How exciting!

I do have readers! 2! Well, at least I know someone sees this. And just so you guys know, I read your as well...and have them both in my google reader list.

So, for an update. First it snowed last night. It was so peaceful and nice, then this morning...rain and frozen mush all over everything. Oh well. And we are supposed to have flash-flood conditions today and tomorrow.

Enough about the weather. So, first cool thing I found recently. A firefox extension that turns photo galleries into something truly amazing. It's called PicLens and if you have Firefox you can see what it does and get it for free at: http://www.piclens.com. (If you don't have/use Firefox, you should!) Here's a preview:


Also another firefox note, I really like this theme.

Ok, more personal now. Classes have really started and are extremely busy. Both classes are more work than I anticipated, but, in my graphics class we get to make some really pretty pictures in just a couple weeks. Using a technique called Photon Mapping. Essentially we model the characteristics of real photons bouncing around a scene and then render that on the scene. more about this hopefully once I get there. For now I'll say that I've been very slightly involved in work that has continued from my Vision final assignment last semester. Just a reminder that I did my final project on processing video for a multi-touch display system. Here's the final video output that I produced at the end of the project. And I will also link to the final research paper that I wrote and turned in. It is pretty technical, but feel free to at least look at the very professional format and the nifty pictures.

Obviously, with what I had to work with, my results were not perfect. The idea was that we simply want to keep track of any fingers touching the screen over a series of consecutive frames. Since I finished this project another Master's student has started his Mater's research by taking my results and some other ideas and beginning to create the software to actually allow us to use our multi-touch table. I will probably be helping out occasionally with this project, and it just might be the research I do for my degree also.

Here's the paper: http://cs.brown.edu/people/reid/VisionFinal.pdf

And the video: