C# CAMERA CONTROLLER

On a whim I decided to try and convert my patented camera motion control tech (Birdie/Swimming/Sumo etc) into the new language and new Unity. Less than half a day later I had done it, with little or no errors on the way. This surprised me as I assumed it would take weeks and this is some of the most convoluted code I had written in the past.

Now I will attempt to get the Audio-control tech working. This will allow for graphic equalisers or voice/sound controlled games in the new Unity. Like Karaoke Golf. Might take the BOLT dance parts from SEQUENCY and use those to make him boogie in real time! I can also learn about the new auto camera system, particle system and general graphics overhaul.

 Jab

The original camera control. Now better/faster and possible on web, iOS and computers...

I HEAR VOICES

I found a new voice system that works rather well. The sound is more natural and can even subtly change intonation or add ems and ehs where needed.

Here is the voice reading a list of animals. Very little change was needed afterwards, I think I had to change the way she said WOLF. I will try and get this voice working live but at the moment you only get the function by paying subscription and feeding everything through a server which is no good for us. Preparing stories and any other audio is pretty easy though.

MP3 ANIMALS VOICE

WELCOME TO K-TECH VOICED

Jab

COWS : BIG DAY OUT

Good feedback from the Animals game. The only problem was when the little 'touch screen' kiddies had to use the mouse. But as predicted they needed no pushing or instructions when playing the game. And of course I threw in a reward for any of the kids that play all the way to the end. By then I imagine other kids will have left it but when the music kicks in they'll be drawn in and want to see the ending again.

I also really like the new voice. I'll write a bit about that separately Jab

THE BIG ENDING :

BOLT RENDERS FOR JEFF

Rendered up some massive Bolt pics for Jeff.

Lots of poses and colours, the final photoshop file was over 2.5 gigs!

Jab

COWS : WITH FRIENDS

I've added a bunch of new animals to the game and I'm going to add an interface that even younger kids can just jump and go with. Also experimenting with a voice A.I. Jab

AI and PHOTOS

Seems like Google's version of the Adobe Sensei. Wonder if they'll actually release something any time soon. Jab

Google taught an AI to edit photos like a pro and the results are glorious

The Next Web · by Abhimanyu Ghoshal · July 14, 2017

Landscape photography is hard, no matter how beautiful an environment you’re shooting in. You need to be well-versed in composition, deal with weather conditions, know how to adjust your camera settings for the best possible shot, and then edit it to come up with a pleasing picture.

Google might be close to solving the last part of that puzzle: a couple of its Machine Perception researchers have trained a deep-learning system to identify objectively fine landscape panorama photos from Google Street View, and then artistically crop and edit them like a human photographer would. Here’s some of its handiwork:

The results don’t just speak for themselves: Google showed a bunch of these photos, along with others from various sources, and asked several pro photographers to grade them for quality; about 40 percent of Google’s submissions were perceived as being created by ‘semi-pro’- or ‘pro’-level photographers.

What’s especially interesting is that the AI is capable of applying contextually meaning adjustments in different parts of each photograph, making for dramatic lighting and more compelling images – as opposed to simply applying a filter to the entire picture or adding something predictable like a vignette.

I imagine this research will eventually find its way into Google Photos’ editing tools, or in the company’s other mobile editing app, Snapseed.

You can take a look at more AI-edited landscape pictures in this gallery, and find the research paper published by Google’s Hui Fang and Meng Zhang here.

GoogleTech

PAPER EXCAVATION

The structure is revealed the more it's used. Might be a nice idea if we ever get a laser cutter.

Jab

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/01/omoshiro-block-a-paper-memo-pad-that-excavates-objects-as-it-gets-used/

CHECK THIS OUT!

Hopefully this new set of toys will make speed learning C# worth it. Have a look at this though. It was presented running real time at a conference.

 Jab

COWS!

Now that I have 1000 cows running around my laptop, in C#, I'm going to quickly turn this into a game for the kids rather than a curiosity. Jab

STRIKE A POSE (THAT'S A PRINT!)

I decide to test my new C# language skills on a problem I had difficulty with before. The result has become a tool I can use, and soon teachers can too. In the past any time a character was needed I would use a program called Daz3D to alter, pose, light and render the character. Each render could take up to an hour depending on its size.

As Unity is getting faster and faster I decided to program an interactive living version of one of our characters. The user can cycle through poses and animations and, at any time, can grab an arm or leg and drag it to another place or angle.

When happy with the result a single key press will output a 6000 pixel wide version of the character. The quality is indistinguishable from the rendered version complete with soft drop shadow.

The output can be used in any photo editing software or in print.

The software is actually so easy to use that we may try it with the students as a way to spice up stories or reports (or just for fun).

Jab

THERE GOES THAT TOO

Don't need reeding comprihention anyway.

Jab

Deep neural network models score higher than humans in reading and comprehension test | KurzweilAI

kurzweilai.net · by http://helldesign.net

(credit: Alibaba Group)

Microsoft and Alibaba have developed deep neural network models that scored higher than humans in a Stanford University reading and comprehension test, Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD).

Microsoft achieved 82.650 on the ExactMatch (EM) metric* on Jan. 3, and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. scored 82.440 on Jan. 5. The best human score so far is 82.304.

“SQuAD is a new reading comprehension dataset, consisting of questions posed by crowdworkers on a set of Wikipedia articles, where the answer to every question is a segment of text, or span, from the corresponding reading passage,” according to the Stanford NLP Group. “With 100,000+ question-answer pairs on 500+ articles, SQuAD is significantly larger than previous reading comprehension datasets.”

“A strong start to 2018 with the first model (SLQA+) to exceed human-level performance on @stanfordnlp SQuAD’s EM metric!,” said Pranav Rajpurkar, a Ph.D. student in the Stanford Machine Learning Group and lead author of a paper in Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing on SQuAD (available on open-access ArXiv). “Next challenge: the F1 metric*, where humans still lead by ~2.5 points!” (Alibaba’s SLQA+ scored 88.607 on the F1 metric and Microsoft’s r-net+ scored 88.493.)

However, challenging the “comprehension” description, Gary Marcus, PhD, a Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU, notes in a tweet that “the SQUAD test shows that machines can highlight relevant passages in text, not that they understand those passages.”

“The Chinese e-commerce titan has joined the likes of Tencent Holdings Ltd.and Baidu Inc. in a race to develop AI that can enrich social media feeds, target ads and services or even aid in autonomous driving, Bloomberg notes. “Beijing has endorsed the technology in a national-level plan that calls for the country to become the industry leader 2030.”

Read more: China’s Plan for World Domination in AI (Bloomberg)

*”The ExactMatch metric measures the percentage of predictions that match any one of the ground truth answers exactly. The F1 score metric measures the average overlap between the prediction and ground truth answer.” – Pranav Rajpurkar et al., ArXiv

I HAD ONE!

I really had this set when I was a kid, can't believe they still make it. Jab

Makedo Cardboard Building System

Play

Reusable connectors for cardboard creations

The cardboard boxes that come as packaging for my family’s numerous online purchases were formerly an annoying nuisance, piling up until we could cut them apart and add them to the recycle bin. But for the kids at my wife’s school, cardboard is a wonderful construction material. Thanks to Makedo’s plastic screws, this cardboard can be magically transformed into the raw material for forts, castles, suits of armour, etc. A Makedo building kit comes with a serrated plastic knife (non-pointy for extra safety), for cutting up the cardboard, thirty plastic screws that can be used to hold layers of cardboard together, and a special screwdriver that works on these plastic screws. Nothing is sharp enough to hurt the kids. Even sitting on the pointy end of a screw would merely be uncomfortable. Equipped with these simple tools, it’s amazing to see what the kids can do with cardboard. Eventually, the cardboard constructs get left out in the rain, lose their structural integrity, and must be tossed away. When this happens, the bright blue screws are easy to spot and and remove from the junk cardboard, keeping lost screws to a minimum. We buy ours from Lee Valley Tools, but I think Makedo’s construction tools are widely available from other suppliers too. A full set is under $20.

-- Scott Reid 12/12/17

MOLDABLE PLASTIC

Finally found that plastic we used for repairs before. Order some, in black of course. Might be useful for the class. Jab

PLASTIC CLAY

WHEN YOU GROW UP...

Every year the insurance company Daiichi Seimei asks a range of young kids about what they want to be when they grow up. They go as young as kindergarteners. Here are the 2017 results. Jab

● Boys :
1. Scholar (8.8 percent)
2. Professional baseball player (7.2 percent)
3. Professional soccer player (6.7 percent)
4.(tie) Doctor (6.4 percent)
4.(tie) Police officer/detective (6.4 percent)
6. Carpenter/contractor (4.8 percent)
7. Firefighter/paramedic (3.7 percent)
8. Restauranteur (3.2 percent)
9. (tie) Architect (2.7 percent)
9. (tie) Swimmer (2.7 percent)
9. (tie) Train conductor/bus driver/chauffer (2.7 percent)
9. (tie) Chef (2.7 percent)

● Girls :
1. Restauranteur (11.3 percent)
2. Nurse (9.5 percent)
3. Preschool/kindergarten teacher (6.9 percent)
4. Doctor (6.6 percent)
5. School teacher (other than preschhol/kindergarten) (4.4 percent)
6 (tie). Singer, TV personality, entertainer (3.4 percent)
6 (tie). Pharmacist (3.4 percent)
8. Zookeeper/pet shop owner/trainer (3 percent)
9 (tie). Dance teacher/dancer/ballerina (2.5 percent)
9 (tie) Designer (2.5 percent)

TRIPLE PENDULUM

This is what I was talking about regarding emergent chaos/behaviour. This is also related to the three body Newtonian problem. That is, with some simple rules which are then layered a system becomes more and more unpredictable and things can happen that are utterly unpredictable.

I'll be using it in the cows game which will make the blocks seem really organic and alive. It's seen in nature in ant behavious or flocking like starling murmurations.

It's a good point for class regarding programming and electronics. More info about that problem here : WIKIPEDIA

 Jab

ARKIT UPDATE

This is one on the new additions to the ARKit. It doesn't just work for walls but for blocky objects like couches and tables. I've also managed to use the wall tracking too. Jab

RICOH THETA

I don't think it's enough of an upgrade for me to get his one but the Theta is a great little piece of kit. Not only technically, I use it for 3D and reflections, but also for capturing memories. Might be useful for certain classes as it records every part of the room and the quality is now good enough to make a normal looking video from a single angle. Jab

AMAZON LINK

PERSONAL TRAVELLING DEVICES

10-15kph through Shibuya or flying on your own personal saucer, the future was looking interesting.... in 2016! Jab

VR/AR PRIMER

For any one late to the party, here is a primer for AR v VR. Click the photo for a zoomed version. Jab