time. I really hope we have something ready in time for the PWISE event, or at least the Symposium. With that in mind, I need to get back to work!

DavidOluwatimi - 15 Jul 2008 - 09:28

Yea!......Work .....Work.....Work....don't waste your time blogging. I rather see your finished creation than reading what your creating which you could have spent time on your main project

AllisonWhite - 14 Jul 2008 - 14:17

group IDs and race conditions? sounds more like a civil rights protest than virtual legos

July 11th 2008

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Field Trip!

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Well, I just finished my ice cream and can now finally write about the trip to Principal Financial's usability lab today. The building we toured was very impressive, with a lot of stonework and art. We were taken on a tour of the labs upstairs. The lab itself wasn't anything that would blow the mind, but they did have a way to watch the user's screen from another room to see what they clicked and hear what they said. We got to watch David attempt to use a website. That was interesting. They told us that the lab has saved them a lot of money and let the company make much more effective products with less time and money. They let us keep one of their usability experiments as an example. It had a ton of different tasks to be done with the website, trying to work out every bit of the product. I have a bit of an issue with my product right now. Yesterday Prasad advised me that I could cut down drastically on the number of Quads I'm drawing by treating groups of objects as a single texture. Of course, I still have to calculate where the individual UI components would be located so that they can be interacted with. I've already done quite a few of the buttons that way anyway, so their locations are already recorded. I know that's what I'm going to do for the blocks, because 3D blocks can't coexist with the 2D tab unless we use orthogonal view, which would require us to use a whole new GL object to avoid destroying the building area's perspective. A picture of the 3D blocks should be just fine. Now to make those textures...

July 10th 2008

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More Progress

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Today I've been quite a bit more focused than usual. At least, I was until about 1:30, when a belt in my brain slipped and I just stumbled through my program for a while. I got a lot of the interface reorganized to conform with the new one we made for the poster. I reorganized the buttons, redesigned the blocks, and made the tabs. Speaking of which, it turns out that the poster draft was pretty good. We just have a few more changes left to make. I have to rearrange some of the text and make some new pictures, but the content itself was pretty good. The one thing I was lacking was discussion of how the collaboration worked, and more technical terms. I'll probably go off to fix a few things with that now, to get myself some time away from my interface programming. I have about half of that done, though, so I shouldn't worry. In fact, I'll probably put some extra time into it tonight, because I've decided to go to the bandshell concert for a bit. Those are always pretty nice, and not very long. I figure I should do it again now before things get even busier. It never hurts to have some free entertainment, since I have no money. Anyway, tonight I still need to put all of the color selectors into the tab, and get started on the block pool. The block pool might be the most tedious work, since I'll have to draw all of the pieces to display them. Hopefully my drawPiece() function adapts well to this situation. I'll have to have all of the blocks drawing themselves in the pool and ready to change their color when the user chooses one.

NizarKhalife - 10 Jul 2008 - 20:31

Wow, it sounds like your interface is really shaping up. I'd like to see it for myself. Say, could you add a french fry block to the interface so that I can generate french fries with the wave of a hand? I'm certain that Lego has gotten a lot of requests for french fry generating functionality.

JennaLanger - 10 Jul 2008 - 17:32

I'd like to see what the interface looks like. It seems like you guys have been doing some hardcore coding right behind me!

DesireeVelazquez - 10 Jul 2008 - 16:35

Nice! I have to give you the current version of the paper, even though you said you didn't want to look at a computer screen at the moment. Anyways, you'll be working from your apartment? 'Cause you know you can...wait, why am I even mentioning this? I'm usually the last person to know anything, so you should know that you can. Eh...I'm going to return to the paper now...

CatherinePeloquin - 10 Jul 2008 - 16:22

Wow, it does certainly seem like you had a productive morning.

If you're looking for more to do for free, check out the rec. facilities at Iowa State. You can go swimming, climb on the climbing wall, or do any number of other activities. http://www.recservices.iastate.edu/facilities/homepage.html

July 9th 2008

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Got that Done

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Thanks to a lot of motivation and help from the rest of the team, I finally managed to make an extremely rough draft of the poster. The images are mostly placeholders and the text is poorly aligned, but it's good enough for tomorrow, and from there it shouldn't be to hard to get it ready for Monday. That's good because this weekend has a few things to keep us busy. I should really take our changes to the interface and put them in code form. It looks very different from the one in our presentation, and I think all of the changes will make our program a lot more fun to use. If I can get some cash, I'd like to do some bowling or pool, now that it was on the list and I'm broke. Also, I can't wait for the Mall of America trip Saturday. The ride's a bit long, but I have a book and a Game Boy, if I need them. I'm hoping to just start with enough bottles of beer on the wall that we can sing all the way there and back. Given a three hour trip each way, that's about 2700 bottles of beer! This is going to be fun!

July 8th 2008

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Poster Time!

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This evening and tomorrow our team really needs to dig into the poster. I'm finishing up our changes to the interface after the meeting we had today, so that we can add a section on the features of the program to the poster. I can't believe I forgot some of the buttons. Oh well. We decided to leave out Undo and Redo for the time being, as those are more complicated with collaboration. Anyway, we also have to get the text written and have everything ready for Thursday, which means we're all going to be putting some work into it. I just can't wait to get it out the door, personally. We've apparently decided on a shirt, but I'm not really a fan. "The Game" isn't related to HCI, and will make the shirt far too dorky for me to wear. Which also makes it dorkier than losing to the away team at T-ball, for those of you keeping track on the scale. I think "Check the iPhone!" is much more representative of our experience. I'll also need to retool the code along with the interface, but that's going to wait until Friday.

NizarKhalife - 08 Jul 2008 - 22:47

We could probably fit "Check the iPhone!" in there too. In fact we could add that as an acronym: CTI. It even rhymes with HCI. This really might put the shirt over the edge of dorkiness though.

July 7th 2008

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Back on the Job

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Well, this morning we toured the John Deere Des Moines plant. I thought it was a pretty cool place. I loved looking at the Pinnacle cotton balers that they were retooling. Those things were huge. I also liked seeing some of the robots in action. It's too bad there wasn't more going on today, but I got to see a lot of interesting things. I think we all got a kick out of watching the laser cutter move. I noticed that the robots are very careful, and are designed to take slow steps. If the floor were more active, I probably could have seen how the assembly line really works, but the ceiling chain was pretty cool. It's pretty impressive that they have 2.5 miles of the stuff. I probably shouldn't have had so much for lunch. It was a little too early, and I'm tired today anyway, so I couldn't stay awake on the trip back. Oh well. Today I'm going to finish making the interface icons so that we can get them onto our interface mock-up for the poster. We really need to get started on that.

DavidOluwatimi - 08 Jul 2008 - 09:05

Yeah, i kinda thought the 2.5 miles of chain was cool too.

July 3rd 2008

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Mental Construction

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Well, today I'm putting a lot of work into the user interface of our program. It's based on a design Cole came up with, with additional input from Prasad and others in the REU. The toughest part was figuring out how to use textures in JOGL, since setting them up works a little differently. We're using the textures for menu buttons, as opposed to a drop-down menu. The basic idea is still the same; touch a button to expose the menu, then touch whichever option you want. The exception is that the menu doesn't automatically close after a selection. The buttons we have in mind now are: Menu Open/Close, New, Open, Save, Take Picture, Undo, Redo, and Exit. I might add Print to that list, but it has to spool before showing a picture and waiting for the user. I still have to draw the actual pictures. I don't even have the files created yet. Most of them should be pretty clear, but I'm baffled as to how to represent Menu Open/Close. If you guys have any ideas for this or some buttons that I forgot which you'd like to see included, let us know!

By the way everybody, it's a sad day for Bozo fans. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25520824

JohnMorales - 03 Jul 2008 - 18:04

Bozo die...

JohnMorales - 03 Jul 2008 - 18:04

Bozzo die...

July 2nd 2008

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Moving and Thoughts

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Well, I have a few more things done now. I made the method that will be doing the actual rendering in our program, though there are still a few errors involving getting JOGL to cooperate, since there are some minor differences in the Java wrapper. I'll probably ask Tony if we're doing it right. The blocks aren't going to have as many normals as the ones we did in OpenGL class, just to save on memory. I found the PWSE panel today interesting. I'm not planning on having children, but I have parents that will need help someday, and I should do what it takes to keep them happy, social, and active. I also have career plans, and I'm going to need to work them both into my life. That could be a drag, because I like to try to complete as many things as possible, but I suppose I'll figure out some sort of priority list.

NizarKhalife - 03 Jul 2008 - 11:04

But having children is different because they are a direct consequence of our own actions. That is, unless you somehow get your hands on a time machine and alter time to become your own grandfather or something.

JennaLanger - 02 Jul 2008 - 16:08

That's true, we need to think about our parents too, not just our future kids!

BrianRussell - 02 Jul 2008 - 14:26

Good idea to cut down on the normals that are used.

July 1st 2008

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Let's go!

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Today has been action packed. We had a two hour ethics discussion this morning based on the material we read over the weekend. The discussion was very interesting, thanks to the reading we've done. That reminds me, John and I need to plan our discussion for Journal Club. Anyway, we need to write our own 500-750 word code of ethics for Monday. The ray of hope today is that we got our roles figured out for the project. Desiree will be working on the Sparsh interfacing, I will be working on the blocks themselves, and Cole will be working on the application. Once we agree what to send between each class, we'll start working. The network communication will wait for when we have the program working for one user. Another bit of good news is that we finally have the bezel working, so we can dump the unresponsive table altogether. I think this project will go really well, and I'm excited to see our new program!

DesireeVelazquez - 01 Jul 2008 - 15:54

I am as well (kinda). I just hope I won't hold back the team. -_-

June 30th 2008

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Basic Framework

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Hey everybody, sorry I didn't have a blog ready on the 30th. I put in all of the text below, then forgot to move it to the visible section of the page.

Well, today we finally have a project framework we can act on. I managed to cobble together a crude representation of what our object structure will be. I'm relieved, because now we're closer to getting done before our looming deadlines. We have a lot. The poster draft has to be done next Thursday, but that shouldn't be too bad. We already know what we want to have our project do, so we'll have to estimate how far we'll get before August. Now that the framework has been made, tomorrow we will be having a team meeting to decide who does what. The trouble is, I don't know how hard each part is going to be. We have the Application, the SparshUI interface, the GUI, the blocks themselves, and the networking to consider.

June 27th 2008

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A Sluggish Start

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Well, to tell you the truth, our team's a little timid about going into this project. Hopefully that pays off in the long run with better structure, but it's still a bit of a drag at this point. We are figuring out useful things, though. I finally figured out JOGL, and we know how we're going to respond to touch actions with JOGL rendering. Still, I'm glad the weekend is coming. My parents will be visiting, and the weekend will also give us time to read our ethics assignment. What I've read so far is pretty interesting, so that might make for a good video game or Band of Brothers break. Speaking of which... yeah, Matt got the last disk. Okay. I think I found something interesting for HCI. It's not as cool as most of the other videos, but maybe someone will find it interesting. See you at HCI!

BrianRussell - 27 Jun 2008 - 17:31

Figuring out JOGL sounds very useful.

DesireeVelazquez - 27 Jun 2008 - 15:08

Isn't that true?! But, yeah, if I have questions, I'll ask either you or Cole. I'll probably be here during the weekend though (after I get back on track with my sleep) doing either Java or Maya (hey...do those two words rhyme?)

JennaLanger - 27 Jun 2008 - 15:04

Good planning is the key to success. it means not having to redo things later down the road. sounds like you guys are off to a good start, even though it may seem slow.

June 26th 2008

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Games and a Meeting

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Well, today we're going to have a full team meeting and figure out how we're going to organize our code. I have some ideas of what classes we should use, so I think we'll be able to figure out a good structure. Prasad also said that he's found some software similar to what we want to make, so we should take a look. This morning was Journal Club; Brian and Cody took advantage of the lecture Thursday to have us discuss video games' role in education. That was a good choice of article. Many of us today have had experience with computers in school that influenced how we felt about the idea. I don't think it's bad at all for information that can be broken down into very small chunks. At least until I learn that Ctrl-A has total power over almost every MECC game. Those were fun, though. I remember many crazy arrow punching rounds of Number Munchers. Well, we need to go to the meeting now. Thanks for reading!

June 25th 2008

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System Planning

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Today has been a slower day, because after all of the creative work we did yesterday, we're forced to face the reality: How will we do it? How we solve problems with getting everything to work will affect how the app is designed. For example, we needed to extend 2D touch inputs into 3D space. David Kabbala suggested using the projection matrix to create a ray from the finger's position into the scene, then selecting the first block the touch hits. Because of this, all of our blocks now have some more member variables. I have a copy of an example multi-touch application that uses Sparsh to look at. It's that picture manipulator that we saw when we toured VRAC. Fortunately, a lot of the hard work is done for us, and we just have to make a few files that will make our program compatible with Sparsh, so that shouldn't be too hard. I'm reading a lot about JOGL lately, but I still don't quite understand how I'll put blocks onto our GLCanvas. I still have some more to read. Speaking of which, I need to head over and see if a journal article has been picked yet.

June 24th 2008

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Interfaces and In Your Faces

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Well, this morning was another mostly free time. I actually got down to business and drew up a proposal for the interface. It's pretty much what we showed in the presentation, but the full color wheel has been scaled back to the discrete subtractive color wheel in the style we used in our presentation. My plan also has buttons for white, gray and black. We have some debate about whether the colors and block pool should be in the same tab or two separate ones. If the latter, where should each tab be? In the long run, a multi-tab system might be a better idea, allowing us to put tabs for irregular pieces, people, etc. in their own pools. We're also deciding on what gestures the user will use to navigate the scene. We have to be careful with that, because whatever we choose makes assumptions about how the user will use the program.

We also had a speaker from the psychology department talk about his studies of video game use on various brain functions. The studies he had done/looked at showed better visual processing, but weaker focus. The studies on violence sensitivity haven't shown very much yet, it seems. At least, they haven't shown anything conclusive enough to win an argument.

JennaLanger - 24 Jun 2008 - 16:51

If you put it in two separate tabs they can be located right next to each other. and it can give the user the opportunity to move them around separately. I could see someone moving the color wheel somewhere so they could change the color of piece they already placed.

DesireeVelazquez - 24 Jun 2008 - 13:54

But you know, now that I think about it, even the whole tab system (existing or not) still has a problem about user position. I'll tell you when were at the meeting.

June 23rd 2008

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Getting Started

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Well, today is the first day of freedom to work on our big projects. Frankly, though the other teams were quick out of the starting block, we're having some trouble switching gears. We have some good ideas, though. We decided against letting users choose from the entire RGB 0-255 standard range, instead choosing some discrete colors and allowing users to change the intensity of those in discrete chunks. I'm thinking of using the rainbow for our seven main colors. Anyway, we have a meeting at three tomorrow where we'll bring a mark-up of the interface. It should include how the interface reacts to gestures, because the interface's appearance is meant to be as simplistic as possible. Prasad says that the user interface will take up most of the code. That makes sense, as the actual app is almost entirely JOGL operations. JOGL is a Java wrapper class for OpenGL, by the way. I think this will be a lot of fun once we finally see the program start moving!

June 20th 2008

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Whew!

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Well we finally survived a really tough week. I'm pretty sure that I'll be trying to make up my sleep this weekend. Now we can focus more on the big project. That's the best thing about the presentation. We now have the research project decided on and the planning well underway. We'll be making the project in Java using JOGL for our graphics. We were originally planning to do this in C++, but the C++ version of Sparsh isn't quite ready to go. That's no problem. Cole and I already know Java, and after C++, Desiree should find it easy. The plans of the system aren't too complicated, and I'm going to grab all of the source code I need this weekend. I'm excited to get started. I might have to do some more research with the Legos this weekend.

NizarKhalife - 22 Jun 2008 - 23:26

The plans may be uncomplicated but making a life size Darth Vader with Legos is. That was a challenge.

DavidOluwatimi - 20 Jun 2008 - 16:55

I totally understand you, I am currently writing the message half sleep. It will be cool if you combined legos with the augmented reality effects.

JennaLanger - 20 Jun 2008 - 16:49

I'll play with legos if you want to watch me! I'm excited to start working on the project too, and to see how all of them are progressing!

June 19th 2008

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More late nights coming up

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Well, I was up until two last night, but it was really nice to finally have the project done. I'm not as proud of it as I am the adventure game, but what we had time to include works pretty well. I definitely got a little relief after that presentation was given. Tonight's the second big night in a row though. I need to make a lot of changes to the presentation for tomorrow, and it has to be done tonight because there's no room for a breath between events tomorrow. I also still need to read for journal and HCI. I'm going to do that now, since I won't have access to Powerpoint until Cole gets back from the Pizza Pit.

June 18th 2008

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Usability and Birdshot

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Well, we have what's pretty much a day off today from classes, though we did have HCI at 3:00. That was kind of fun really. I liked getting to barrel through a website pretending to be someone else and pretending to order delicious high-fat foodstuffs. Unfortunately, now I really want some Gumby's Pizza. Oh well. I also liked the optional reading from yesterday. Don Norman had some pretty interesting stories. Mostly today we're working on duck hunt, and it will probably drag on long into the evening, since the project is due tomorrow. We have the main "shoot duck and it dies" down, but we're still putting in the rest of the game. We need the interface, the dog animations, the scoring system, and the levels system. Anyway, I'd better go. Bye!

MatthewScheinerman - 18 Jun 2008 - 20:53

I'd like some Gumby's as well. I hope they have a Pokey topping!

June 17th 2008

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Projects & Presentations

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Well, Vijay decided that we won't be covering any new material today so that some of the more perfectionist Maya modelers can catch up and the rest of us can work on our projects. We have a persona to build for tomorrow, on OpenGL project to have finished Thursday, and our big project presentation is on Friday! That said, I think we'll get everything in on time. I'm working on the persona and the OpenGL presentation right now. Also, today our faculty mentor spoke at our luncheon lecture. It seems that he has been working on a tutoring program for various software applications that advises the user on what they're doing or leads them through tutorial tasks. He said they were still having trouble with some applications, but I think what he made is a huge improvement over the "assistant" style tutors or the ever older analogy tutors like "Microsoft Bob." Well, we have to get our picture taken now, so I'm signing off. Bye!

June 16th 2008

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Our Project is Starting!

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Well, today the big event was our meeting about the research project. We're definitely sold on the cooperative building block environment, and we spent a lot of the time planning out how it would work. We have a lot of good interface ideas and goals for the project. One of our goals is to make it an effective model of real cooperative block building. To do this, we'll probably watch kids play with Legos at the library. We're also planning on adding in some building instructions and competitive time trials. I'm working on the presentation right now, and it's going pretty well.

As an aside, I also got a kick out of the HCI class today. However, I now have to eat at Pizza Pit.

By the way, the biplane ride is awesome! A little pricey, but a lot of fun. See Jenna's pictures!

DesireeVelazquez - 16 Jun 2008 - 22:37

I'll definitely see them. But, have you watched the team blog?

June 13th 2008

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Biometric Identification

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Well, working late tomorrow night paid off, and I'm now pretty much caught up. Today we had a Journal Club discussion about biometric identification. We weren't very sure what to think at this point. Even eight years after the article was written, biometric ID adoption has been slow-paced. Of course, we recognize the need to change, with the large number of people who write their PIN on their ATM card or make their computer password the name of their significant other. The major worry about biometrics was that it would centralize the "identity", which would make identity theft even more dangerous and potent. Whether that outweighs the large number of people whose identities are stolen because of problems with current technologies is unclear. Some of us recalled the use of fingerprint to pay in grocery stores a few years ago. It seems that the particular business that was providing that service is no longer in business. It will be interesting to see what happens with those technologies. Well, I have to get back to work on my spray bottle.

JohnMorales - 15 Jun 2008 - 04:04

yeah working hard paid off, by the way nice bottle, looks very real.

BrianRussell - 13 Jun 2008 - 15:24

I agree, seeing what new technologies emerge in this field will be interesting.

June 12th 2008

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Busy, Busy

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Today is crazy. I'm working late and have to catch the bus in 15 minutes, so this will probably be pretty short. I fell behind yesterday because I ran into a weird bug with GL_FILL. I'm catching up though, since neither my Maya project or the current homework in OpenGL is too difficult. The multi-touch table team met again today, and we decided that due to the lag inherent in multi-touch, a chamber music app wouldn't work well with our current technology. Instead, we are considering a collaborative construction environment. It should be pretty cool. By the way, our group's OpenGL project is probably going to be a Duck Hunt clone. Holding the mouse right against the screen won't help.

June 11th 2008

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Opening up OpenGL

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Well, today a new class started. We have a course on OpenGL right now. I'm not very good at it yet, but mostly because I'm slow to do any work this morning. It's a really exciting set of tools, though. I'm planning on making my initials out of 3D objects so that they can be spun around like Vijay's cube template. That should be cool. I have to say that I'm impressed with Cole's 2D name though. Using math was a great idea! I wonder what other stuff we'll be making with OpenGL.

Also, since people wanted to see the Maya objects I've been working on so far, I've attached the Maya binary file. The fighter bay is down by the ground. It's not very pretty, since it's just an early version of the daisy petals. It's normally gray, but if it's rendered at certain angles it has a dark red shine. It's really weird. Anyway, I need to actually get some work done, so I'd better go. Here's the Maya file:

daisy.mb: Early daisy and "fighter bay" in Maya

June 10th 2008

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Wacky and Creepy

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Today we've been doing some more modeling. We don't have access to our H drives, so I can't get to the knight I was working on yesterday. Instead, I'm making a daisy, experimenting with some more of Maya's abilities. I gave everything in the scene color, and I think they look pretty good. I accidentally made something that looks like a fighter bay on some kind of space carrier. That was cool. We had a speaker today on the subject of Artificial Evolution. He used it to evolve solutions to a lot of problems. One interesting thing he did was evolved a code to make a person stand up. It was very cool, but the earlier generations which could do nothing but spin around in the fetal position were kind of creepy to watch.

EvaTao - 11 Jun 2008 - 05:39

Yeah, show us your fighter bay!!.

MatthewScheinerman - 10 Jun 2008 - 22:41

You should post the fighter bay. I'd like to see that.

DesireeVelazquez - 10 Jun 2008 - 19:10

Um, even after we were told not to save in H after the visual (blue screen) thing, you still saved it in H? Oh, well. That really sucks. But you have to show me your daisy later!

BrianRussell - 10 Jun 2008 - 13:39

It's too bad you can't work on the knight. It sounds like your daisy creation is making good progress.

June 9th 2008

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Modeling is Hard Work!

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Today we started a week long crash course in Maya. It was pretty brutal. I'm really glad the grad students were there to help, because the tutorials they suggested were tough to work with. Thanks to their help, I got most of my knight done, though. Undo was my best friend today, that's for sure. I think the knight should look pretty nice if I ever come back and finish it. By the way, congratulations on getting the project done, everybody, and a special thanks to the rest of the Multi-touch team!

NizarKhalife - 11 Jun 2008 - 00:24

Congratulations, Tom. The text adventure seems very enjoyable. The tutorials weren't too difficult. They aren't very thorough in their explanations either. Asking questions seems to be the way to go for Maya.

June 6th 2008

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Researching

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Today we had another Craft of Research class. As part of the class, we looked for articles on what has been tried before in areas related to our project. We looked for what had worked and what hadn't. The biggest thing I've found in the short time I already searched was a paper from a university in New York. It described the system one of our tables uses, and what they use it for. That was pretty cool. I then talked to Prasad about our table's responsiveness. He said that our table's responsiveness was controlled by a threshold slider software, and the material we use as a pane. Our pane is a little old and beat up, which forces us to set the threshold higher. Also, it's the area that a touch takes up that makes it easier to recognize, not the force He also showed me how to start the table. Well, this weekend our team will be working on the game for Monday, so I hope you all enjoy it!

DavidOluwatimi - 09 Jun 2008 - 09:50

I am actually interested in this game because I never seen a text based rpg

DesireeVelazquez - 06 Jun 2008 - 14:56

So it's not just because it's old that parts of the table can't be recognized or something? Unless Cole was wrong about the section of the table that didn't respond. What do you mean by start the table? As in, the program it uses? Hmmm, that would make sense.

BrianRussell - 06 Jun 2008 - 13:30

I'm looking forward to seeing this game in action.

June 5th 2008

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A Lot of Coding

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Today has consisted almost entirely of coding for me. I can't quite figure out one last thing from the double extra credit this morning. I'll have to ask Eric or Cole about fmod tomorrow, because I don't really understand it. We finished our video for HCI class today. That should help us out. Tomorrow we can also get quite a way down the read on our C++ project, too. It's all planned out, just like we said it would be, and all that's left is the coding. We do have classes tomorrow, though. I've got a lot of reading to do. I have to go eat now, so I'll chat tomorrow.

Oh! I just remembered that we had a speaker today. He discussed what he was doing with haptics. Haptics might be my favorite of the technologies here, so I was pretty excited. I hope I can see the results of some of the things he's working on.

DavidOluwatimi - 05 Jun 2008 - 20:25

Yeah, I was pretty excited too bout the haptics technology

DesireeVelazquez - 05 Jun 2008 - 19:57

Personally, I like Augmented Reality since I want to play with the ARToolKit

June 4th 2008

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A Little Progress

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Things are moving along. We've gotten some more C++ done, and we finished some of our text adventure. We decided to make that quite a bit smaller, because otherwise we'd take up a lot of RAM in order to keep the program moving quickly. Given that, I have some pretty good plans for the map as a whole. HCI class gave us some useful advice about working in teams and handling disagreements. That might come in handy this summer. We still have to think of a technology to tape one of us using. The problem is that all of these side projects are seriously draining our brainpower from the REU project. I haven't been able to think of anything new for the touch table in a long time. Oh well, maybe Prasad can give us a little extra time. Next week we should be able to really get started.

June 3rd 2008

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Thinking Day

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Well, today we had some more C++ class, and a guest speaker. Our guest speaker was from the Business College on campus, and he talked to us about the impacts HCI is having on business models and education. He was especially interested in virtual worlds, and their relationships with business ideas. He mostly talked about Second Life, since it has a capitalist economic climate similar to that in the United States. I'd never thought about the possibility of using virtual worlds to conduct economic research, but now that he mentioned it, it makes sense. I wonder what experiments are conducted outside of the ISU island. He said something else that applied to HCI. He pointed out that even though his Second Life class could be held in the sky or something, class worked best in a virtual classroom, because everybody immediately knew what they were supposed to do. Culture clearly plays a major role in interfaces. Well, we have Wii games tonight. If they have Brawl, I have a little gift for the purists...

EvaTao - 04 Jun 2008 - 04:13

You should try out the 2nd life. You will like it.

June 2nd 2008

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New Classes

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Well, we started our classes today. I don't have to attend the C++ class, (I just have to do all of the homework) so I took some time this morning to talk to Prasad. He said we would be writing our application as a client served access to the physical interface by the SparshUI. The nice thing about that is that we can write our new program in any language we're comfortable with. A write-up of the product we choose will be due Friday. I need to hurry up and get some great ideas! I'll write later about HCI class.

Later: We didn't get very deep into HCI class today. Mostly, we discussed the articles that we'd read over the weekend, and tried to get a more complete understanding of what HCI is. An interesting thing I hadn't thought of is the ethical implications of using interfaces to directly modify people. I think that such changes should be up to the individual. Also, we're putting in quite a bit of work into getting our project proposal ready for C++ class. It's a little complicated, since we expect modifications to happen to the plan while we work on the actual program. We'll just put down what we know so far.

EvaTao - 03 Jun 2008 - 00:54

Hey Tom, could you vote the activities you will attend and the movies you like when you get a chance?

EvaTao - 03 Jun 2008 - 00:30

Modify people...actually a good thought. We got modified all the time but no one really raise the issue. For instance, PC users use Mac machines...we have to modify ourselves to use different machines...keep going...

And hey you all found out who the C++ expert is here

NizarKhalife - 02 Jun 2008 - 21:38

You should write every line of your project in a different language. And I don't even mean programming language.

JennaLanger - 02 Jun 2008 - 17:41

Does that mean you can code using multiple languages? I've never heard of that program before. And watch out, I might be coming to you for some C++ help!

DesireeVelazquez - 02 Jun 2008 - 14:24

Ugh, that I didn't know!

SamanthaLevine - 02 Jun 2008 - 14:19

So now I know whose door to knock on when I have 90+ errors on my Hello World program

May 30th 2008

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Projects Start Today

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Well, this morning we discussed what really constitutes research. I get the feeling that it went well, but I can't really tell. Every description of research so far has been very verbose. The ones I like the most just line up each step of researching. We then had another faculty speaker. I think the idea of the speech was to remind us to think about the possible results of what we will do. Oh well, I'm about to go over to our first group meeting, so I'll write about that afterward.

Later: Well, our first meeting was a bit more laid back than I expected. I still liked it, though. Basically, our job this summer will be to develop client applications for SparshUI that use cooperation between two or more multi-touch devices. (SparshUI is the library that serves multi-touch functions and data to apps.) There are already quite a few potential uses for this.

One we came up with was a MIDI chamber music system, where each device plays an instrument and the combined sound goes to all devices. Another fun use for many of the multi-touch functions would be a team jigsaw puzzle. We'll be doing this in C++, since customers of SparshUI have said they prefer that to the original Java code. Of course, before we do any of those, we'll have to understand how to take advantage of SparshUI. I also need to look through my networking book again for the cooperation aspects to be set up.

Well, feel free to toss any more ideas our way!

DesireeVelazquez - 30 May 2008 - 16:35

If we want more types of applications we'd have to look at different types of games and hobbies people use or do, right?

May 29th 2008

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First Day of Blogging

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Hello, everybody. This is my first post, obviously. We haven't started the project yet, but we'll be finding out about it soon. Right now we finally have all of the necessary permissions and access cards and stuff, so we're pretty much ready to go. We also took a C++ test this morning, just to see where we were. I'm out of practice, so I don't think it went too well. Oh well, at least I have an opportunity to learn. Today we have a few tours left, so I'll let you know what I see.

Later: Wow, today was awesome. Personally my favorite demos were the haptics exhibits and the touch-table. Before I went in the C6, I was worried that I would hurl, because I've never been able to handle amusement park rides very well. It worked out pretty well, though. The Universe was awesome, of course. The Medical app had some pretty neat abilities. I wonder if shortcuts can be set up to make switching between useful views faster by cutting out the rotation. That would replace many loads with one. Sky Paint had plenty of childish joy available, like shooting mountains with stars.

I already have some ideas for the multi-touch table, so I'll have to see if I can get them to work.

EvaTao - 29 May 2008 - 23:56

Great Tom. Discuss your ideas with your team mentors if you like. They might be able to give you some suggestions as well.

• Potato_Chip_Puzzles.zip: Potato_Chip_Puzzles.zip

• Yahtzee6.zip: Yahtzee6.zip

• Toms_Maya_Scenes.zip: Toms_Maya_Scenes.zip

• Duck_Hunt(2).zip: Duck_Hunt(2).zip

• Code_of_Ethics.zip: Code_of_Ethics.zip