Usage of the sketching table

We have collected some movies depicting the usage of our sketching table. The videos will hopefully provide a better understanding of the usage of the sketching table.

The first video shows Robin Schaeverbeke teaching Jimmy drawing techniques using the table. It also contains reflections on the usage.

The next video shows some other persons using the table for the first time during the exhibit in Delft.

We also created two timelapse picture series. First we have one that shows the first day of the exhibition.

The other one shows some more usage of the table during the second exhibition day and how we take down the stations.

Project presentation

Tomorrow, 13 december, at 13.00 o'clock to 14.00 in A109 on LTU we will hold a presentation about the project. If you are not able to come, there is a possibility to see it on Adobe Connect:
https://connect.sunet.se/ltu_srt_pmc

After the presentation there will be a demonstration in A1301. In between there is a break with some mulled wine and gingerbreads.

Hope to see you there!

Release 4 aka "Dolph"

It's time to announce our fourth release.

In this release we have updated the workspace transform code to use WebGL, as Jimmy hinted at before we went to Delft. So that code is a thousand times faster now. :)

There is also a small bug fix in the tangible binaries. You can continue to use the old executables if you haven't encountered any problems. You can get the new binaries here: Tangibles-Release4.zip

Remember that the latest instructions are always up to date on the wiki: github.com/stefansundin/The-Tangibles/wiki

Go to Tangible.se to try it out, as usual!

Reflections from the WebRTC group

Working with our system and setting up a live demo in Delft revealed several issues previously not encountered.

The first problem, which is something that affects the system as a whole is that Chrome is currently having problems handling more than one video stream. The resulting effect is that the video views swap rapidly between the two video streams. It does not happen every time, but often enough for it to be a problem. In our case, the camera view swaps between showing the desktop view and the face view. Google has been working with this issue from the start, but it is not prioritized. To get around this problem we decided to use two computers per workstation. This worked well and allowed us to have a successful demonstration and workshop. A one-computer solution is not really viable until Google fixes the issue in Chrome.

The other main issue is freezing video streams. This seem to vary between different computers and simply requires that the user exits and reenters the room. Something related to this is that a rather powerful computer is required to run the system with several participants. Test results examining this will be presented in the report. The first set of computers we received in Delft turned out to be too weak to handle rendering of several video streams.

These issues are something that we have to accept when using technology that is currently in development.