Posts tagged Media Informatics
SCRUM Presentation
Jul 22nd
After a very intensive and practical Agile Lab, in which I had to prepare two talks – one on Agile techniques and other on Geolocation, today I had the pleasure of participating in a very nice SCRUM Talk presented by Mr. Jens Trompeter, Board Member in Itemis company.
Media Informatics Master
Feb 1st
In the Autumn of 2008 I joined the Media Informatics Master program, saying goodbye to Alensa Online team. It is part of the Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology (B-IT) and was created through the collaboration of prestigious German institutions:
- University of Bonn,
- RWTH Aachen University,
- University of Applied Sciences Bonn Rhein-Sieg,
- Fraunhofer Institute Centre Birlinghoven Castle IZB
Supported by the B-IT Foundation and complementary state resources, B-IT offers highly selective International Master Programs in Applied IT, as well as the summer/winter schools for qualified computer science students.
Most courses take place in the beautiful B-IT building next to the former office of the German Chancellor on the banks of the River Rhine in Bonn.
The University of Bonn has almost 200 years of history, over 38.000 students from 130 countries, with an excellent research record and an excellent graduate education have made one of the ten largest universities in Germany.
In the context of more than one hundred first degree programs, the university engages in a broad range of international co-operations in research and teaching.
Founded in 1868, RWTH Aachen University is Germany’s top-ranked University of Technology and one of Germany’s nine Elite Universities. Of its 30,000 students, over 4,000 are international, including 900 students from the Asian-Pacific region. In addition to 65 first degree programs, RWTH offers more than 20 graduate programs in Science and Engineering.
Within the Fraunhofer Society of Applied Research, the four institutes in Birlinghoven Castle represent a quarter of the largest IT research organization in Europe. Over 500 post-graduate researchers investigate Autonomous Intelligent Systems, Applied Information Technology, Media Communications, Algorithms and Scientific Computing in a world-wide network of industry and research partners.
GPS vs aGPS vs WiFi vs GSM localization
Aug 26th
Each method presented has its strengths and weaknesses. None of these is the perfect positioning system, yet they all can collaborate in order to give the estimated position of a user.
GPS, the veteran of the group, has a plethora of satellites at its disposal, offering almost anywhere in the world a precision in meters. The devices which implement this technology are small enough to be inserted even in phones, smart enough to do their job or even more by tracking many satellites in the same time and eating less power, affording the usage of this service for hours in a row. But it needs clear sight to the sky in order to see at least 3 satellites and needs quite a long time in this busy era to get a clear position and be able to pinpoint the location on a map.
Latest Flash UI changes
Jul 27th
Final preparations for tomorrow’s big show! See below the latest Flash movie.
We added :
- sounds in our application, allowing user to get auditive feedback
- background and confirmation for hit sounds for improving the User Experience, creating an immersive experience who tries to transpose the user into the real wood atmosphere
- self generating levels, allowing users to improve themselves beyond our ideas about their possibilities: the user gets 60 seconds levels in which he has to hit more and more animals as he becomes better in targeting ( and in ball retrieval
) - changed the aspect ratio of the game from 4:3 to 16:9 to better use the whiteboard’s surface
- we dropped a lower right sensor from our latest setup to improve the quality of sensor reading. The reason is that wooden board conducts very well the sound. Thus, too close sensors can receive same signal in almost the same moment, given false positive responses.
Flash UI changes
Jul 26th
Since last week the Flash application changed- I added support for numerical keys for hitting. We mapped the numerical keys 1 to 6 to the 6 animals positions that can be hit. This way, it is enough to press a key to simulate the throw of a ball.
The reason behind this application architectural change is that we needed an smart way to simulate the sensors that were hit, without actually having the entire setup in our workplace.
iMeet application presentation
Jul 25th
Finally, the biggest moment: application is ready!! I am very proud of this application, as it represents my achievements in fast learning and adapting to:
- new way of programming, as XCode and Interface Builder truly represent the ModelViewController paradigm
- new language- Objective-C, which as any language has its pluses and minuses
- new device: mobile devices on which I didn’t work since my experience on Sales Force Automation in TotalSoft company, back in 2005, on Windows CE.
I’ve structured the application visually in few areas:
1. Login screen – the ‘”gate” to the application. Since the access to the
XML-RPC is done in a secure way, the application implemented also a credential input and recording mechanism. The mechanism is dual: user can enter the login into the first screen or in the iPhone Settings application. Depends only on him where and how he’ll manage his credentials.
The main point of this screen is to create a intuitive interface for users to insert their credentials, instead of having to leave the application and go to the iPhone settings.
Objective-C: Putting markers on Map control
Jul 21st
This article comes as a completion to my previous ones, XCode : using MapKit with no geocoding available out of the box and XCode: Modal windows – Google maps and shows how to add pins on your already created Map View.
First of all, adding the points to the map is not as intuitive as it might seem, so let’s start by creating a new class called POI – point of interest. Its header must be filled with this code:
#import <foundation foundation.h> #import <mapkit mapkit.h> #import <corelocation corelocation.h> @interface POI : NSObject{ CLLocationCoordinate2D coordinate; NSString *subtitle; NSString *title; } @property (nonatomic, readonly) CLLocationCoordinate2D coordinate;@property (nonatomic,retain) NSString *subtitle;@property (nonatomic,retain) NSString *title;- (id) initWithCoords:(CLLocationCoordinate2D) coords; @end
The User Interface
Jul 18th
This week we work also on the User Interface – the Flash GUI. It was challenging since neither me nor Loredana had previous experience in creating games under this application.
Because of this fact, we searched for some advices on the net and after quite a long trial and errors we found something interesting here . Even that it didn’t met all requirements, this tutorial was what we needed to get a quick start.
The animal images are free clip arts taken from http://www.free-clipart-
After following the steps and understood the concepts,we modified the application to :
- Change the resolution, as it has to run on a projector
- Redesign the entire scene graphics, but keeping basic elements like scoring and timer.
- Change the game’s AI from
- how many simultaneously balloons you can hit in a specific period of time to
- having only one target available at one time and you can get another one only if you hit the current one
- Remove the old targets and create 6 new ones more appealing.
- Implement the Arduino interface classes taken from here.
XCode: Modal windows – Google maps
Jul 18th
From time to time, you’ll need to show in your iPhone application a view over the entire application without navigating and destroying your workflow of the application. I’ll present the mechanism of modal windows as it is implemented in Cocoa Touch.
Lets take a real case: you have a view in which you want to input an address. Near the address you have a button which will show the user the Map centered on the specific address that he inputted. How this can be implemented?
The answer is quite simple: you need to declare the view from which you launch the modal view as <UINavigationBarDelegate> in the header file (.h for newbies), like this:
@interface CtrlAddEvtView1 : UIViewController <UINavigationBarDelegate>
This way, the view will know “magically” how to interact with children views.
XCode : using MapKit with no geocoding available out of the box
Jul 15th
One of the tasks in the CSCW lab was to create a map on which the users to see the location of a specific address.
So I started working on it, knowing that the newest framework brings a lot of goodies, through which there is also a map framework. But surprise! Apple provides only reverse geocoding, not forward geocoding. This means that you can only transform a pair of Latitude / Longitude to the Map and it will show it to the user. But what to do when user enters an address?
My point is that nobody caries with him a GPS to search for the address, get the coordinates and enter them into my map!
I was curious about it and after a little search I found that there was a big argue about the geocoding and Apple didn’t want to pay the price that Google and Tom-Tom asked for this feature.
