Week 9

15 Dec

Today we are suppose to give a presentation to Kevin and so when we reached the office in the morning, all four of us did our dry-run for the presentations. Kevin came at 11.30am for our presentations, before that, we discussed the ideas that we came out for the white board application.

Kevin seems to be quite pleased with the presentation and left the office after that. After lunch, we continued with research on how the white board application could be done for the rest of the day.

16 Dec

Kevin brought his parents to IHPC for a visit today. Just before lunch, we had a discussion with Kevin about the things we are going to do the coming Friday. It was decided that Ryan, Leonard and me will be presenting and Wilson will be toggling the applications while we present.

After lunch, we make a trip down to Fusionworld with Ming Hong. After that, we went back to the lab start to work on the white board application but no results for the rest of the day.

17 Dec

Continued working on the white board application when we reached the office early in the morning. We found a japanese website that teaches us how to create a transparent background using Cocoa QCViewer and we found out that the Google translation was really powerful. 

Before lunch, we managed to make the opacity of the background in the application to 20% and also managed to make it fullscreen. After lunch, we tried making the application to be "always on top". Leonard managed to make it show above other applications. However, when we run the keynote application, we could not manage to make the application to show above it. 

Later Ming Hong ask me to change the level of the window to be NSScreenSaverWindowLevel instead of NSNormalWindowLevel and finally, the application was able to show on top of the keynote presentation.

18 Dec

We decided to plan for the tasks for each of us for the White board application. Leonard is in-charge of the palette design, Ryan is in-charge of dragging the image, trash, idling and removing of image, Wilson is in-charge of toggling the application on/off and I'm in-charge of integrating the application with OSC, the drawing and erasing. However, Leonard and I would help both Ryan and You Hock. Leonard and Wilson would help Ryan and I with they are done with their parts.

After lunch, we did something really interesting. We did an experiment on out-of-body experience but somehow it does not work on any of us but we did some research on Google and we found some possible ways that how the people manage to do it. Other than that, we also research on lucid dreaming and ESP. Later, Kevin told us that there will be 4 group for tomorrow and so I guess everyone will get to present.

19 Dec

Today, IHPC has a Project Reachout 'Back-To-School Celebration' with Beyond Social Services. Kevin came in early to give us our name tags and also told us the schedule for the day, the first demo is starting at 10.15am. This timing was earlier than expected because the past demo are mostly after lunch. Luckily we did our dry runs for the presentation yesterday. Just before we started our presentation, Kevin taught us how we should present to them.

Around 10am, the kids came and sat down outside the lightdraw lab. Four of us did a demo from 10.15 to 12.15 which most of the talking was done by Kevin himself. While we were assisting him in the demo, we were also trying to pick up some skills from his presentation. After that we helped the kids to do the crossword puzzle and then make our way to the pantry with the kids for lunch.

After lunch, or should I say while the kids are still having lunch, we helped Jenny to transport the gifts for the kids to the seminar room at level 15 and arranged them. Then, we ushered the kids to the seminar which they will be watching "Surfs Up" after the "Prize-Giving Ceremony". 

After that, we headed back to the lab and had a group photo after the kids had finished watching the movie.

Reflection:

This week, I had a greater understanding on Cocoa Programming on Quartz Composer. We had managed to make an overlay for the application, make it fullscreen, and place it "always on top".

What left me a greater impression was on Friday. Although I had visited lots of homes being a volunteer outside school, what we did was to play with them for the day. At the end of the day, although the kids are happy but they don't learn anything. On Friday, besides "playing" with the kids, we are also trying to tell them how enjoyable working could be if you have the passion. That's what I call, "play fun, work fun". Also, not only the kids learnt something on that day, we had also learn more presentation skill from Kevin while he is presenting to the kids.

Week 8

8 Dec

Happy Hari Raya Haji!!

9 Dec

Met up with Kevin after breakfast to discuss about the plans this week as Bernard, Ming Hong and him will be busy handling stuff at SIGGRAPH Asia 2008. Wilson and Ryan will be working on the transparent white board and for Leonard and I with start picking up Quartz Composer and join in to work with the white board after we "mastered" Quartz Composer. We will also be working with our presentation slides which we had to present the following Monday.

After that we were told to install Office for Mac and Keynote to do our presentation. Initially, I wanted to use Office for Mac to do my slides, however, there seems to have some problems with the serial key and hence, I used Keynotes for my presentation. 

Well, Keynotes seems to be much easier to use as compared to powerpoint. Animations can easily be done using the Inspector and the User Interface can be understood easily. I could imagine the moment when I actually spent so much time training on the use of powerpoint for WorldSkills. 

Just before lunch, we actually went into one of the meeting rooms to play with the smartboard to get a better understanding on how we should develop our next application

After lunch, we watched a video on a talk given by Steve Jobs and also the keynotes given by Steve job during MacWorld 2007. After that, I took the Quartz Composer guide from Wilson so that we could start picking up. We also discussed on the new application that we are going to develop.

10 Dec

Since Kevin and Ming Hong at SIGGRAPH Asia 2008, four of us started working on the slides for the presentation on the upcoming Monday. Using of the keynotes is not that difficult as we initially thought. However, we had quite a hard time thinking of the content and the flow to talk about.

11 Dec

Went down to Suntec City Convention Hall early in the morning to attend SIGGRAPH Asia 2008. It was the very first time SIGGRAPH had its conference in Asia

A*star Booths
Optical Tone - Dynamic Color Composition
This machine tracks where you're looking!

Stack! Online Image Rendering

Umbrella with heroic sound effects?

 

12 Dec

NS Medical Checkup. Checked with the guys what they have done. I hope I did not missed out much.

Reflections:

This week, I learnt about the use of Apple Keynotes. Functions like how to do simple animations, sounds inside keynotes. I also had gained some new exposures at SIGGRAPH Asia 2008. I had learnt quite a bit of image rendering stuff for example, 2D image to 3D images in Photoshop Cs4, and also some wacky ideas that the japanese had came up with.

Week 7

01 Dec 08

Due to a power shutdown last friday, the 2x3 tile display is down for the day and so, we (Leonard and I) were told by Kevin to do research on the different 3D formats and install VMD and paraview on the Mac Pro and find out which formats are actually supported by both VMD and paraview which I believed will be used for our next application "Visualizer". Just before we were about to leave the office for the day, the tile display is finally up.

02 Dec 08

As the tile display was up, we brought the Mac Pro to the tile display room and started testing the OSC to X11 receiver using lightdraw and we found the frame rate was still slow even though it was running on a 2 core duo, 9GB RAM machine. We conclusion, it was the application that causes the slow frame rate and Ming Hong suggested to 'comment' away the code for hold detection and to our surprise the frame rate boost up dramatically.

When we told Ming Hong about the change in frame rate, he went on coding the lightdraw using RGB and did all little testing. However, the OSC to X11 receiver or rather lightdraw was receiving unknown "light source". It was suspected that it was the domain port that we are using that was causing the problem. We did not continue testing as there was a demo later in the afternoon and we brought back the Mac Pro back into the lab room. 

After the demo, we discuss with Kevin about the problems and the possible solutions and he suggested to us to take away the hold detection for the time being and go find out ways on how to control the 3D data using lightdraw.

03 Dec 08

Just as we reached the office in the morning, Ming Hong told us that the new lightdraw using RGB is done and waiting for testing and so we told all the stuff to the Tile Display room and test the new lightdraw and the results was not too bad, the cursor doesn't seem to be as laggy as compared to yesterday and the frame rate was about the rate when we remove hold detection yesterday. 

After lunch, Ming Hong suggested us to combine remote calibration with the OSC to X11 receiver so we do not have to run the application everytime we caliabrated lightdraw. And soon we went on trying to combine the 2 applications together and at the end of the day we still did not managed to compile and run the application successfully due to problems in the Makefile and so Ming Hong asked us to write an application to find out the keycode for the keys on Macintosh.

04 Dec 08

Tried to compile the application that was left undone yesterday and finally was able to compile and run smoothly some time after lunch. After we test the application on the 2 macbook pro and it was working fine,  we went over to the Tile Display room and try to test it on the Tile Display. Just when I was halfway through testing, Ming Hong came in and told us that lightdraw managed to rotate the 3D data in VMD. 

After that, Kevin asked us to gather in the lightdraw lab and 'impart' some of the presentation skills to us. We also watched some videos of Steve Jobs and how he presented himself and his product in the annual MacWorld Keynotes and we were told to give a presentation to him the monday on week 9 on the 2 applications that we are working on previously.

05 Dec 08

Since we have not done the application to find out the keycode for the keys, we decided to start coding the application to find the keycode as needed to toggle different functions in VMD. However, the application fail to print us the keycode even though the codes seems fine. So we try Google it hoping to find the keycodes and we did managed to find a chart that provides the keycode for Macintosh, Linux and Windows.

And so, Ming Hong added in the keycodes into lightdraw and we started helping him test the VMD 3D data using lightdraw. Well, at least something was done before we put an end to this week.

Reflections:

This week, I learnt about how a good presentation would affect on how your clients would think about the product/message you are trying to convey. Also, during a presentation, the posture, eye contact, the volume of your voice, the tone, the slides all play an important role. Keep emphasizing on the key point that you are trying to tell your clients is also important because at the end of your presentation, you would want your customer to remember the message that you are trying to convey.