EDAD660 (2008)

Recently I’ve been researching “Augmented Reality” techniques and how they can be applied to support educational / instructional applications. For those of you who don’t know what Augmented Reality (AR) is, it’s a way in which we can “superimpose” a layer of additional information onto the “real world” through the use of various types of technologies. It’s actually easier to show than to describe! Here are a few demos of me showing off my newest AR creations:

Earth/Moon system:

Wind Power Relief Map:

In each of these demos you can see that I’m using my webcam to detect a special symbol – this symbol, when recognized, tells the computer to overlay the incoming video stream with a 3D object or animation. The orientation of the symbol gives the system the ability to determine its location in space as well as rotation and tilt.

I’m hoping that I will be able to expand my research into creating interactive tools that be used by teachers to explain difficult concepts to their students. I’m also working on developing a streamlined display system that may include head-mounted glasses that allows a person to walk freely around a space and experience any AR content that may be present. Stay tuned!

Two things caught my eye this week, and I think that you may find them interesting too.  The first is a free software package called “Jing” that can be used to capture video and audio from your computer.  The quality is fantastic, and they have a one-click feature that allows you to post your video to the web along with an Embed link.  Here’s a quick video I just made about a project that I’m working on for a class at NYU:

If you want to see the full project feel free to visit it at http://itp.nyu.edu/~cmk380/pileup_04/applet/

The second item of note has to do with an article that CNN ran this week on Google’s plans to create vast floating offshore data centers.  These centers could be used to host Google’s various web services, such as it’s search engine, Gmail, Google Docs, etc.  The plan right now is to also take advantage of emerging energy production technologies, such as wave and tidal generation, to help power these floating computer centers.  Pretty cool stuff!

http://www.cnn.com/2008/SPORT/09/18/computer.navy/index.html?eref=rss_latest

I am cleaning out my office today as today (it’s my last official day working at TCNJ in my current position!) As I’m going through some yet-to-be-filed paperwork and found some interesting sites that may be of use to you in your schools.

1. Virtual Museum Canada: A really first-rate site that I first heard about at this year’s New Media Consortium conference. The site is sponsored by the Canadian Heritage foundation and boasts an impressive display of online exhibits and resources for teachers, including sample lesson plans and curriculum guides.
2. Toonboom.com: Toonboom creates desktop software packages that help you to create professional quality 2D animations. Their higher end software is quite sophisticated, but they have a great tool for kids called ‘Flip Boom‘ that looks very impressive. The software allows you to compose, draw, animate and publish your movies into a variety of formats (including Flash SWF which can easily be incorporated into your blogs).  The software is not free, but they do offer a generous “try before you buy” download option.

Finally, here’s a pretty mind blowing video from Youtube that details a paper that was co-written by researchers from the University of Washington and Microsoft.  They are using geographically tagged photographs to create 3D “walkthroughs” of various locations around the world.  Pretty amazing stuff!

This is for you Heidi, though I’m sure Jamie can use this info also (along with those of you who are thinking of converting to the dark side!).  You can use this procedure on a Mac to convert a video into an AVI format so that it can be used in Power Point.

1. Save the video to your hard drive
2. Open iMovie
3. Click on File -> Import Movie
4. The movie will appear as a series of thumbnail images at the bottom of the screen.  You can highlight portions of the video to select them – once you have a selection go ahead and drag the video up into the empty boxes at the top of the screen.  If you want to convert the entire video just highlight everything and drag the images into the boxes.
5. Click on Share -> Export using QuickTime
6. Select ‘AVI’ as the file type to export and click Save

Once you have your video in an AVI format you can easily import your video into Power Point by using the Insert -> Movie -> From File feature.

Here are some web-based and open source packages that may be helpful when working with images and video.

1. Photoshop Express – http://www.photoshop.com/express
   1. Upload up to 2gb worth of images to your web gallery
   2. Touch up photos and perform basic image manipulation online
   3. Share photos through popular sharing sites or use some Embed code to import images to your blog
2. Cam Studio – http://camstudio.org/
   1. Open Source screen / audio capture package
3. Animoto – http://www.animoto.com
   1. Create videos using your web browser
   2. Upload photos from your computer or have animoto pull them from a picture sharing service (Flickr, Picasa, etc)
   3. Produce any number of short (< 30 second) videos for free.  Longer videos cost $3 per video or $30 per year for unlimited videos.
   4. Takes a long time to render
4. Onetruemedia – http://www.onetruemedia.com
   1. Create videos using your web browser
   2. Upload photos from your computer
   3. Add special effects and transitions
   4. Free accounts can upload 100mb per month
   5. Download videos to your hard drive or use some Embed code to post the video onto your blog

… and here are some other sites we talked about today:

1. Flashkit (http://www.flashkit.com) is a website that has downloadable sound effects and sound loops that you can use in your Scratch or Video projects.  Click on ‘Sound FX’ and ‘Sound Loops’ to explore these sections of the site.
2. Altavista (http://www.altavista.com) is a search engine that lets you search audio files (MP3, WAV, etc) – use the ‘MP3/Audio’ search tab to get started.
3. We watched the ‘Dove – Evolution’ commercial (http://youtube.com/watch?v=hibyAJOSW8U) which illustrates an amazing example of how Photoshop can be used to touch up an image.