Test.kenlawrence.eu Blogs

Unity 3.0 Announced

Smithee — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:27:00 +0000

Hopefully we are about to dive back into the Unity game engine for a truly exciting project, as such the glimpse of Unity 3 opens up a number of possibilities:

Dark Unity from Unity3D on Vimeo.

As soon as we are back using Unity we will of course post the usual update movies and tutorials. Keep an eye on http://unity3d.com/ for full details.

Thanks go to Chester of http://associated-architects.com/ for the link.

London Twitter Cloud

Smithee — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:19:00 +0000

Regular readers will know we have been logging data in 12 cities via our Tweet-o-Meter, its still early days but the results for a weekend in London are intriguing.

The data covers a weekend period from Friday evening to Monday morning containing 380,000 individual tweets. Within these 60,000 were geo-referenced, tweeted by 5,500 individual users.

In terms of density the focus is on central London with local hotspots as the weekend progresses, around Kings Cross and Old Street. There is also a noticable trace along the main transport routes into and out of town, noting that we seem to be tweeting while on the move. The clip below details the visualisation in Google Earth:

Music - 'Social Awkwardness' by Xanthe over on unsigned bands.

The clip reveals a message cloud rising and hovering above London as a time-space aquarium where the time is plotted as the height information. Interestingly Google Earth is becoming the visualiser of choice for such data sets, the combination of location, imagery with the ability to view by time makes it a formidable engine for data visualisation.

Thanks go to urbantick who converted the data via a custom VB script.

Image Stacking: 8400 Images – Day and Night in the City

Smithee — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 09:25:00 +0000

Using our recent tutorial on image stacking it is possible to stack images from both day and night to create a single image of the city skyline over time. The photograph below consists of 8400 images taken using a Go Pro HD with one image every 5 seconds. The streak of light to the left is the moon during the night time sequence, while the right hand light is the daytime sun. The small lights are aircraft during the evening:

You can view a higher resolution version on our Flickr Stream, we will have more on the Go Pro HD next week, including a tutorial to create 24 hour+ timelapses.

Photoshop Tutorial: City Star and Aircraft Trails

Smithee — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:20:00 +0000

Last week we covered creating 'day trails' in Photoshop using the technique in Astrophotography known as 'star trails'. Today we take the same technique and use it to create a view of city activity at night.

You will need:

1 x Timelapse System, you can use a simple webcam as per our previous Tutorial: Torch + Webcam = HD Timelapse System a DSLR such as the Canon G9 with CHDK , a iPhone with the free Gorrilacam app or any camera that can take photos at regular intervals. We used a Go Pro HD camera in timelapse mode, taking a picture every 5 seconds.

1 x Copy of Photoshop, you can download a 30 day trial.

1 x Photoshop Stacking Action (thanks to Deep Space Astrophotography)

Time Taken, 4 to 12 hours to capture, 2 to 6 hours to process.

Setting Up

The concept is simple, set up your camera, webcam or iphone at a suitable location, and capture an image at regular intervals, for our example we captured an image every 5 seconds pointing at the skyline of London. Capturing an image at least every 5 seconds is vital for star/aircraft trails as it allows for closer spacing between the lights in the final image.

We left the camera running for approximately 12 hours capturing 8000+ images, saved into a folder on our computer. Ours captured covered both day and night time, resulting in the following timelapse:

The next step is to open up photoshop, chose the images you want to use, and start stacking.

Image Stacking in Photoshop

The images will be stacked onto of an intially blank image via a simple automated action:

1) Create a new blank black image the same size are your captured photographs.

2) Load the action into the action windows in Photoshop and load the action Startrails.atn.

3) In Photoshop click 'File', 'Automate' and 'Batch'. Select the action you have just loaded and choose your directory with the images as source and make sure you select 'None' for the output directory.

Click 'Ok' and leave it running, our Mac laptop took around an 2 hours to stack the images - resulting in the Start/Aircraft Trail' below:

The line across the centre is a star and the bright line on the left is the moon coming into shot. The rest of the lights are aircraft in the sky above London.

You can view higher resolution versions via our Flickr Photostream.

Carling Cup Final Tweet-o-Meter is Live

Smithee — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:59:00 +0000

The Tweet-o-Meter developed here at CASA is now live for the Cup Final Weekend, making it, in the words of Carling, the First Digital Cup final.

The Tweet-O-Meter measures the volume of tweets about the Carling Cup Final and shows who's tweeting hardest; fans in Birmingham, Manchester or London! As Carling states - it's a great way to see where the buzz is in the build-up to, and during, the final.

For your tweets to be measured use #CCF10 and if you're following a particular team add #villa or #manutd. Also, you'll need to geolocation turned on in Twitter to do this...

To enable us to locate your Tweets, login to your Twitter account at www.twitter.com and select "Settings" at the top of the page. In the location setting, check the box next to "Enable geotagging". That’s it! Any message from now on sent via Twitter with the "#ccf10" tag will be caught by our Tweet Meters.

The Tweet-o-Meter system was developed here at CASA, University College London and measures the amount of tweets (measured in Tweets per Minute or TPM) received from various locations around the world. The gauges are updated every second giving you a live view of the TPM's in each location.

There is some serious science behind the Tweet-o-Meter, it is designed to mine data for later analysis relating to furthering our understanding of social and temporal dynamics for e-Social Science within the Twitter demographic. The system is as part of a wider survey tool as part of the NeISS project in association with us here at Digital Urban, with research by Urban Tick and coded by Steven Gray.

View the Carling Tweet-o-Meter.

Composite Cityscape: New York

Smithee — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 11:03:00 +0000

Darren is a freelance designer/artist based in Belfast, Northern Ireland, his cityscape composite of New York below has been created as part of a showreel in his bid to gain some freelance visual effects work in the world of fantasy/sci-fi television:

Its nice to feature such projects sometimes rather than the high-end visualisations from established studios.

See Darren's site http://planetmirth.weebly.com/ for full details...

Urban Cat

Smithee — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:23:00 +0000

A slightly bizarre post today, but quite interesting in an odd way, in fact we like it - Urban Cat:

Urban Cat from Elcio Horiuchi on Vimeo.
The movie was by Elcio Horiuchi, created while learning After Effects.

German and UK Truck Simulator

Smithee — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 10:30:00 +0000

We can't quite remember our search terms on game engines this morning but we stumbled upon a game entitled 'German Truck Simulator'.

The game allows you to drive across a realistic depiction of Germany, visit its cities, choose from over sixty kinds of cargo, and deliver them. The game progresses by growing your truck fleet and hire the most experienced drivers to build up a business:

The game has been developed by the makers of simulations in the 18 Wheels of Steel series and authors of Euro Truck Simulator. There is quite a niche market for this type of game although the web page states that 'we are happy to confirm that the game has been released in Poland - a country where we know our games have lots of fans'.

Here is the official Polish game website: germantrucksimulator.pl.

It would be easy to put in a few jokes here and there, but in terms of simulation and visualisation this has got potential and we note there is now a UK version:

The UK version was relased last week, ever had a craving to drive the motorways of the UK and chose between over sixty kinds of cargo to deliver? Head over to http://www.uktrucksimulator.com/ for full details.

The the 1-hour trail demo version of the UK game is not available until April 19th, 2010 but you can download the German version now.

Do let us know how you get on if you do, happy trucking.

Carling Cup Final using Tweet-o-Meter

Smithee — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 12:09:00 +0000

Part of our remit for e-Science here at CASA and du is to use our research in new and innovative ways to get it out into the field. Indeed thats what the blog is all about, sharing our work and the science/techniques behind it. As such this weekend Carling Carling is positioning this weekend's Carling Cup Final as the "first digital cup final" and is asking fans to take part in the biggest-ever live Twitter commentary during the game using our Tweet-o-Meter.

The Molson Coors lager brand is aiming to get fans talking about the game, which sees Aston Villa take on Manchester United, on the social networking site by using the hash tag #CCF10 and submitting their comments to @thecarlingcup.

The sponsor will track the levels of activity across the social media platform as well as the topics supporters are discussing around the game via a new Tweet-o-Meter, which the brewer has created in partnership with us here at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, part of the University College London.

Carling brand director, Martin Coyle, says: “Our ambition is always to give fans a bigger voice and get them involved with the competition every step of the way - the great thing about digital activity is that it gives everyone the opportunity to have their say in what should be a superb occasion.

“With all the activity we’ve got lined up on Sunday we genuinely believe that this is the first ever digital cup final. It should be a cracking game and if our activity can add a little more to the overall experience then it’ll be a great way to celebrate 50 years of the competition.”

Your be able to view the results via our customised Tweet-o-Meter over the weekend on Sky Sports and online, we will put a link up as soon as its ready.

In the meantime our city Tweet-o-Meter continues to 'mine' the cities for social trends...

Tutorial: Photoshop Image Stacking for Day Trails

Smithee — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 10:51:00 +0000

Creating star trails is a well known technique in Astrophotography and the same technique can be used to create trails of activity during the day. The results are both unique and potentially useful to identify heavily used routes or flows in urban areas.

You will need:

1 x Timelapse System, you can use a simple webcam as per our previous Tutorial: Torch + Webcam = HD Timelapse System a DSLR such as the Canon G9 with CHDK , a iPhone with the free Gorrilacam app or any camera that can take photos at regular intervals.

1 x Copy of Photoshop, you can download a 30 day trial.

1 x Photoshop Stacking Action (thanks to Deep Space Astrophotography)

Time Taken, 2 Hours (including capture and processing).

Setting Up

The concept is simple, set up your camera, webcam or iphone at a suitable location, and capture an image at regular intervals, for our example we captured an image every 2 seconds pointing down at a London street:

We left the camera running for an hour capturing 1800 images, saved into a folder on our computer.

The next step is to open photoshop and start stacking the images.

Image Stacking in Photoshop

The images will be stacked onto of an intially blank image via a simple automated action:

1) Create a new blank black image the same size are your captured photographs.

2) Load the action into the action windows in Photoshop and load the action Startrails.atn.

3) In Photoshop click 'File', 'Automate' and 'Batch'. Select the action you have just loaded and choose your directory with the images as source and make sure you select 'None' for the output directory.

Click 'Ok' and leave it running, our Mac laptop took around an hour to stack the images - resulting in the 'Day Trail' below:

You can clearly see the path of the traffic and the most utilised sections of the walkways over the hour, we simply like the effect.

We have created a Day Trail pool on Flickr if you create a stacked image feel free to add it to the pool...