For the past few months I’ve been working on IT exhibits for Glasgow Science Centre.  What started out as a commission for two interactive exhibits turned into a project involving five exhibits.  These ranged from relatively simple touch-screen video interactives to full-blown games and dual-screen applications. A few highlights…

News Editor

This exhibit allows visitors to edit their own news story, selecting video clips, applying blue-screen effects, applying captions and music to produce a news piece suitable for broadcast.  Once complete, visitors can re-play their entire package as it would be shown on TV, complete with titles and credits.

The tricky part here was getting Flash to seamlessly stream one clip after the other with no buffering delay.  Other people had abandoned Flash in the past for its limitations in handling frame-accurate video playback.  For this project I had to develop some Actionscript routines that guaranteed seamless playback and syncronisation of title overlays.

You Vote

This one features a touch-screen interface, webcam and large projection screen.  Visitors are allowed to vote on the topic of the day, then have their head ‘beamed’ onto a cartoon body of their choice on the projection screen. 

I knew before I started that the difficulty would be in syncronising content between the two screens - one a 19″ touch-screen, the other a 6ft projector display. A solution was developed using specific graphics cards, a load of Actionscript and advanced configuration of the touch-screen software.

Organ Transplant

Organ Transplant was the last exhibit we developed and is probably the most popular of them all.  It’s so popular that Glasgow Science Centre had to install a second terminal beside the first to meet demand.  The high score table, controlled by an on-screen keyboard, has made things highly competitive — the current high score is 540, more than double my highest score!

There’s a few higher res photos of my exhibits here.

If you go to Glasgow Science Centre, please take a look and let me know what you think.

I’ve just finished another online game for Glasgow Science Centre.  The Bang or No Bang live show explores the science of risk though a series of demonstrations based on popular game shows.

GSC commissioned me to develop an online Flash game to allow web visitors to experience one of the demonstrations from the show.  The game displays probabilities through a ‘luck-o-meter’ gauge - a tongue-in-cheek reference, as the show clearly demonstrates “there’s no such thing as luck”.

You can play it online here: Bang or No Bang game.

I’m kinda really annoyed by BBC iPlayer.  Not the technical execution, but the concept itself at the most basic level.  Everyone’s complaining about the fact that it doesn’t work on Vista, or Mac, or Linux, or anything else except Windows XP, but…

Surely the real problem is that it only plays BBC content?

Imagine a TV that could only show Channel 5, or a radio that could only play Classic FM.  In this age of open standards and digital convergence, doesn’t it seem odd that playback technologies are becoming more diverse, more closed and proprietary?  Already we’ve had the Sky TV player, the Channel 4 player, the ITV player and others.  Now we’re expected to install yet another DRM-infested “player”* just to play the output from a handful of BBC channels — no thanks.  (more…)

The Simpsons Movie website allows you to make your own Simpsons character.  Here’s my attempt at me…

You can make your own here.  A couple more of my attempts are below the jump… (more…)

I went down to the Red Road flats today to watch Didier Pasquette’s attempt to walk a High Wire strung between three tower blocks.   According to The Herald, the wire is 90 meters above the ground, and the buildings were 52 meters apart.

He made an impressive start, covering the first quarter stretch is just a few seconds.  However, the wind started to pick up a bit and he decided it wasn’t safe to proceed.  Impressively, he managed to return to the first building by walking backwards along the wire.  I’m not sure if he’s going to attempt it again, but I’ll keep an eye on the High Wire site for any updates.

Update: I just read on SkyscraperCity that the attempt has been cancelled permanently and that the film crew have returned to London. 

Here are a few pics I took today.  There are more pics (and high res versions of these ones) over at StockPhotoX.com

If you’ve read this blog in the past you might know that I’ve been a fan of the Fon social wifi project for a while.  To be honest, I didn’t think much of the first gen hacked Linksys routers, but their more recent customised hardware, La Fonera, with it’s dual SSID is a much better device.  La Fonera is good, but still suffers the limited range of other 802.11b/g devices.  It’s fine around the house, but doesn’t extend far beyond so it’s use as a ’social’ hotspot is limited. 

The guys at Fon are clearly very aware of this, so they’ve developed La Fontenna, a wifi antenna you plug into your Fonera to increase it’s effective range.  The Fon guys say it will multiply your signal by 5x, and I wanted to see if that was true. 

My Fonera unit sits in a cupboard with my other networking gear, roughly in the middle of my house.  To reach the garden the signal has to go through two internal brick walls and one external wall, also brick.  For this test I was using my Acer laptop’s built-in 802.11g.

Before Fontenna

Before the upgrade the effective range of my laptop was just over 13 metres (42ft) from the hotspot.  After this distance the signal seemed to drop off sharply — literally taking two steps backward stopped me loading a web page in its tracks.

After Fontenna

Installation of La Fontenna was a one minute job.  Simply unscrew the existing antenna and replace it with La Fontenna.  Back out in the garden I started walking….

Signal strength & quality were excellent at the point where the signal had died before.  At twice the distance the connection was still great.  It was finally at 31 metres (101ft) that connection quality finally dropped.   As with the standard antenna, once you step outside of range you lose your connection pretty quickly.

Conclusion

Admitedly this test wasn’t at all scientific, but hopefully provides some useful ‘real world’ information for anyone considering upgrading to La Fontenna, or even just getting involved in the Fon social wifi project in the first place.