Google Earth in browser!

Need to install one plugin, then you can tour Google Earth with 3D buildings in the web browser.
UWA School of Physics

Minority Report gadget come to live

It is so so cool!!

sixth sense - a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.

Making Google Street View into 3D

I was very excited about Google Street View in Australia. I think in a computer vision point of view, it provides such a huge amount of usable multiple views data to play with.

One idea I have is to:
1. Run the SIFT descriptor (by David Lowe) over the photos along one street to grab the interest points,
2. Ran RANSAC with rather loose tolerance to find homography match, and classify regions into planar surfaces. Maybe some super pixel algorithm will be useful to grow small region into bigger one based on colour information.
3. Transform the Street View into a 3D cardboard style walk through like the Photo Popup I mentioned before.

I think it would work. And because we know it's on a street, there are many constraints that can be added like we know the ground under is flat and it's pretty much sky on top kind of things.

If you're reading this and implement the algorithm and got a paper published or something, just give me an honourary mention will do. ;)

On a non-technical note, here is one place that it didn't quite work out on Street View. There's clearly a road there, but it didn't show it.



Or on Street View live:

View Larger Map

Google Street view in Australia!

Google gets down and detailed on the street where you live


View Larger Map


View Larger Map

If you know where I live, you can even see my Daihatsu parked on the side of the road. Haha! That's pretty cool.

Win a Creative Zen X-Fi with Bejeweled

The new MP3 player looks fantastic with the in-ear earphone, the sound technology. The 16GB version even support wireless LAN.

Go play the Bejeweled-like game and enter by 22nd Aug to be in the draw to win one.



Damned! What a time waster! Here's my best score.

New umbrella!

Funny new umbrella - "Nubrella".



Right click and click play to see video.



The website: nubrella.com

Will it take off like the new rotary can opener?

Pu22!es

I have been busy putting together my thesis chapters lately. The progress has been satisfying and the thesis starts to take its shape. Working consistently with the pace, I shall be able to submit in July. Yay!
Apart from the dry process of writing thesis, I had been doing some puzzles. Canon research lab CiSRA is having a puzzle competition. Danno told me about it as he work there and want me to never graduate. Haha!
Me, ShihChing and Minh are teaming up as Fubar Fighters to crack the puzzles. We solved the first group which was open for a long time, then this week the real battle started at the rate of 4 puzzle a day for 4 days! My brain is rather overwork. Some of the puzzles are just clueless to me!

Anyone can take part in the competition, just have to register for it and play. But Australian students are eligible to win prizes. Looks like my hope to win the camera is slowly vanishing.

A friend send me this website on puzzles which tech interviewers like to use. See techinterview.org

Malaysia Election Comedian Songs

Comedy Court made:

ELECTIONS Blah blah blah


Rough Little Indian Boys


The Family Tree


And more of other political and non-political videos on Comedy Court

Turning any monitor in to a 3D VR display

Using Wii, this CMU phd student made a monitor into a portal to the virtual world!!

Turning any monitor in to a 3D VR display

The modellers Theme Song

It's a crazy hour now but I just can't wait till tomorrow to blog about this!
Danno made a theme song for the modellers! I can't believe it!!!

It's so cool! And hilarious at the same time! And I now have a song with my name in it. You have made history Danno!

Read the post and enjoy the song on Danno's The Modellers post.

Oh ya, apparently Danno is having a Theme Songs on Request service. Danno I want one!!

Also, The Modellers has become my ringtone.

Super Horatio Song V2

Danno has done it again with Super Horatio song! This time with his high voice and violin. It's even better than the first version!!

Click here for the full story:
Super Horatio has returned!

Download Super Horatio’s New Song while you read the story.

How I met your Mother theme song

I really like the CBS sitcom "How I met your Mother", so today I decided to play the theme song with my guitar. I did some search on internet for its chord and found that its name is "Hey Beautiful" by The Solids but had no luck with the chords. So I cracked it myself and here is the guitar chord. Sounds pretty like it.


C C#
A C#m F#m A D F#m Bm E
A

Tab:

C C#
|-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-|-4-4-4-4-4-4-4-4-|
|-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-|-6-6-6-6-6-6-6-6-|
|-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-|-6-6-6-6-6-6-6-6-|
|-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-|-6-6-6-6-6-6-6-6-|
|-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-|-4-4-4-4-4-4-4-4-|
|-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-|-4-4-4-4-4-4-4-4-|

A C#m F#m A
|-5---5---4---4---|-2---2---0---0---|
|-5---5---5---5---|-2---2---2---2---|
|-6---6---6---6---|-2---2---2---2---|
|-7---7---6---6---|-4---4---2---2---|
|-7---7---4---4---|-4---4---0---0---|
|-5---5---4---4---|-2---2---0---0---|

D F#m Bm E
|-2---2---2---2---|-2---2---0---0---|
|-3---3---2---2---|-3---3---0---0---|
|-2---2---2---2---|-4---4---1---1---|
|-0---0---4---4---|-4---4---2---2---|
|-0---0---4---4---|-2---2---2---2---|
|-0---0---4---4---|-2---2---2---2---|

A
|-0---------------|
|-2---------------|
|-2---------------|
|-2---------------|
|-0---------------|
|-0---------------|

Toyata Robot plays violin

From Reuters

African fractals on TED

I stumbled upon this great talk on TED.
Ron Eglash on African fractals.



Try this Cornrow fractal with 250 iterations, 2% starting dilation, 75% translation, 20 degree rotation and 102% dilation.

UWA in 3D

It has been a crazy week for me preparing an entry for the Google 3D campus competition (Aus/NZ). We decided to put a team together since we already have a team interested in modelling UWA in 3D. But modelling for Google Earth is a bit different because of the bandwidth and complexity constraint. So there are some considerable effort put in to make the models smaller in size and lesser in geometry. Most of the models are simply an empty shell with texture. anything that cannot be seen are to be taken out.
We applied some good tricks like using transparent texture to replace complex fences or row of pillars. Taking a snapshot of a complex windows structure of the model and replace the geometry with the snapshot works very well too.

The entry closed on 31 Oct 2007 midnight EST. And we hit the submit button at 9:35pm WST on Chris's laptop in his office down in G.(don't know which number, there has been some office shuffling recently). The historical moment was witnessed by Chris, Minh, Jonathan and myself. Chris has been a long captain in the team followed by me as the lead 3D modeller. Minh joint in couple of weeks ago and did some incredible work, and Jonathan came in like couple of days ago and did a great job with the business school, though a bit intensive on the geometry.
Others on the team includes Jayjay who initiated the whole UWA in 3D idea, Michael my fellow 3D modeller, Evgeni the quiet achiever, Bradley who did it the proper architect way, and John who took many great shots for the texturing.
Many other not on the 3D campus team gave us tremendous help to, thanks go to Louisa for keeping us informed on what is going on with ourselves, Leondro, David, Juan, Ashley, Ryan and Jeff for various help.

The madness was on Tuesday, me and Minh worked through the night in the lab to finish up as many models as possible. I started in the afternoon of 30/10 at about 2:30pm and persevered until 9:30pm of 31/10. About 30 hours of modelling. Wickedly fun! I heard Minh did longer!
Anyhow that night I hit my bed at 12:30am and recharged for two night worth of sleep until 4:30pm. Mad!!


Check the models out on 3D warehouse. You can see them either in Sketchup or Google Earth, both need installation. If you don't want to install a big software, use this 6MB SketchUp Viewer.
If you already have Google Earth installed, this 3D Warehouse network link will put a link to 3D model in Google Earth.

Several must see are:

Winthrop Hall


Physics



And unbelievably detailed Engineering buildings and Architecture.

Also check out the very clean Octagon Building and spiral staircase at Reid Library.

Amazing Way to Tie Your Shoes

I received an email attachment from my brother about shoelace. I usually do my shoelace once when I buy the shoes, and never again. But I'm still amazed by how cool some of the methods are.

My favourite - Lattice Lacing


See more at Ian's Shoelace site.

VideoTrace: Rapid interactive scene modelling from video

Cool 3D modelling application developed at Adelaide U, appeared in Siggraph 2007.
VideoTrace: Rapid interactive scene modelling from video

Thanks Danno.

Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman

As part of the National Science Week activities, there was a public lecture by Prof Richard Wiseman titled "The Luck Factor". Richard is a professor of Psychology he was a magician before that part of his career started. It was a very entertaining lecture with magic tricks and public psychology experiments. I was fooled too! Fun!

Jason found one of the experiment online. It's an experiment to count the number of basketball passes among 3 white-shirt players. It's hard to get it because there are also 3 black-shirt players to confuse people.


There are some more cool experiments by Richard Wiseman on youtube and his quirkology website. I was fooled by the colour changing card tricks!

UWA EXPO

It's Open Day again. This is my 5th time volunteering at the open day, and it's the last time also.

I helped set up most of the vision demo in the morning and talked to visitors about all these projects that I seems to know from listening to the creators explaining about them in previous years.

Most of the demos are from last year or year before. A couple of interesting thing to note：
1. A really cool face recognition system using a simple webcam that we downloaded from here. Visitors just love it. If you have a webcam, you can test it out too.
2. On last Friday 5pm+ I decided to print out a huge poster of Chinese Ascii arts to cover a big white wall in our demo lab. So I go to the code that I haven't touched for more than a year and got it to do what I wanted in 20 mins. Felt pretty good about myself. The end result is a 8x8 A4 sheets of Winthrop tower made up of Chinese characters. A couple of visitors were very impressed by that. One of them said "It's the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life!". I was happy with that.


More photos are on my photo gallery

Disappearing Door Prototype Concept Car

1993 Lincoln Mark VIII Disappearing Door Prototype Concept Car with video.