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!

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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.

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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.

I’ve managed to get a host, and have transfered the blog over to the server. This means that the blog should run a lot faster, and I’ll have a lot more freedoms. I’ll be able to host files on here that wordpress doesn’t allow (like java files) and make modifications to the web software.

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!