Nigel Parker's Outside Line : web09

NZsynth – How It Was Done

nparker — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:10:26 GMT

Previously I wrote and demoed the NZsynth application that was built for the WEB09 keynote. This post is detailing how it was made and introducing version two (Zoom all the way in using mouse wheel then double-click for popup image).

WATCH THE VIDEO that goes end-to-end on the development of the application (mainly building the mosaic and the extension that Tim Tate created to make the tiles clickable).

The video is also downloadable from Channel9

The Code

It goes without saying that this code is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights it is demo ware and should be treated as such.

Flickr Image Download Code

Mosaic WCF REST Service (Including Flickr Database File)

NZsynth

Demo at http://possi.bility.co.nz/ Hot keys in previous post

Tim’s Silverlight 3 Code and Demo

There is no “go live” for Silverlight 3 yet so what I’m going to do next is for “informational/ testing purposes only”. If you are a developer and happen to have either the Silverlight 3 Beta - Windows Developer Runtime or the Silverlight 3 Beta - Mac Developer Runtime installed pop over to http://possi.bility.co.nz/timtate/ to look at a running version of Tim’s solution.

NZsynth V2 Source (excluding image tiles)

Demo at http://possi.bility.co.nz/nzsynth (Zoom right in using mouse wheel then double-click for popup image)

Key tools

WEBPI to install Visual Studio Silverlight Development Tools & SQL Server 2008 Express
AndreaMosaic
HD Make
Deep Zoom Composer
WCF REST Starter Kit
FlickrNet

Other Resources/ Examples

Jellyfish Deep Zoom
Deep Zoom Image Generation with DeepZoomTools.DLL
My post DeepZoom-Tastic
http://tr.im/photosEFAS (DeepZoom Pix Photos from Expression for Art’s Sake)
Miss March and Other Distractions (Parental Advisory)
Deep Zoom++ : Build Dynamic Deep Zoom Applications with Open Source

All this got me thinking how this idea could be extended further?

National Geographic have been doing some interesting work with photosynth recently. Check out the Sphinx below.

This is why I was intrigued to see they too have developed a mosaic experience called Infinite Photograph. It is not as smooth or free flowing as the nzsynth mosaic demo but it has a great touch that it repeats on itself after a few layers giving you a “feeling” that you can zoom forever. Also double-clicking images brings up more details like in Tim and my examples.

I guess beyond this we then need to think about video and using dynamic frames in a form of “massive” stop motion animation. If you haven’t seen it yet the YouTube Mosaic Music Video may give you some insight into where my mind is heading.

NZsynth and WEB09

nparker — Tue, 12 May 2009 07:56:00 GMT

It started as a conversation I was having with Brett Roberts regarding options for promoting NZ online at a time when tourism was taking a hit from the current economic climate. From there we discussed the proposed National Cycleway and this lead to a conversation about “crowd sourcing” images that people have already tagged as New Zealand to construct a demo from our shipping Silverlight 2 technology.

This conversation tied in well with a looming keynote slot at WEB09 where I had a 5-10 minute demo slot. The biggest problem was that I only had three days to build the “demo-ware” prototype and present it to a room full of web influential's!

Needless to say after a nervous period fighting with the failing conference WiFi. I switched to the hotel wireless and pulled it off!

Watch a 6 1/2 minute video of the demo I showed at the conference (this time the video is hosted on a US based server so the experience won’t be as good for Kiwis as the demo further down this post).

I have also posted this video on Vimeo (download available).

The demo app is hosted on a development server at Swizzle in their Telstra Albany datacenter. The fact that server was only 1 hop away from the conference venue meant that I could stream video via wireless at 2.4 MBS over the hotel wifi using smooth streaming with NO CACHE! I would go as far as saying that this was the Best Quality Internet Video that people in the room had ever seen stream over the Internet and all this in an environment when no other presenter could get their “US” based video to play without buffering! Goes to show the importance of peering for local content!

As mentioned at the event the “Excellent" video was generously provided by Making Movies for use as stock footage in the demo.

If you are in New Zealand and have a direct connection to the Auckland Peering Exchange I recommend that you try the demo steps for yourself by navigating to http://possi.bility.co.nz.

WEB09 Demo V1

1) Use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out of the Mosaic and the slider to switch between Mosaics with more or less tiles.

Needless to say there was some smoke and mirrors in play during the demo…

Key combinations to try

SPACE bring up photo, mouse click on the image to hide again.
Q to show my photo collection (click on faded background then W to hide)
A to show a photosynth of museum S to hide
Z to show a photosynth of statue (P inside the photosynth to hide photos and show 3d model) S to hide
X to show a photosynth of blackout protest
V to show smooth stream video B to hide (needs to be done last)

In retrospect I didn’t like the way that the watermarked text that I applied to each individual photo tile looked after it was added to the mosaic. Also the tiles were being cut when they were being laid out in the Mosaic so in some cases (like below) the watermark attribution was being partly obscured or not visible at all!

For stage two I wanted to figure out a way to get rid of the watermark all together and work out a way to make individual photos in the Mosaic clickable.

I hadn’t been able to solve this problem in my demo so I used SPACE to bring up a single photo to show my thinking but not having it working.

Tim Tait came up to me after the keynote and we started discussing how I had built the demo and how he could look at productionizing the code for an upcoming exhibition at Te Papa museum in Wellington. Following our conversation I invited Tim to the Expression For Art’s Sake event in Wellington the following week and the rest as you say is history. Tim was able to solve the big problem I had above and this lead to me building a V2 of my demo which I will show you soon.

Tim wrote:

Before this week I had hardly touched Silverlight and now I don’t think I can live without it. Even though Silverlight is very different from Flash, I think having that Flash background let me pick it up fairly quickly.

I will post again shortly with a more detailed description of how I built the demo above including source code and a preview of Version 2 inspired by Tim’s work. But in the meantime it worth calling out the great piece of software Andrea Mosaic that I purchased to pull the base 3 Gigapixel tile sets.

Read Part Two about how it was done…

WEB09 - ‘Wheel of Fortune’ Challenge

nparker — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 04:45:00 GMT

This is the first of a few posts that I am making on WEB09 in Auckland and the 'Expression For Art’s Sake’ event that we held in Wellington this month. I have over 30GB of raw video to process so it will take some time to get the stories out.

After previously mentioning that he didn’t like vendor conflict (along with throwing out a few opinions of his own) Andrew Hedges somewhat surprisingly suggested to John Ballinger that he should “pit” Adobe against Microsoft in a challenge. I must admit I’m kind of glad he did. There is nothing more challenging and rewarding than building something under pressure in the shortest of possible timeframes!

Two hours before the end of WEB09 John approached Ryan, Andrew and Paul from Adobe as well as Tim and Arturo from Microsoft to build an application from scratch to pick the winner for the WEB09 closing prize draw, below is a video I created documenting the challenge and presentations. The screen is a bit obscured so I will update the video when John releases the “official” WEB09 videos next month.

For those on a variable connection I have encoded the video for Silverlight using smooth streaming check it out at http://tr.im/smoothchallenge

You can also check it out below on Vimeo as a comparison.

The Great WEB09 'Wheel of Fortune' Challenge (download link bottom right of the page)

I got the guys to promise to release their code in the video and Arturo followed up and confirmed that it is OK for me to link to it in this blog post. It goes without saying that this code is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights it is demoware and should be treated as such. The application was built using the beta of Silverlight 3 and an early “buggy” beta of a circular control panel first shown at MIX09. That said there is nothing in this project that couldn’t have been done with Silverlight 2.

There is no “go live” for Silverlight 3 yet so what I’m going to do next is for “informational/ testing purposes only”. If you are a developer and happen to have either the Silverlight 3 Beta - Windows Developer Runtime or the Silverlight 3 Beta - Mac Developer Runtime installed pop over to http://mo.bility.co.nz/WEB09/ to look at a running version of the solution.

Click the host character to bring up a file open prompt
Select a Text File that has a different name on each line
Click ‘Pick a Winner’

Like I’ve said before a healthy amount of cross pollination helps spark innovation

I had a conversation over dinner about working for Microsoft and attending a conference like foo I likened it to playing a game of sport... We play hard against our competition and we play to win, while others in the crowd fight with each other about who has the better team. After the game we socialise with each other are in amid of each others top players and share a common interest which is the love for the game.

I love getting to know the Adobe guys at events like WEB09 and Web On The Piste over the last couple of years. Andrews’ WEB09 session on After Effects and Sound Booth made me really want to get my hands on a copy of CS4 Master Suite to use as part of my video production process!

Ryan and Tim at dinner in Wellington after WEB09.

Update - Tim has also blogged about his experiences and a minute by minute timeline of the challenge

Update 2 - Ben Waggoner has commented on the smooth streaming video