Hey. It’s been awhile since I’ve done any math-intensive apps, and I was starting to get a little nervous about “losing my touch”. Not to mention, all I’ve worked on for the past several months is Chase, and the last thing I want is for me to get bored of it. So I something different, and programmed a real quick application of some random effect. I like rotating things in isometric space (who doesn’t?), and always thought that it’d be neat to do some sort of depth-of-view thing, so I threw this together.

I’ll probably release the source tomorrow (assuming I have time), after optimizing and making it a bit easier to read. Don’t forget that I have other apps you can watch and get briefly entertained by here, if you’re ever bored.

It’s been over a month since my last post. I apologize for the lack of updates. I truly wish I could keep up with Chase at the moment, but I’ve been getting some other things done lately. For a month I’ve been training to get into track. My primary reason for training is for health though. I find that running for 3 miles can have the same effect on me as a cup of coffee, except longer lasting. This, hopefully, will help me productivity-wise in the long run. I have been getting into the habit of running a mile before school on week days, which hopefully will keep me in top conditions.

Not much has happened on Chase, or any other of my projects. I re-organized some of the files in Chase, and made some progress in the Scene classes. I also started on a data importer and exporter (a function that can save and load models and other junk). I’ll likely not get much done on Chase in the next week or so due to some after-school classes I’m taking, and me training for the last week before track starts. But after that, I’ll hopefully be able to get a good pace going, and start making progress again.

I have made some updates on the glove cursor though. After I made my last post about the glove last month, I took apart an old mouse and experimented with the circuit board. Keep in mind that I have almost no knowledge on how most circuit boards work, but I did manage to figure out which parts I should connect with which to send certain commands to the computer. If I take a wire connected to any of the ground connections, and tap it against to any of the connections for the left-click, right-click, or middle-click connections, it’ll send a command to the computer respectively. After some painful burns and an attempt at getting lead poisoning, I eventually soldered a wire to a ground connection and wired it to the thumb of the glove, then soldered a wire from the left click connection and wired it to the middle finger. From this, you can simply click by tapping your middle finger to your thumb. I plan on doing the middle click and right click later, after I get some significant progress done in Chase.

On Sunday of last week, I had a pretty neat idea. I was looking around the internet, and ran into some sort of gaming glove. I thought “Hey! That’s pretty cool.” I had something different in mind, and found that this glove didn’t have the capabilities I’d hope for. I was thinking of something like a wiimote but in the form of a glove.

I remembered seeing Johnny Lee’s videos of his wiimote hacks. He set up his wiimote to receive input from external infrared lights, and to track it while doing several neat things like head-tracking or a multi-touch projector white-board. This was all very impressive, considering he was using very cheap supplies to accomplish these things. He also made a finger-tracker using an infrared light array (grid of lights), and some reflectors taped onto his fingers. I eventually came to the idea of using an IR light with the webcam. I understood that cameras have a tendency of picking up infrared lights, unlike our human eyes. I grabbed a TV remote, wrote a quick script, and it worked greatly!

I went to Radio Shack that evening, picked up an IR light, a battery holder, and a button. I then went to Lowes and got a pair of gardener gloves. When I got home, I taped it all together using some electrical tape, ran the script, and it worked beautifully. The glove wasn’t perfect yet though. The algorithm takes all the pixels the webcam inputs, finds the brightest ones, then averages them and use that. I actually discovered that sunglass lenses blocks visible light from entering, but NOT infrared light, which was extremely convenient on my part. I popped the 2 lenses out of the glasses, taped them together, and made a little holder so it can slide onto the webcam. This also helped reduce glare, which is another cause of some error in accuracy. Another fall-back was the jitterness that occurs naturally in your hands, and the wide range of brightnesses the infrared light can give off when angled differently. Fixing this was simple, simply load all the calculated positions into an array of 5, 10, or however much and average those out to significantly smooth the cursor.

Hopefully I’ll be able to work on from that. Add another infrared light and add some sort of “multi-touch” capabilities, or maybe even attempt something like a virtual tablet, using the same methods as Johnny Lee’s white-board. The possibilities are endless. Below is a gallery of a bunch of different high-res images involving the cursor glove.

This doesn’t mean I’m letting go of Chase, however. I’m working on it as much as I can. I worked on it again, and got even closer to a working graphics engine. I’m currently creating a Scene datatype. It’ll act much like Adobe Flash Professional’s scene, but in programming. In my engine, you’ll plot different models and polygons in a 3D or 2D space in the scene. All 3D coordinates are rendered, but 2D coordinates are kept the same. Using a scene class will make it easy for the developer to rotate, translate, dilate, or do whatever globally to all the coordinates being displayed.

I got rid of all of the transformation functions (translate, dilate, etc), since they’re already existent inside Coordinate and Polygon’s class. Hopefully I can get the Scene class to work pretty soon here, so I can proceed to start adding actual new features and tools to the engine.

Below is a library of pictures of the cursor glove and webcam filter made out of sunglass lenses:

Remember yesterday, I said “If tomorrow also provides the convenience of a snow day, I’ll take advantage of that as well…”? Well, today happened to also be a snow day (woohoo!), and I did as I told you. I worked on Chase’s Engine. I’m currently at about 744 lines of code, so I’ve made some progress since I started the conversion. Yesterday’s version included support for handling coordinates, polygons, and models in 3D space. It also had some transformation functions (translate, dilate, and rotate) for coordinates and polygons.

I’ll probably delete those transformation functions the next time I edit. Today I’ve nested support for adding, subtracting, dividing, and multiplying in both the polygon and coordinate function. Not only an add/sub/etc function, but operator overloading (like for +, -, or *). This will allow me to use coordinate and polygon data types, for example:

polygonA * ((coordinateA + coordinateB) / coordinateC)

This will be exactly why I won’t need my transformation functions. Any sort of geometric manipulating can simply done using the nested math functions or use the coordinates/polygons in a formula. I also added in a rotation function to both classes. Another neat feature I’ve implemented is 2 and 3 dimensional support for the Coordinate and Polygon class. I was originally going to have a separate class for 2 and 3 dimensions (eg. Coord2D and Coord3D), but that won’t be necessary with the mighty convenience of function overloading in C++.

The picture above shows a rough draft code flow chart of Chase’s graphic engine. I drew this on the first this month (and year!), and will probably, if not definitely, will change as I refine my concept for Chase’s engine.

Good day! Over the winter break, I began working on Chase’s conversion over to C++. Today, I’ve had the convenience of a snow day, so I took advantage of it and proceeded to work on Chase’s Engine. Note, however, I haven’t really made any *real* progress. I will count this as a day though, since a lot has been done in the conversion.

The conversion isn’t done yet. I’ve got all the coordinate, polygon, and model classes converted (although certainly not finished in terms of features), as well as the transformation functions. If tomorrow also provides the convenience of a snow day, I’ll take advantage of that as well, and hopefully get Chase’s C++ engine up to an equivalent of Chase’s Processing (the API for Java!) engine.

I’ve uploaded a picture of my colorfully written rough draft for how my .h and .cpp files should work out. My compiler (Dev-C++) has an awfully convenient feature which allows me to place individual files in their own folders unlike the Processing IDE, as far as I’m aware of. You can check out the picture by clicking the image to the left/top of this post’s text. Feel free to give me any feedback or comments.

That being said, I’ve created a directory of Processing Apps, which runs a lot faster and smoother than the apps OpenProcessing. I’ve also changed the blog theme to a modified version of Pixel. Hopefully we’ll be able to settle in and gain some actual momentum in content and visitors.

Happy New Years!

Christmas was fun. I got some sketchpads, so now I can keep all my notes and junk all in one place, instead of scattered all over my desk (I should probably clean this up). I’m using one sketchpad for the notes, and the other for all my formulas and algorithms. I also bought myself some pretty nice pens, of different colors, so labeling shouldn’t be a problem.

Today, however, was admittedly disappointing in terms of progress. I started working on a quick reference, since the code was getting more and more complex, and keeping track of parameters for each function was difficult. This would be especially useful, since I’m developing Chase over a long time (up to a week or two between development days). The quick reference, however, wasn’t so quick. It ended up taking me longer to document the different functions than it did for me to actually make some of the functions, so I decided that it was a waste of time, and to ditch it. If it’s getting difficult for me to keep track of things, then it’s probably time for me to re-organize and clean up the code a bit.

I did get a working 3D rotation function in today. It’ll allow me to rotate models, polygons, and coordinates along the x, y, or z axis freely.

I’ll probably devote an entire day to organizing and cleaning up the code soon, and start following a little more strict and consistent standard of coding. I might even start naming functions the same way openGL does with their functions. Being somewhat new to programming,  it’s best for me to set some good habits for the long run.

Even though I haven’t programmed in the past week and a half until today, I’ve been hard at work at composing some of the formulas to be used in Chase. One that’ll be particularly essential is line to polygon intersection detection in 3D space. This would be used in my lighting algorithm and collision detection, unless I pick up a more efficient method of calculating these.

Another feature I’ll implement is culling. There’s a working zbuffer right now, but polygons intersection won’t actually draw that way. I’ll hopefully implement that eventually as well.

By the end of Winter Break, I hope to port the entire engine to C++. I originally chose Processing for ease of creation, and to make playing convenient and available to users from within their browser. Chase is looking a little too ambitious to be ran quickly within the browser. Making Chase in a lower level language (compared to Processing) will probably be a wise decision, since it’ll allow me more resources.

Development on Chase up to this point has been going super slow. I’ve only been able to use a few weekends to work on it. I’d work on it on the week days if I didn’t have school crowding my time, and family keeps making plans with me during some weekends. I’ve only had 6 days since the 21st of November to work on this. At this rate, Chase isn’t going to be completed any time soon, unless I get together a development team of some sort, which I doubt I’ll do.

Fortunately, Winter Break is coming up. It starts next Wednesday. I’d spend everyday developing, but no promises. I’ll take advantage of the time available as much as possible, and hopefully get some significant features done.

Even when I’m not developing Chase, I’m still perpetually thinking of the various algorithms and formulas to be implemented. Polygon to line intersection in 3D space, lighting and shading, 3D model collision detection, etc. The next time I develop, I plan to implement 3D model rotating along x, y, and z axis freely, have suspensions work with rotations on vehicles, and clean up.