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

Awesome augmented reaility in Flash demo from a gentleman from Japan called Saqoosha (includes  source code too which is always appreciated). There is also some quality stuff in this area over at Draw*logic which explains how to use the ARToolKit software library and more goodies at Digital Pictures. All great stuff

There are so many potential applications for this; think – “Help me Obi Wan Kanobi, you’re my only hope”

Inspired by this QR code mobile phone battle event in the US  http://www.qrcode.es/?p=209&&language=en I had a look into these matters and found a wonderful QRcode generator over at http://qrcode.kaywa.com/ I thought I’d share.

Blending of the virtual and physical worlds in web applications being the fun it is I will be posting more on such matters soon but am flat out busy behind the scenes on a related project I can’t talk about yet   More info soon