Obscura Digital worked with the Discovery Channel on an episode of Prototype This! titled “Virtual Sea Adventure”. Travis Threlkel helped them to make this surreal underwater scuba/shark tank simulator using a dome, projector, robotic underwater vehicle, and an HD camera outfitted with a fisheye lens. You have to see it to believe it. Anyway, I appeared a few times in the episode showing off some of the projects we have in the lab. (Hey, it’s not everyday that I get to be on primetime TV!)

The CEO of Intel wanted something cool for his keynote presentation at Oracle Open World this week, so we put together this touch screen with an interactive medical visualization system that allowed him to investigate 3D and 4D MRI scans. That big projection screen in the back was gigantic — at least a couple of hundred feet long.

I bit the bullet and dropped some money on the Canon G9. The last digital camera I bought was the Nikon Coolpix 950 back in 1999, and technology has come a very long way since then. I’ve actually never really been much of a big photo-nut, and honestly all the holier-than-thou photographers irritate me. A big part of why it’s become an interest for me lately is that it’s a nice feeling to pay attention to reality; I’ve spent most of my life in front of a computer screen. It also gives me more of an excuse to head for the hills.

My street.

Well I went to Siggraph for the first time. I must say that it was really fun and it was great to get a sense of what’s going on around the world in terms of media technology. A lot of the exhibitors were focused on film and games but there was a really cool art+desgin section, as well as new tech demos which showcased a lot of weird and inspiring projects mostly from kids in Tokyo and Europe.

Mathematical Scupltures by Bathsheba Grossman

I have a strict policy of only posting images of things that I have personally worked on, but I love these sculptures so much that I can’t help it.

I set up our multitouch platform on the Pepper’s Ghost stage we have in the lab. It works by holding infrared LED lights in your hand. It looks really cool but the lighting and perspective conditions have to be very specific. Last time I checked, this video had over 200,000 views!

Here is a nice CNET video and article about Obscura Digital. A lot of my work is shown in the clip, including the multitouch wall, laser writer, holographic interface, etc.

I put together a realtime 3D interface for Applied Materials. There’s two components: a 50″ holographic touch screen on glass, and a 16×9′ rear projection wall. Both displays are driven from one computer: as you manipulate an object on glass, the same view is rendered in higher resolution on the RP wall. Each of them shows some high resolution (600k+ polys) CAD models of machines that are used to fabricate chips for Intel. You can select different hot spots to inspect, and then zoom/rotate using your fingers. Here’s a clip of it on YouTube.

I tailored our multi-touch wall for Intel’s Centrino 2 launch event. I was on stage with Mooley Eden to help out. Fun! You can watch the webcast here.

What can I say? I love oldschool raytracing.

I wrote a Missile Command clone for the multi-touch wall at Obscura Digital. Just like the original, except you can fire by touching the wall with your fingers. Save the Golden Gate Bridge from ICBMs. Fun for the whole family! Check it out on Patrick’s official Obscura Digital blog entry.

Been working on some interactive art for the multi-touch wall. Multiple people can use their hands to “paint” ribbons which float pleasantly across the eight foot wall.

I took a new job about a month ago, at a very interesting company called Obscura Digital. It’s a cool laboratory/workshop with all kinds of high tech gadgets and technology being thrown around into new things. Most of the stuff we do is relatively hush-hush so I probably shouldn’t say much about it, but I can probably show some mysterious images now and again.

So far, I’ve worked with camera tracking, realtime dome projections in Side Effects’ Touch, multi-touch, and 3D “AirTouch” prototypes. I guess that’s a lot of touching going on, but it’s all good.

Sadly, my work on Star Trek: Online has officially come to an end, quite prematurely. We never even went into full production.

I was responsible for the Design and Engineering of the UI for the game. So not only was I working on the visual design, but also the overall design of the game as an application. We had to solve a lot of interesting problems — like how to handle having ground and space versions of everything in the game, the age-old inventory, paper doll, etc.

This was a mockup for our initial game login screen. We wanted it to feel like you were actually using a terminal on the bridge. After logging in, the camera would sweep back to reveal your character sitting at a physical LCARS terminal.

While not completely finished, this was the beginning of our final look target for the UI. The action bar is still very rough here. We hadn’t yet identified everything that would need to be down there. Nor had we had a chance to finalize our mini-map and health meters, so they are absent.

An early diagram to help visualize the pressure zones on the screen. I spent a lot of time thinking about where the center of interest is during gameplay, how it moves around the screen, and what information needs to be where at any given point in time.

An early screenshot showing transparent chat windows.

In addition to designing the UI, I worked with the tech and art teams to come up with a solution for creating procedural terrain. This is a capture from a very early test which shows algorithmically generated textures and relief features.

See it in motion

I re-made the Cielab color tool that I started working on last year. Its purpose is similar to Adobe’s Kuler, which is really nice but this definitely has a more organic, fluid feel once you get the hang of the interface. It’s really good for quickly making color swatches and exploring the relationship between colors. I haven’t put in any advanced features from the first version yet, but I will eventually. In the meantime…

function indefiniteTween( a, b, s, t:Number):Number {

 var q=1/s;

 var c=1-(Math.pow(q-1, t+1)*Math.pow(q, -1-t));

 return a+(c*(b-a));

 }

a = starting value
b = target value
s = tween coefficient: 0 < s <= 1
t = time elapsed

So, for work (Star Trek) I figured I would try to come up with a nice algorithm for planets, so that when a person tries to fly their ship into it, you can’t, except I wanted it to feel natural and not like bumping up against a big beach ball. Anyway it took a weekend to put together all the stuff, including my mini-asteroids style interactive simulator. Use the arrow keys to move!

Play it.

These are just 2D and I made them in Apophysis, which is Scott Drave’s fractal flame (now called Electric Sheep) routines on serious steroids. It’s a cool program but it takes a very long time to get a specific result. Might be useful for skybox source art in Star Trek.

Procedural geometry and a few shader tests for Star Trek: Online. Making realtime cloud formations is really difficult, and pretty expensive if you try to use a point cloud with sprites. Geometry would be way cheaper but shading it convincingly is not so easy. These were rendered in Houdini, but I wrote a realtime version of the shader in HLSL.

Why are there no good utilities for just picking colors online? Something that allows you to edit RGB, HSV, LaB, CMYK, and manage multiple swatches at once. Seems like everything out there is either made for “web safe” palettes, or is just bad. I should really finish up CIELaB, which was looking nice but I just lost steam on it. Too many projects, not enough time.

I created this very organic looking sketch tool for odopod.com, which was subsequently converted into a standalone application. You can save your own illustration.

Make your own drawing

I created a system to allow panels to move around the stage, yet stay connected via gradient-filled quadrilaterals. Not the most impressive effect, but building this within MTV’s framework was a huge challenge. Ultimately we had to cut a lot of eye-candy due to CPU usage issues.

An early version of the effect