I haven't been doing much in the way of electronics recently because I've been spending all my time researching/planning our upcoming vacation in Japan. ( it also doesn't help that my workshop is out in the chilly garage. )
I finally have our route and hotels planned out. Here it is: Tokyo - Kyoto - Mt. Koya - Takayama - Tokyo. In Kyoto we are renting a traditional wood machiya (townhouse), and plan day trips to Bizen City and Nara. In Koyasan we are staying with monks in a Buddhist temple, and we have one night in Takayama in a traditional ryokan with a smazzy dinner.
We still have lots of planning to do, but somehow there is a certain comfort in knowing where you will rest your head each night.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Saturday, February 5, 2011
The power of creation.....errr.... Programming
I recently took phonegap for a spin around the block. I've found that I learn best by flinging myself at something and doing/creating/making something. Phonegap is pretty cool. It creates platform independent hybrid apps for mobile devices. It basically uses JavaScript as its programming language, and provides APIs for using all the sensors on your device. That means you can use whatever JavaScript libraries you want, and you can compile your app for android, iphone, and blackberry.
One of my pain points in developing augmented reality apps has been that getting camera access meant developing a native app, which in turn meant porting waz painful. Granted, I think for vision based AR, a true native app is still the way to go because you usually need to do some crunching on images that you grab from the camera. But once video support is added to phonegap, things get really interesting for location based AR.
Anyway, I created a simple phonegap app that grabbed a picture from my camera, displayed it in the app, and then used jquery to push it to my waiting php script on my server. I learned a lot from it, and was struck by one thing. I realized that in the space of an afternoon that I had sort of implemented a rough cut version of what my Eyefi setup does. My Eyefi pushes images from my camera to my NAS, and the phonegap app does a similar thing, using all open source. Open source is so cool that way. It's like no matter what I need, there is always a waiting set of open source power tools for the task.
One of my pain points in developing augmented reality apps has been that getting camera access meant developing a native app, which in turn meant porting waz painful. Granted, I think for vision based AR, a true native app is still the way to go because you usually need to do some crunching on images that you grab from the camera. But once video support is added to phonegap, things get really interesting for location based AR.
Anyway, I created a simple phonegap app that grabbed a picture from my camera, displayed it in the app, and then used jquery to push it to my waiting php script on my server. I learned a lot from it, and was struck by one thing. I realized that in the space of an afternoon that I had sort of implemented a rough cut version of what my Eyefi setup does. My Eyefi pushes images from my camera to my NAS, and the phonegap app does a similar thing, using all open source. Open source is so cool that way. It's like no matter what I need, there is always a waiting set of open source power tools for the task.
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