A. Aronsson's WeBOLLog

A month ago, December 1-5, things were very hectic. The week before that I had been pondering what I should dress up as for a masquerade Christmas party at church. The theme was characters out of the Disney show that traditionally is broadcast on national TV on Christmas Eve here in Sweden. I had a few stupid ideas from the start, though they seemed like too much work to be finished in time, but in the end I used one of them anyway.

I was going to dress up as the jack-in-the-box character that is the last toy to jump into Santa’s sack in the short movie Santa’s Workshop from (gasp) 1932, available for viewing at Youtube. My other ideas were the propeller airplane that wrecks chaos on the shelves or an almost fully painted chessboard both from the same movie, but I decided those would take too long to design and realize, and be even more cumbersome to wear than the jack-in-the-box costume.

The party was on Friday, December 5th, and I had decided what idea to us the Monday night the same week. On Wednesday I bought whatever was needed and planned how I would make it, and I spent Wednesday and Thursday manufacturing the outfit. A total of 11 hours of manufacturing, a bit more than I expected. My kind parents let me do it at their house, as my apartment lacks the necessary space and machinery.

What I used:

• ~3.75 m² green cloth + green thread
• ~0.8 m² white cloth + white thread
• ~0.15 m² black cloth
• ~1.5 m² thick cardboard
• ~3m string
• ~2m thick steel wire
• ~2m thin steel wire
• 4x rock rings
• 3x cargo straps
• A red Santa hat + red thread
• A black Christmas tree ball
• Stuffing
• Yellow face paint
• A few lolly sticks

To create:

• A green ring dress
• A wearable box
• A stuffed red hat with a black ball
• A white curly collar
• Two white curly sleeves
• Fake black hair
• A yellow face, ending with tender facial skin

I started by fixing up the hat. It was a red Christmas hat with the white cloth removed, instead I added a black ball, elastic to make it stay on my head and stuffing to make it fluffy.

Then I started working on the green ring suit. It was a bunch of sewing to make it, the top and bottom edges had canals for strings and then it had to be a large tube to contain the rings. I got some help to attach the rings and add the shoulder straps.

The white collar is white cloth with steel wire in for the wavy shape and elastic to keep it in place around my neck. The sleeves with the same design was just white cloth with the same elastic. My mother was kind enough to make the sleeves while I was hacking away at the box.

The box was made out of a quite thick cardboard, my hands were really worn out after cutting and folding it in several ways before I ended up with a good result. I also sawed PVC pipes to reinforce the construction. It was kept together by thin steel wire which me and my father pushed through the cardboard, around the pipes and then twisted, a few around lolly sticks to spread the stress. I wore it by cargo straps through the belt loops on my trousers.

Last summer I got some weird face-paint when getting a burger meal at Mac Donald’s (hurgh) which had been lying about on my desk since then. A desk that never seems to get organized. It seemed transparent when I applied it, but it ended up looking pretty good anyway. The problem was getting it off, the oily stuff was hard to even get off my hands! Which explains my pose in the photo below. Around midnight when I was home I spent an eternity scrubbing my face, since I just wanted to go to sleep. My skin ended up like after a bit too much sunbathing the next morning. The next time I get the bright idea to paint my face I will use something better and make sure to have good chemicals to remove it with afterward.

The end result: I got a box of chocolate for my efforts! Apparently they liked my costume enough that I won the grand costume prize. Still not sure if it was all worth the stress, pain and discomfort that it brought with it, but at least I might have put a smile on a few people’s faces. Now I just want to forget it all, hahaha.

Update: At 2009-05-29 Aftonbladet published an article about a small girl who had used the same McDonalds crayons to paint herself, and the paint is just about impossible to remove! They [the parents] even consider that she will have the colors when grown up! Apparently the crayons become like this as they age. Originally they were givven out for the European Championship in Soccer in June 2008, so when I used mine in December 2008 they were about six months old, and the color was _VERY_ painful to remove. In the article they had gotten the crayons just now, which makes them about a year old, so that particular McDonalds were handing out old toys, amongst them the blue and yellow face paint crayons. Suddenly I feel a bit lucky.

From the title you could think that I have made cards for many years now, however this is my first time! Ever since I photoshopped a Christmas card for a friend I have wanted to do one of my own, unlucky enough I have been very busy leading up to this holiday so it took me until the evening of the 21st, a Sunday, to actually make it. Obviously I got to mailing them way too late, the 23rd, but I guess better late than never! At least the cards also say “Happy New Year!” so they will not be totally out of place when they arrive at the 29th.

I had an idea of putting myself into a movie, meaning into a photo from a movie. I googled around a bit but did not find a good source for high resolution movie photos, but eventually I stumbled upon high resolution Wall-e pictures over at /Film and decided I would use one of them.

For the photo I setup a couple of stools in front of my projection screen with a floor fan blowing at me. The camera was setup so I saw myself at a 14″ TV screen and I triggered the camera with an IR remote. At intervals I loaded a photo into Photoshop and placed myself in the Wall-e picture, to see if the lighting and pose worked. In the end I used a work light mounted in the ceiling to fix the lighting, though I adjusted it once by moving the hooks further back into the room so my face would not be completely shadowed.

After I had a photo I was happy with I sat in Photoshop for roughly 4½ hours. I cut out myself, decolorized my shirt, added the blue light tint, a shadow, fixed some details, added snowflakes and text… done! The snowflakes are downloaded brushes by =meldir.

It was quite troublesome to get a good result at the print shop as their real photo printer was out of order, but as I was too late to look for other printing options it had to make do. I might get a photo printer of my own until next year. Below are the resulting prints, which does not look really as nice as the source looks on screen, but I am at least satisfied with the picture itself, especially for being realized during a single evening.

At work we are supposed to have private mugs so the general ones can be used by guests. I used a blue Christmas mug at first, but now I have one which is truly mine… me! Surely nobody will mistake it for theirs!

The process to generate this mug includes an eight year old idea, sawing, video recording, LEGO and custom software.

Read on if you want the full story behind the creation of the mug(s)!

Background

In 2000 I found photos made by Andrew Davidhazy, a professor in imaging and photographic technology, but by then I did not know how they were made or who had made them. Six months ago or so I found the files on my computer and could via Google Image search find where they came from!

Andrew Davidhazy utilized a scrolling film with a slit that exposes a beam of light over time, creating weird photos which fascinated me; especially those of people. As I did not know about this technique at the time, I came up with my own way of how to create similar images.

As depicted in the crude 3D animation above (from 2000-02-25) my idea was to use a video camera to record imagery, and then I would extract a column of pixels from each frame in the video to create my images. At the time I only speculated in what kind of apparatus I would need to rotate a camera perfectly around objects (like my own head) to create unwrapping pictures, but I never got to constructing anything as I was not very resourceful back then.

The image to the left is from 2001, generated by sitting on a rotating office chair while recording with a webcam. The software used in this case was a VB application which saved columns of actual screen pixels, made by a school classmate. Not especially practical but it worked, the entire thing was experimental.

In 2003 I begun to use parts of my thought out method with a static camera which rotated to create standard panoramas in Halo, a videogame for the Xbox. To do this I had my cousin create a specialized software to process the videos after my specifications. This is the same application I used for this project, five years later.

Creation Process

Now, in 2008, the concept sparked to life in my mind again when I got the pressure on me to find a private mug to use at work, and I decided it was about time to realize the old idea of unwrapping my head. Many of the things I would need this time around were readily available, or could be acquired cheaply. Here is what I needed.

• Video-capable camera with lockable ISO/exposure setting.
• A construction that would rotate the camera around my head.
• Custom software to process the video with.

The Camera

The camera I used was my beloved Canon Ixus 75 bought in January prior to a skiing trip. It is a cheap ultra compact camera but it is the best video capture device I currently own, and it is physically small enough to simplify the next step of the project. It captures a compressed video stream in 640×480 pixels at 30 frames per second, which had to make do. A feature I found after about 15 face scans was a way to lock the exposure/ISO setting during recording which generates a much better image. Too bad I did not find that earlier!

In accordance with my old idea of how to scan a head I decided I would create a device that carried the camera on around my head, looking inwards all the time. The easiest way to construct this was to use my old LEGO bricks.

The LEGO

First I created a vehicle with different speeds on the inner and outer wheels, which caused it to move in a circle. It ended up being way too hard to align it correctly for a perfect circle and it had to travel at a very slow speed to not vibrate or shake too noticeably.

My second concept was a whole frame that would rotate around my head. I experimented with different wheels and constructions. Wide tires would have too much sideways grip so they would only gradually follow the circular track, causing it all to wobble. I ended up using the thinnest tires I could find.

For propulsion I started using two motors facing each other on the construction, but as the motors got different speeds even though they were of the same model I used one large motor instead. I ordered the extra motor and extension cables to reach the battery pack from the LEGO store. In addition I bought additional tires off of eBay as I only had five of them from the beginning.

The final construction is supported by 16 wheels that is in contact with the surface, four of which are driven by the motor via gears, axles, screws and two differentials. The larger tires were added to counter some of the weight and to add grip. The camera hangs outside the outer supporting wheel which caused the inner to slip, causing the rig to travel outside the edge of the table.

The Table

First I got a second hand table which was one meter in diameter, sawing a hole in the center. This table was round and nice, but it could be extended; which meant the board was split in two. This caused the LEGO construction to jump as it crossed the seam to the other board. I went back to the second hand store again to find a table with a whole board. Finally I got a smaller table, square, and precisely the right size.

The Software

As I mentioned before I used the old application my cousin made for me when I created the Halo panoramas. One limitation it has is that it can only handle raw AVI files which cannot be larger than 1GB. To work around this I cropped the video to a small stripe and exported that without sound. A side benefit is that it saves disk space as well as making it lighter to work with.

The Scanning

I tried several different ways of positioning the table and myself before I got to the final scan session. This is how I ended up doing it.

• I put the table on four stools to increase the height; so I could fit a chair underneath.
• I bought a cheap lawn chair that fits under the table.
• I using my Wii Balance Board (which I don’t use very much anymore, sadly!) to gain height from the chair, as I did not get high enough up as it was.
• I hanged an Xbox Live Vision camera in the ceiling, hooked up to my Xbox 360 displaying a picture on the TV so I could align my head correctly.
• I used a universal remote to deactivate the screensaver on the 360 when it activated.

I began with setting the camera to video mode, macro and fixed ISO value. Then I focused it on my hand which I put where my head would be, turned on the recording and inserted it into the LEGO construction and turned on the LEGO motor. Next I climbed into the setup, which almost always resulted in a sour shoulder or other muscle pain, and tried to align my head while the LEGO traveled around the table.

For a successful capture I need to sit still for about two minutes with the same face. Your face can relax when the camera has traveled past it, but the risk is that you change your posture if you relax too much. Some of the faces were hard to keep for two minutes, as well as not blinking when the camera passed!

Other considerations where lighting, angles and distance. I noticed that I got blue strikes through some images, and that was due to my wall mounted lamps getting into the video image. As for positioning, whatever you have closer to the camera will take up less horizontal room in the generated image, so to get a result that is as proportional as possible I needed to center my head. As you can see in the collection of scans keeping your head straight is also important. When you angle the head a whole lot of distortions enter the picture. If you lean your head to the side the whole image will be heavily distorted, but that was easy to control. It was harder to remember to look straight forward, if you do not your ears will be rotated and moved, getting different proportions compared to when you keep your head level.

The Mug

After several face scanning sessions across several months I finally decided I had images I was happy with. I cut them up in Photoshop and adjusted scales so my ears would be in the right places on the mug. After that I ordered three panorama mugs from Emmagjort.se, I found their price was very acceptable and even had phone contact to arrange the details, very nice!

This concludes the eight year old idea… fantasticly relieving! Of course I have ideas of how to make a much better construction from engineered metal parts, but that is 20 years off.

Flumen Formula is one of my many spare time hobby Flash projects which is unfinished. This one I’ve spent a fair amount of brain-juice to create, so I better complete it or the waste would be terrible! The game is fully functional, but what it lacks is levels, and some polish.

Development grinded to a halt when it was time to design the 144 levels the game can handle, but after several months I got the suggestion that I should open up level creation for anyone who would dare, which is now what I’m doing.

So here you have it, your chance to make a contribution to this project!

The Game
Water flows from the blue block. Your mission is to move and rotate the colored blocks so the water uses all canals in the entire level, without any leaks, including canals that are immobile.

How to Play
To lift a block, click it and hold the button down. To rotate the block, use the scroll-wheel or the left and right arrow keys. To drop the block, simply let go of the mouse button. Give it a test spin to understand what it’s all about, use the link at the top or click the game logo.

Level Creation
I’ve written a description of how to create and test levels for Flumen Formula, and I present it here in Word, PDF or HTML format. Also available are reference material in PDF, PNG and Flash (in HTML) formats for the game board, the various blocks available and a sample paper conversion.

• Level Creation Documentation: levelkit.zip @ 193KB

As mentioned above, levels can be pasted into the game and tested, right now! How to is described in the documentation!

Submission
To contribute your level to the project, please paste it in an email, or attach a .txt file with the level data, and send it to submit@7708.net. You decide yourself what personal information you want to disclose, but any type of name will do. It’s all that is needed for the credits. There is no deadline, but I will post a message when I have gathered enough acceptable levels!

Ownership
If you submit a level you grant me the ownership to the level data if you don’t specify otherwise. This is to simplify the process if someone wants to purchase a license for the game or the source code. If you do not want to grant me the ownership please note that in your email submission. In an eventual business transaction those levels will be removed from the game.

Credit
Everyone who gets their level(s) in the final version of the game will be mentioned as level designers in the credits and on any eventual site/page that accompanies it. If you go by a moniker, it shouldn’t be perverse, politically incorrect or anything else I wouldn’t want to say in public.

Genereal Feedback
Of course I also appreciate feedback on anything surrounding the game. Be it user interface, graphics design or anything. Feel free to send your feedback to feedback@7708.net or post a comment right here!

Thanks!

Note: The game itself is hosted on my private server, and not the server that hosts this blog, which is why it’s located on the 7708.net domain.

Update: My initial plan was to have this ready two weeks ago, but as I was finalizing the public release I came up with new features that changed how levels were constructed and other things that needed polish, so I’ve been postponing it several times. Two times the post managed to pop up on my front page as my social life kept me so distracted I forgot about when the post was going live, as well as denying me the time to finish the small details I myself thought necessary, sorry about this.

Earlier I posted that I had acquired a trampoline to put in my parents garden, as I myself live in an apartment. Shortly afterward I got curious of how well it would work in water, if at all. It was quite a strange idea, but it got stuck in my head, so I had to try it out.

To make it possible to launch off of the trampoline into the water I wanted to increase the height by extending the legs. I checked if it was possible to order more leg parts, as they were stackable, but that was only possible if you actually had a broken part to replace. Then I checked the price for manufacturing extensions, which was more than half the price of a completely new trampoline! So I ended up buying a second one and used those legs for the extension.

For the trampoline not to sink in the sand on the lake bottom I prepared boards to have as feet on the legs. These were then attached with a rope to stabilize the structure somewhat.

To test the rig out I brought together a number of friends and headed out to a beach belonging to the second largest lake in the country. It was in my first week of vacation so it was cold in the water, a friend guesstimated 14°C, but it was the only weekend this summer that this amount of my friends were available!

To see the process and the end result, watch the video below! Enjoy!