Trident
2010-07-28

Linework | Fillwork

The green part of the figure is taller on the right side than the left, while still being a single object. The colored parts show the conflicting differences in width due to perspective distortion.

The i2 camera showed up a few days later and I went to pick it up. It did feel a bit plasticky but not totally bad. It was already getting dark outside as I had spent the day out of town so when tried it and noticed a very sluggish framerate I assumed it might need a bright sunlit day to work properly. This was very positive thinking on my part, but I had a tiny suspicion.

The morning after me and the 3D camera went out into the brilliant sunshine, and to my dismay the camera still recorded a stuttering video just like the day before. Sure it has two very small lenses and it is a cheap brand, but the specifications says 720p in 30fps, so I was quite disappointed! I decided to check how low the frame rate actually was. Back at my computer I took a closer look at the recorded video files. The camera sure saved in 30 fps, but many of the frames were the same, making it appear to have a much lower frame rate at playback! When I ran it through a video converter it reported how many unique and total frames it had: 136 unique frames out of 1360 frames in total. That is only 10%! This means the effective frame rate is  3fps instead of 30 fps! This of course was unacceptable and it had me promptly putting that test video on Youtube. To see it in the 3D player you need to click over to the site.

Of course I deemed the product to not represent what was advertised and I asked if I could return it. I got to pay for shipping it back as it was not broken, just not up to spec, and now they have finally approved a buyback so I will get my money back! I still ended up a bit unhappy as I was naively thinking (even though I knew Aiptek to be a low quality brand) that I would get a nice solution for spontaneous S3D content creation. Apparently it was not to be!

Update: For your reference I have also attached a few pictures taken with it. The noise levels in a dark room are quite horrible, but not as apparent here as I have scaled the images down. In daylight it actually works as well as my digital camera from six years ago, except that each image gets slightly different color, you can easily see this in the road picture.

About the Fujifilm Real 3D W1; I was very hyped for this product when it was first announced but as it was quite expensive and practically impossible to find in a store for testing I did not spontaneously buy it. I finally did get a hands on experience at a photographic fair, and even though it’s a solid piece of hardware I am still not buying it. This mostly because the 3D screen does not work well for me at all; it works by shifting the display back and forth beneath a parallax barrier so  each eye gets 30 fps 60 flickering Hz individually. A static parallax barrier display would probably be more comfortable due to the light being constant. Also, the buttons to control it are very unintuitive as they have two commands and you have to tilt them one way or the other, all of them. I really liked the general concept but I wish Fujifilm would make a revised model with a different screen, new interface and buttons and a better movie mode. And to keep the price down they could also skip the optical zoom as it probably messes up the baseline anyway. That’s what I think!

Box2
2010-06-25

Linework | Fillwork

The center surface is the back wall, flat with the front and standing out from the front; all at the same time.

The theme this year was: labels

A label is any kind of tag attached to something so as to identify the object or its content. Labeling means naming. It is human instinct to group things with what they are most similar and name them as a whole. We live in a world filled with labels antagonising each other to win our preference. There are labels associated with consumer products and fashion. People voluntarily label themselves in order to have a sense of belonging to a group, but there also labels that people use to categorize others stemming from feelings of racism and xenophobia, political and religious discrimination, etc. What is the role of these labels in your life? How can a label describe the world you live in? Can a label give the infinite set of experiences, beliefs and desires that summarise each human being?

I had a number of ideas, but with my limited time and brains I only managed to realize one of them.

Recursive Labeling

re·cur·sive
–adjective
pertaining to or using a rule or procedure that can be applied repeatedly.

la·bel·ing
–verb (used with object)
to affix a label to; mark with a label.

As you can see I had created labels in different sizes and tied them together as a chain of labels that labeled each other… it’s a bit abstract, I guess. The picture with the black background also looks a bit dark, but I guess that depends on it being next to the other picture.

The process was quite straight forward. I printed a bunch of labels in relative sizes, cut those out and used them as templates to cut the actual labels out from table placement cards I had bought at the book store. Then after deciding in what order I should put the different colors I made string holes that were supposed to fit the scale of the different label sizes. Lastly I glued the labels which I had grouped together to create the final labels and then I just tied them together with pieces of string!

The harder part was to get them to look good in a photo. I messed around with many flash configurations, mainly because I’m a newbie strobist with little experience, but after two sessions I had to be satisfied because I really had no more time. The pictures themselves had to have a high resolution so they are both made from three pictures each stitched together as panoramas.

Again, the entries did not fare well in the contest, but perhaps next time! If you find a creative contest you figure I should participate in, send me a message! That was how I ended up creating something for this contest! :o

Tower
2010-05-09

Linework | Fillwork

The yellow path goes between all levels of the tower while being completely horizontal.

When looking at this figure I myself don’t think it looks very impossible, that is mostly because it is hard to see that surfaces perfectly follow a vanishing point even if they only look slanted, slanted surfaces would be differently affected by perspective, but that is pretty hard to see.

Waves
2010-04-30

Linework | Fillwork

The top of the figure does not match the bottom.  All five surfaces in the middle which face upwards are all perfectly flat and facing the same direction, straight up.

(A link to the game!) To make a long story short! Mig over at HBO contacted me about two weeks ago to make a Flash game to help distribute codes to the Halo: Reach beta. I pondered the project and said I would do as good as I could muster, in my busy spare time. When I finally got to working on it last Sunday it was pretty close to the deadline, the game had to be public Wednesday night!

How did I manage it? To start off I opened up an old project I had never finished from 2007. Why the progress had stopped back then was because the game ran so slowly on my computer hardware at that time, but now that was no longer an issue. I began with writing a list of things to do, to be slightly organized. The list of changes and additions is probably not very interesting, but the important stuff I did was adding a new collision detection model, copied over database connectivity from another game I have not finished, added an actual UI (though incredibly basic), designed all the obstacles and finally a level for people to play. Half of these things I did the evening before the game was published, which is kind of nuts when I think about it.

So on Wednesday night at 2am my time it was posted in the HBO forum, and I could finally go to bed, after a three day headache :) Before falling asleep though, I checked the reactions popping up on the forum, and I have to say I have not felt that feeling you get when people are playing a game you have made in quite some time! I can’t even imagine how it would be to release a retail game you have worked on constantly for several years… but I enjoyed this very much in any case!

All game sessions were registered in a database and nine winners were picked. The categories you could win in were not only highest score, but also most runs, most quits, longest time played and so on. There is a summary of it here.

About the game itself.

The game takes place in a cramped tunnel on the last level of Halo: CE, The Maw, where you had to race towards an escape to safety while all these parasitic life forms that are The Flood were bearing down on you. This rendition of the event is a bit calmer with only static flood blobs, but they are instead incredibly dangerous! Touch one and you are assimilated!

The style is quite clearly based on Stuntmutt’s stylized version of Master Chief, the famous One One Se7en. I greatly enjoy using Mr 117 as it makes content creation quite quick but also instantly recognizable by the right crowd. Win win!

The only tips you get when it comes to controls are what keys to use, the rest is for yourself to find out through experimentation! Personally I feel like more games could be made this way, as I greatly enjoy exploration even in that sense… but I guess that much depends on the complexity of the game.

Afterthoughts? I wish I had time to do more things like this, more often, for sure.

After some brainstorming and juggling ideas with a few friends I had formed a plan. The day before the deadline, last Friday, I went to a toy store and bought a doll house bathroom set. I used this bathtub to let my potato get some relaxation time! He got hot water and soap bubbles, while being monitored by rubber ducks. A disappointment was that the ducks were molded solid and did not float, but at least they look cute!

The location was at a friend’s place as I had been invited over that evening; and because I would have no other opportunity to make the shoot that week I brought all my gear to her place! Preparing and shooting took all in all around 1½ hours. This was the first time I tried using my eBay flash equipment, and I have to say it makes working with a scene way more interesting!

Up top you can see the image I submitted to the contest, and below are a few behind the scene shots!

Oh, and the result of the contest? This Saturday I got an email from David himself with the message that I *shock* was the winner!

This is actually the first photo contest I have ever won, and I have lost count of how many I have participated in. Though often the theme of a contest is very broad, like “summer”, “motion”, “pets” or “Christmas” which can be just about anything. The theme this time was much more specific while still leaving many parameters up to creativity, I like it!

There was a few questions in the email and I couldn’t help myself so I just wrote down everything I thought of in my response; it was received so well that the reply was hacked into a fake interview and promptly posted! You can read it in Swedish or in English translated through Google.

All in all I thank Mr. Bicho for a fun contest and I greatly look forward to future contests that he might host :) I hope they will be of the same inspiring nature!

Update: Today, May 6th, I finally got an adapter to use the lens I won on the GF1! I have not had much time to experiment yet, but it fits quite nicely on there :) I can’t wait for Panasonic to release an official adapter, perhaps with more functionality than the one I got now, which does nothing except being a solid lump of metal. See pictures below!

Intersect
2010-03-29

Linework | Fillwork

If you travel along the top and then along the bottom you will keep going in the same direction, in or outwards. At the same time the top and bottom are connected vertically at several places.

As a bonus today I’m also attaching a picture I put together by superimposing all the different steps I had saved while plotting the lines. I found it pretty interesting to look at. Actually, it might be the best way yet to visualize my technique and give you an idea of the amount of work that is involved. Enjoy :)

]]> http://andreasaronsson.com/2010/04/14/impossible-figure-2010-03-29/feed/ 0 http://andreasaronsson.com/2010/04/14/impossible-figure-2010-03-29/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/AAronsson/~3/JogT8fOML5U/ http://andreasaronsson.com/2010/03/21/what-is-that-on-the-cover/#comments Sun, 21 Mar 2010 20:09:47 +0000 Andreas Aronsson http://andreasaronsson.com/?p=2500 The 19th of November I got an exciting email through this blog. It was from a creative studio in London called Remote Location, they asked for permission to use one of my impossible figures as a base for a CD cover. Excited as always about things like this I hardly hesitated and quickly complied to their request!

I recently got my hands on the final product as I received a few copies in the mail just a few weeks ago. The production is called Elevator Music: Vol. 1 and it’s a various artists collection from a London club called Fabric. I can’t say that I’m very familiar with clubbing as an activity but I greatly enjoy electronic music. The genre of the music on this disc is called Dubstep and it kind of requires a phat bass to make it justice; you can listen to samples here :)