Seeing those green Japanese mascots sucked :-\ I was almost at the expo, only they didn't find money in the budget for me to actually go and see the tech I'd spent the last six months working on actually in use.
They had a mummified woolly mammoth and a zeppelin and a model of the house from My Neighbour Totoro there that year, too.
Crazy. I actually don't know you. I'm Neill and live in Wellington,I meet Shaleen in Auckland as I used to go to the CR gigs. I worked on the expo, I designed a system to syncronize DVD players and had 6 trips back and forth to Nagoya mostly installing stuff. Did you work on the Hitlab stuff? I did enjoy the link to random pictures, but I guess I've become so Japanized that the expo picture did not seem the least bid odd to me.
Yeah - As part of my HITLab MSc I developed the multi-touch tracking software for the screens in the interactive zone. Given cost/material constraints I couldn't do the active IR stuff the same way Jeff Han famously did later in 2005, so there were a lot more behind-the-scenes calibration and illumination issues to address. Heck, in my lab we were blocking out excess sunlight by taping black plastic weed matting over the windows, so it wasn't exactly a high-budget operation.
There apparently wasn't enough money for me to go over and make any calibration tweaks on site for any of the screens as they were installed either, so I was pretty much flying blind and hoping the guy they sent over to install the hardware got them mostly right. Ideally I would have been able to calibrate each of the wide-angle camera lenses for maximum precision, and make sure there weren't any environmental issues affecting detection that we hadn't allowed for
( ... )
Nathan was the guy who was sent over. Not the most practical guy around I think he was a bit out of his depth. I felt sorry for him especially when he first arrived. We went to collect him from the airport then drove him to the expo. We had been in Japan on and off for months at this stage and all 3 of us "techs" had fallen in love with the food. We asked Nathan about what he liked, he said that he did not eat any sea food, all 3 of us just went quiet for a while. Poor guy, he got a burger from McDonalds which had a strange tasting sauce, it would have been prawn flavour.
We sure could have done with some support on the ground in Nagoya, we needed a turn-key solution instead we got a bunch of bits and very little instruction. It did not go together easily I can tell you that.
Lack of budget was a big problem for us too. Shame that good ideas cannot be realized properly due to insufficient budget.
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They had a mummified woolly mammoth and a zeppelin and a model of the house from My Neighbour Totoro there that year, too.
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Yeah - As part of my HITLab MSc I developed the multi-touch tracking software for the screens in the interactive zone. Given cost/material constraints I couldn't do the active IR stuff the same way Jeff Han famously did later in 2005, so there were a lot more behind-the-scenes calibration and illumination issues to address. Heck, in my lab we were blocking out excess sunlight by taping black plastic weed matting over the windows, so it wasn't exactly a high-budget operation.
There apparently wasn't enough money for me to go over and make any calibration tweaks on site for any of the screens as they were installed either, so I was pretty much flying blind and hoping the guy they sent over to install the hardware got them mostly right. Ideally I would have been able to calibrate each of the wide-angle camera lenses for maximum precision, and make sure there weren't any environmental issues affecting detection that we hadn't allowed for ( ... )
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We sure could have done with some support on the ground in Nagoya, we needed a turn-key solution instead we got a bunch of bits and very little instruction. It did not go together easily I can tell you that.
Lack of budget was a big problem for us too. Shame that good ideas cannot be realized properly due to insufficient budget.
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Random!
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