randform

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We finally managed to put an excerpt of our video documentation of seidesein on the daytar website.

seidesein is an interactive environment, which investigates communication in virtual 3D space.

seidesein can be experienced on a home computer as well as in bigger setups like a virtual reality theatre. This is due to the platform independency of the underlying software called jReality. (see also links above :-))

I had the pleasure to give a talk at the Days “Data processing and Geometry” (this is what google makes from the title) at Lyon the first two days of june.
It is quite an experience to attend a scientific meeting when having only a faint idea of the language (the spoken one, not the scientific) :-). While lasting only two days the conference covered quite a widespread range of topics. Especially interesting to me was some introduction into the design of the CGAL library — a collection of robust and efficient algorithms for geometry presented by Sylvain Pion and Raphaelle Chaine. An other interesting talk was from Alain Daurat on discrete tomography of convex sets. The question here is about algorithms that allow the reconstruction of the shape given the sample values along some finite number of directions (and what are the conditions on the choice of directions to ensure a reconstruction is possible). The complete reconstruction of any set given sample data along any discrete straight line was turned into a game by us recently. Many of the talks dealt with (re)construction of shapes: like arithmetic definition for Bresenham circles (Jean-Luc Toutant), a modeler based on the topology of discrete objects (Alain Daurat), or an algorithm for implicit surfaces (Christophe Raffalli)
I myself tried to draw the attention to the Berlin grown software jReality and oorange.

Despite chilling 17 degrees celsius there is 3 days of “Karnival der Kulturen” in Berlin. Here some pictures from the glorious parade….and as one can see the upcoming soccer world championship is sort of
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The images are from the article “Columbia Object Image Library (COIL-100),” by S. A. Nene, S. K. Nayar and H. Murase, (Technical Report CUCS-006-96, February 1996.)
The COIL-100 is a database of 7200 color images of the above 100 objects. Each object was fotographed in 72 different positions, by rotating the above black plate.
The database can be downloaded via ftp from the Columbia University server at: this link.

The collection/database was used in a realtime 100 object recognition system.
I.e. it was made in order to teach a computer to recognize/distinguish the above well chosen ;-) hundred objects. From the intro in the article:” The objects have a wide variety of complex geometric and reflectance characteristics.”

My little remix of the original video at youtube. :-)
The android is the work of electrical engineers at the University of Osaka.
From the article on national geographic news:

“Repliee Q1 appeared on June 9 at the 2005 World Expo in Japan, where she gestured, blinked, spoke, and even appeared to breathe. …the android is partially covered in skinlike silicone. Q1 is powered by a nearby air compressor, and has 31 points of articulation in its upper body.”

Whatsoever- one thing I learned from the video: real (android?) women wear pink jackets.

The xblocks 3D maze is a fairly straight und unloaded sculpture. I wonder how a video game could work e.g. on Rodins Burgers of Calais :-O:

mathematik.com has a mixture of experiments and visualizations of math content. And their radial Moiré is about as nice as our rand-Moiré…

we might get an up to date flashplayer for linux in the end but until then at least there is a blog about its development at adobe: penguin.swf

Merci to Etienne for the info.