Rob’s geeky discoveries Blog

The latest site I’ve been working on has been live in Germany for a week or so now and is running nicely so thought I’d do a quick post in case anyone reading is interested in what I’ve been building lately…

If you can read Deutsch – the live site is http://www.blivebeatology.de – the version I’m linking is a showcase version in English so you’ll have a clue what’s going on. The basic premise of this site is that you upload a picture of your face and get back a video of yourself beatboxing but there’s a hoard of other functionality to explore and a big social element including a Facebook App so you can post your generated videos and share amongst your friends. The amazing video assets are all custom shot by Superglue and we’re very proud of it all. A holiday is in order for me but I shall probably do a bit more of a write up on it at a later date.

So… if you want to try it out or see an example grab a passport style photo of you – higher res and higher contrast the better ( sub 500KB) or if you don’t have one to hand, save this one below to your desktop. You’ll need a decent video player like VLC to watch .FLV directly but our system also generates an AVI. I’ve linked the image below to the generated AVI for this image and you can watch the FLV for it here if you prefer.

The back end will map the image onto one of 4 3D meshes, analysing it and applying one of several matrices to get the best fit and generate the videos on the back end which then send it back to you in Flash. We’re also creating 3GP videos for mobiles which are downloaded via a QR code link and allowing Webcam upload as a photo submission method so have been very busy.

Enjoy the beatboxery

This post originally just said “http://www.mogulus.com/gluelondon Xmas party broadcast, hooray! ”

Just thought I’d clarify, we broadcast the DJ sets from the Glue in-office Christmas party (Using Adobe Media Encoder to kick out multiple bit rate steams and maintain the stabiliity). Stuart kindly converted this to MPEG 4 so I might post, contact me if you want it (Audio quality isn’t great to be honest. Suffice to say on the night it was most excellent) Big up DJ Jens also for a storming back to back techno and old school garage set. Merry Christmas indeed!

I was interviewed on Friday for BBC 1 Extra’s ‘Take Control’ program. The premise of the show is that some celebrities completed psychometric testing to see what their careers might have been in other circumstances and as Trevor Nelson showed a potential aptitude for computer programming; he came into glue to have a look at what we do and how I work.

I am just happy that Trevor Nelson has heard of Java. You don’t get much streeter than that! I also feel I should mention that I have no intention of ever ‘sacking it all in and become a lawyer’ but it’s amazing what you come out with when somebody points a camera in your face. It would be amazing if it did in any way help to make anyone study Science or Maths though which is a pretty noble cause in my book, especially as I have just finished Cheney & Uth’s Nikola Tesla’s biography “Master of Lightning” and am convinced he is the coolest person that has ever lived. P.S They edited out the bit where I talked about my life-long love of Speed Garage – sorry Laxmi