Tricorn
2013-03-16

Linework | Fillwork

If you follow this figure around you will continuously travel either into or out of the picture.

I became aware of this device when the Kickstarter launched back in August last year. As I at the time had no real income I hesitated backing the $300 for a week, but then came to the conclusion that I wouldn’t be able to survive without getting it, so I pledged.

Just this week I got a message that my Rift would ship with the next batch, which I hope means soon. The entire back story of this product is amazing and inspiring, I’ll try to summarize it real short, with reservations for factual errors as I am writing all this from memory!

1. Palmer Luckey tinkers with VR gear while being home schooled. As long as he could ace the national tests he could spend his time as he wanted, thus hardware hacking. Much of the money he earned repairing phones was spent on computers and virtual reality gear. He fluked out of journalism and started working on VR in a lab funded by the army.
2. As Palmer could not find any head mounted display that let him enter the Matrix he began developing his own. This resulted in prototypes he posted about on enthusiast forum(s). When he had a revision he was satisfied with he planned to start a small Kickstarter project for self-assembly kits.
3. Programmer legend John Carmack who had a break from normal duties and time to mess with VR saw his prototype and asked to buy one. Palmer did not think twice and sent him his only prototype just like that. This is where things get crazy.
4. John Carmack taped a sensor to the prototype and mounted it all in the frame of a pair of ski goggles, then integrated support for it into Doom 3 BFG which was due for remastering. He then brought this setup to E3 2012 and demonstrated it for the press. This did shake things up and probably led to what happened next.
5. The Kickstarter launch was a bit delayed, because Palmer was no longer a lone guy but had more people in his startup Oculus VR, and they were getting some incredible people to vouch for their tech. When the project did launch the Internet exploded and they finally ended up with almost 10 times the original amount asked for, close to $2.5 million.
6. The interest for VR suddenly got revived and this generated some really interesting talks on QuakeCon, John Carmack’s keynote and then the Virtual Insanity panel. People who got to try the Rift raved with how awesome it was, and well, I can say I have been hyped on this since the first day of the Kickstarter.
7. Post-Kickstarter Oculus VR has picked up more employees, another $2.5 million in funding, has started to produce development kits in China and since March have been shipping them to developers all around the world. At the same time they have been to multiple shows everywhere to show off the tech.

Some great recorded reactions are Grandma visiting Tuscany, Norweigan Dagbladet Rollercoasting, Hydra Tuscany by Sixense, Cymatic Bruce testing demos, Davis Daily CES13 reactions and Kotaku Australia hands on.

So, why do I bring this up? Well just now I was about to post a bunch of Photoshop jobs I did for a thread on MTBS3D.com, and it kind of needed an introduction, which as you might have noticed became a bit more serious than I had planned. Anyway, first the Photoshop thread was just for fun, but it got turned into a contest with a prize by the site admin, more on that later. Now on to the imagery!

The first image I did was of course based on Halo, as that is a big part of my online community history. This is the Master Chief with his visor exchanged for a Rift devkit. I extracted the Rift from one of the few available images and distorted it to fit in the helmet. I actually reversed the image and then the logotype and cut the side up… way too serious. In the end I also created a displacement map for the bumps and applied that to the honeycomb pattern overlaid on top. Of course I would love to play Halo in the Rift, but I’m not sure that will ever happen.

This was an idea in my head I could not let go of, and the last image (view full) was part of the motivation, because I knew it existed. I will not spoil what the point of the joke is here in the description, just check it out :P To put together this one I actually stepped through this sequence in the movie and did screen captures to get the views I wanted. The actual photoshopping was not so much more than framing and some small adjustments.

This was a play on yet another VR movie, Total Recall, and of course shows how it hopefully not is to wear the Rift. This was a quick job with basic adjustments like color balance, brightness/contrast and overlaying a lens flare.

This is one of the more serious projects. Sadly with Photoshopping a big chunk of the project time is looking for source material. In this case I think I ended up with a quite compelling result. I drew the black silhouette on top of an instruction illustration, extracted the fantasy scene from some concept art and the room from some architectural renders. There are a ton of small adjustments all over this piece, as well as all the texts and logotypes. I was imagining it as a center-fold ad for the Rift :) Lets see what they will actually do when they finally will try to sell the consumer version. Perhaps they won’t even need any ads…

Trying to tie in popular culture a bit more I put the Rift into Back to the Future. I wanted to add some catchy subtitle by late at night I was not in shape to come up with that :P As it would show later this was a fairly pointless image with just nice photoshopping, when it was remade by someone in the forum where Palmer’s and Carmack’s faces were inserted it got very popular, more on this later!

With all the news being reported that included factual errors, like the Rift having two separate displays or positional tracking, I was inspired to create a stupid picture where an owl wore the Rift backwards, which is physically impossible to boot as the display would be in the way. Funny enough the owl’s eyes fit almost perfectly in the lens sockets of the Rift, which made it quite funny :D Then I just added some shadows and was done with it!

This took me forever! Looking for nice images with angles matching the few images that existed of the Rift, coming up with titles that made sense and followed a theme, adjusting colors, contrast, etc separately between the four images… it was way too much work to be motivated, but as I had already started I finished it! It’s supposed to show that using the Rift is so immersive the people using it does not realize they are actually not just using the Rift… perhaps a long shot.

Oh, this one. I think it has a lot of subtlety that perhaps was not picked up by everyone. I posted it on the supposed day of the apocalypse, 21st of December 2012. I took a picture from the movie 2012 showing a rift, the geological term, with someone donning the Oculus Rift in a house nere the rift talking in a headset obviously misinterpreting what is being said. This someone is actually the main actor from the movie,  John Cusack. A little by random I ended up placing the Oculus VR logo just above the start of the rift, which kind of makes that into an Oculus Rift too. Here I again spent an obscene amount of time trying to find good source material, then it was mostly a matter of placing things where it made sense and adjusting colors/contrast.

In a few of the photos available of the Rift an adjustment dial was visible. At this time it was not public information what this dial actually did, so I was free to make up what it could mean. Using urban dictionary I found a few of the words, but I had to make up a number of them myself. I tried not repeating any of the parts they were built of which was a challenge. It is also a little funny that it goes to 11, but in reality it goes from -5 to +5.

It was actually this image that won me a prize in the contest! Not the grand prize, but a prize nonetheless ;) The fun part is that it was also one of my quickest jobs, just turning the original into evening time and replacing the face on the box with the face of a Rift. I think it got included as it kind of resonated with how many of us felt at that time :D Right now the wait is not so calm, but more like running around in circles clawing at the walls.

Uhoh. This one will not make one iota of sense if you did not keep up with CES this year. TechCrunch had a live interview with the then most likely very exhausted Palmer Luckey, and he ended the interview with “It was great having me” which was kind of hilarious and probably a sign of just how worn out he was :P This is based on the most interesting man in the world and is basically just a face switch, but it was quite fun to do :)

The Verge took some very nice photos of the Rift at CES. Guessing some nice flash-bouncing in the ceiling, looks oh so familiar. This is playing on the Rift being the vision of Palmer, and then replacing the front of it with his actual face and eyes, creating an illusion of an offset part of the face of the wearer. This was inspired by talks of googly eyes on the Rift. The actual photoshopping was quite thankful, some transformation and the usual corrections, but it was really fun trying to fit the face on there and tracing the contours so it looked nice :)

With the rampant discussion and speculation of how the production and shipping of the Rifts actually going, I made a fairly dull troll picture :P I think it’s dull because it’s almost entirely gray, and turned out fairly boring to look at even if it took quite some time to make… but, at this time, my well of ideas was running dry and I was pretty much grasping at straws. It was also my last contribution to the actual contest as it was the last day of submission :)

This is the last one that required some effort and which ended up satisfactory, also based on the same photo as one of my earlier favorites. After a thread on MTBS3D where we discussed how we could decorate the face of the Rift I came up with this. Instead of a part of Palmer’s face I have glued on the entirety of E.T’s face, also kind of ironically referencing the game Atari released that was not that great. Still, custom Rift skins sounds like fun, right?

I made this one for Road To VR, a site with superbly good VR coverage and a very nice logo, ehem! The character is the Heavy from Team Fortress 2, a very polished team shooter by Valve. The reason for this was the listing of a talk for GDC where they were going to talk about the challenges porting TF2 to virtual reality. This was before they had announced the support of the Oculus Rift which now is in the live game!

Just seeing this image I cannot remember why I did this one. Reading up on old posts I saw that I made it to jokingly suggest what the prize of the contest had been upgraded to. By this time I was making great efforts to learn Java in a new class and did not really have time to do many more photoshops, this was a fairly quick job with a gradient map and lightening up shadows.

My motivation to do these Photoshops was partially because the access to images of the Rift was very limited. Not much was out there, which made it feel kind of exclusive and made it challenging to use those few images to create stuff. Now when the kit is out and it’s easy to take all the photos you want, it’s not really as interesting :P And things will not come as naturally, as the possibilities went from quite boxed in to unlimited. I work much better within constraints, for some reason.

This kind of happened before, with my Halo panoramas. When they were almost impossible to make, I made them. When anyone could make them in super high resolution, I could not be bothered… but then the Halo universe has pretty much died for me :P I can rant for ages how Halo 2 ruined the series, but that is outside the scope of this post, haha. I better stop now before I go way off topic ;)

Oh, and as I said earlier about face replacements. I noticed how well received images were where faces of characters were replaced with Palmer, Carmack or anyone from the Oculus team. At the time it felt a bit cheap, I had spent up to eight hours on a piece which almost got ignored even though I used my Photoshop skills to the max, while some copy-paste faces got really popular! Of course this is how things works, and I’m almost ashamed that I even cared, but I guess that is human at least :P

My brain was working in a mode to create stuff that would be entertaining for as many people as possible, the general public. I forgot that inside humor is always the best, and that I was in a tight online community. As you might have noticed this really saturated the entire contest :D When it was announced on the front page a face replace image was used as the cover. When my Back to the Future image was altered (with permission) it got way more popular. And finally the grand prize winner was an image that brought face replace to new heights with what, nine replaced faces? Now in retrospect I find it fairly hilarious how things worked out :) And I also appreciate the face-replace images more!

A last note on the Oculus Rift. I have tons of ideas I want to try, but who knows how much I will be able to experiment, it would involve learning a game engine which is no small task. Right now my mind is preoccupied by finding somewhere to live as I’m starting a new job in a new city in less than a months time, but I definitely want to fiddle with native Rift games in both first and third person, playback and recording of spherical video leading to telepresence… I will have to find time for some of this eventually, haha! There will probably be much more on the Rift later on.

Follow the arrows down the slopes and you will forever travel downwards.

Then, to my wonderment, I noticed that every single impossible figure post for 2012 had 2011 in the title! For some reason I had only updated the month and day and not the year, and hadn’t noticed my mistake until now! Crazy for sure! All fixed now though, which has changed my links, but it’ll have to do.

This impossible figure is based on a quite old sketch. I dug it up in my archive and I felt that I had to do it. It was a bit hard to figure out, I had to sketch up a new version where I marked up which surfaces that would share the same width across the image. Almost the entire thing is drawn in relation to just a single side.

Snake
2013-01-30

Linework | Fillwork

If you follow this snake up and down you will notice that surfaces change direction between up and down or even into just air.

Trees
2012-12-21

Linework | Fillwork

This construction consists of multiple vertical connections between bars that are perpendicular to each other.

With my webcam I did a few panoramas of my room when I wanted to document how I had it set up at the time. I would place the camera on a rotating platform and let it take pictures at an interval, the resolution maxing out at 320 by 240 pixels. After that I would stitch them together and spin them around in a Flash application. I have picked out the two most successful panoramas.

In this first panorama, a prominent feature is the Coca Cola portable refrigerator as well as my first very own PC, bought with money I had earned myself! Though at the time it was a bit old.

In this second panorama, done almost a year later, there has been a few upgrades. A new PC, a TV, an Xbox with Halo running and quite many tables. You might also have noticed that I appear twice!

Now ten years later, I have moved out from my previous apartment and am now renting a room for studies. Before I packed up all my stuff I just had to do another room panorama, something I had been planning to do ever since I felt settled there.

So, four days before I was shipping myself away I spent a day to try and accomplish what I had in mind, it was pretty much the last day available as time was running out and I had to pack up all the gear in my living room. Let me first post the result and I will go into how I did it after that!

As you can see, we start out with Halo yet again, now the anniversary edition, appropriate enough. Then we have motorcycle-me, skiing-me, sleeping-me, laptop-me, xbox-me, stepmania-me, party-me and kitchen-me. You can actually find my reflection in the frame of the TV too, that would be photography-me then. Below I will try to very quickly go through the creation process.

Preparation

First I picked out all the different clothes I wanted to wear, made a loose sketch on where the different characters should be placed and planned at which points there would be seams that had to be stitched later. To get my camera in a vertical position rotating at the focal plane I had borrowed a ball tripod head which I put on my own macro head which in turn was mounted on a borrowed tripod. Thank you Ateljé Digital for enabling me to do this!

Execution

Before capturing all my needed images I experimented with many flash positions and exposure settings. I set the camera to manual mode and fired away. For the shots where a seam in the panorama would be crossing my body I actually used a piece of string to pull at the tripod handle to rotate the camera for a second photograph. A fairly non-scientific method with plenty of randomness but it worked. One mistake was to forget that my camera resets the focus position when restarted so some pictures ended up blurry after a review on my computer as I had turned the camera off.

Editing

Luckily I had enough good pictures to make a panorama I ended up happy with. It actually took me almost four months before I sat down and edited it all, as I straight after shooting rushed to finish packing everything for my move! How to fit it all together was hard to imagine in my head, but my original plan worked, and I could Photoshop together people contained in the same photo frame and then stitch a panorama with the resulting composites. The final panorama is just above 81 megapixels, a Photoshop file at 993 MB.

Post Mortem

Some of the characters I had planned didn’t actually fit inside the frame of the camera, luckily I discovered that early on and could change my plans. The focus mistake was bad, not fatal, but it did make me nervous when I was going to edit everything together. I ended up being one of those times where the decision to take just one extra photograph actually saved the entire project.

What I really miss with the Panasonic GF1 is a flip-out screen so I can see what I am photographing. It’s quite hard to do these kind of jobs blind with just a remote, I sourly miss the video out I had with the Olympus E-410.

Oh, and one other thing. When doing my panorama sections I did the blood on kitchen-me and some fake shadows, and when I later edited the stitched panorama I realized it should have been much better to add those effects after stitching so I could tweak them easier.

At last a funny detail, kitchen-me is wearing a T-shirt I got from donating blood. And as I have been asked this, yes that actually happened, something people who has been reading this blog would know :P

Fence2
2012-11-27

Linework | Fillwork

Follow the horizontal beams from the left pole, notice how the top and bottom turn towards you while the middle one turns away from you, at the same time they all connect to the right pole.

In March last year I got an email from Trick Music about using one of my impossible figures as a CD cover for one of their upcoming projects. As you might remember something similar has happened before, and for some reason it is again electronic music from the UK!

The product itself is a nine track CD featuring psychedelic trance, one of the genres of music I listened to as a teenager. The release itself is titled Nothing to do for the Next Three Hours by Prism.

It is a limited release of 300 or so copies, I think primarily made for disk jockeys and the like. The package is a very nice satin matte digipack and the print is really high quality! If you want to sample the music it is possible through Amazon.co.uk where you can also purchase the tracks as MP3 files, neat! Thanks again Trick Music for including me in this project! :D

Above you can see a time-lapse done with my webcam from when I visited DreamHack Winter 2012. Right now I’m at zero income, and a table spot is quite expensive, but as I had never brought a machine when going to DreamHack before I put down the money to get the experience.

The first hassle was to get all my gear packed. I brought my desktop computer as I suspected I was going to play games and perhaps do some editing and/or artsy stuff. I also packed a security cable, padlock, Kensington lock and things like that as I was wary to get stuff stolen, mostly because I’m understandably not really in a position to buy replacements.

I arrived with a friend quite early on the Thursday, with the event lasting until Sunday morning,  and as he was a DreamHack veteran he quickly went inside with his golden ticket and everything in his chair. Yes, you can/should bring your own chair if you want to sit comfortable. Myself I brought a tiny office chair which only fit my computer, put a backpack on and carried my monitor under my arm. If I ever go to DreamHack again I’m definitely taking a lighter screen, or even just a laptop, urgh. After standing in line and getting a bracelet I descended into hall C which was where we would spend the next couple of days, my left arm incredibly weak after holding my screen while standing in line.

Unpacking my gear I realized just how small a space I had to fit everything in, 80 x 60 cm seemed much larger in my head. Luckily my older brother had the spot right next to me and he was only bringing a laptop which meant I could use some of his space. It is a bad idea to bring a 24″ behemoth screen (large footprint).

Even though my plan was to not spend much money at the event itself I was pretty much forced to get a good headset as it became apparent it was impossible to hear what anyone said unless you had a VOIP group call going. And this even when we sat in the calm hall! In the other halls where they had stages and music blaring you had to resort to text chat or sign language even with a headset on.

It was my original wish to participate in some of the creative contests, but in the darkness and noise I didn’t get much more done than setting up a webcam feed for friends and family. I had also read beforehand that you could submit (pretty much) anything you had done previously which made it seem pointless to try and do anything right there and then. Instead I gamed more than I had done in ages, watched tournaments, went sightseeing and met more friends and even relatives :P

As for games, I got to play Starcraft 2 customs, Counter Strike, League of Legends, Hawken (closed) beta, Trackmania, WC3 Dota and probably a bunch more games I cannot remember right now. When looking around it seemed like gaming sure was the main activity for pretty much everyone. Back when I was still a teenager and I was at slightly smaller LANs filesharing was more prominent, but then everyone didn’t have broadband at home and it was still legal-ish in Sweden to fileshare. On the live network statistics for the DreamHack Internet connection only games were listed as the biggest sources of traffic, which makes me wonder if that was the whole story. In any case here is a screen cap of the stats if the next LAN has already taken place when you read this :)

General thoughts about the spectacle? Quite nice. There were exhibitions from various sponsors, a few shops, food places. Lots of crew to keep things in order, supply medical help, directions, registrations etc. People seemed calm most of the time, no fights that I saw and I didn’t hear about anyone losing any gear. There are a few odd habits that apparently has grown over the years, like randomly applauding which spreads through the hall, or more oddly, screaming “Hallå!” (hello) and people would respond in sequence for a while. A good way to stay awake I guess.

One thing though, the center area between the halls which contained a section of console/arcade gaming and also the bathrooms had the most crazy smell/stench! I tried to hold my breath everything I passed through there and I do wonder if the people who sat there still have a sense of smell. Though, as I know from previous LAN (and farm) experience a person can get used to mostly any smell with enough exposure.

Sadly when I had finally gotten used to the place it was all over. As it was my first time there for real I was fairly stressed out in the beginning, wondering what to expect, what to do, where to go. Now afterwards it feels like I could have spent more time in the exhibitions, watching pro gamers play and just socializing. Also, taking more photos, perhaps panoramas with a tripod. This time around I spent most of my time just playing games with the people I was there with which essentially made it feel like I could just as well have been on a smaller LAN.

Not really sure what personal benefit visiting such a large LAN is except experiencing the spectacle. My guess is that it has more meaning if you have an online gaming community with members gathering from all over the place, that would actually be really neat, though I’m not seeing myself doing anything like that anytime soon. The last time I had such a large group to play with was during my WoW days, days which I don’t look upon with much fondness.

As usual I took a photo from a movie from the year that has passed and inserted myself. At first I was looking for something funny from The Hobbit as I just saw that flick, but I don’t have much of my photography gear with me so I settled for an Iron Man shot from The Avengers.

I had accidentally changed the camera to JPEG instead of RAW the last time I used it, but the exposure was good enough so I could still use my images. To match the lighting in the original shot I used a 10″ tablet with a white background at maximum brightness as the only light source. I held it up behind the camera in a dark room and snapped away hoping to get a shot that would work, and luckily I did! The process in Photoshop was…

• Scaling, rotating and masking out my face.
• Adjusting color balance, curves, levels, brightness and contrast.
• Adding blur and reducing saturation at different places.
• Adding glow, reflections and some extra graphics and text.
• Some final dodging and burning and then a global curves adjustment.

Of course that was fairly simplified, but pretty much it too! Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! In case you don’t celebrate Christmas, Happy Holidays!

Oh, and something funny. When you already got something matched up like this, it’s quite easy to give myself Mr Starks eyes. Weird… eew… I don’t like looking at that one, hahaha!