Contact Details

If you would like to contact any of the Obsurveillance Team our email address' are as follows;


Blaine Rennicks: rennicks@gmail.com


Ben Ryan: benryan51@gmail.com


Baptiste Madeuf: baptiste.madeuf@gmail.com


Keith Way: keitho300@gmail.com

Obsurveillance at the Fís

Dont forget that you can come and see Obsurveillance for yourself at this years Fís Exhibition in Dunalk IT.

Dundalk IT’s Fís Exhibition runs from June 1st to 3rd in the newly refurbished PJ Carrolls facility on the college campus. Admission is free and all are welcome to witness a showcase of the student’s finest multimedia, film and computer games work.

Exhibition times are as follows:
Wednesday 1st June: 18:30 - 20:30
Thursday 2nd June: 12 Noon - 21:00
Friday 3rd June: 14:00 - 19:00

To learn more about the topics brought up at the Obsurveillance exhibit, such as the level of information gathering which takes place online as well as what simple steps you can take to protect your information, simply click on some of the links below:

Adjusting your privacy settings on facebook:

http://personalweb.about.com/od/makefriendsonfacebook/a/faceprivsetting.htm

The dangers of Tracking Cookies

http://www.ehow.com/list_6914475_dangers-tracking-cookies_.html

9 'Friend-Finder' apps that essentially turn your phone into a tracking device:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/finding-your-friends-via-gps-9-free-mobile-apps/

Big Brother watching you could become a reality very soon

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23391081-george-orwell-big-brother-is-watching-your-house.do

What is spyware?

http://www.spychecker.com/spyware.html

Gmail's intimate targeted advertisements

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-10453226-71.html

What can you do about Gmail Target Advertising?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/askjack/2009/nov/19/gmail-adverts-privacy-scanning

What is Wikileaks?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10757263

What are the dangers of Data Mining?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/technology/10pri

vacy.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5088&en=83281de60f5340aa&ex=1362801600&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Article on Data Mining agency 'Double-Click'

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,996366,00.html

Ghostery - Protection from spyware and information gathering.

http://www.ghostery.com/

Obsurveillance Trailer Online

Check out the new trailer for Obsurveillance, just posted today.

http://vimeo.com/24257606

The Evolution of our 3D Background

The interface will feature a 3D animation playing behind the video clips to give it a more floating feel. Here's a look at how the concept for this animation has evolved over the last few months:

Version 4: May 2011

Version 3

Version 2

Version 1

Working on Final Video Sequence in Motion, and General Updates

Is it as complicated as it looks? Yes.

In other news, we had our Demo with all the lecturers of the department yesterday, where we had to present our progress 3 weeks ahead of the deadline. They seemed quite happy with the fact that we now have a fully functional application, with all video clips loading and unloading as needed. They also seemed impressed with the GUI and interactive hardware (we presented the video which was posted here on this blog earlier).

Most importantly for us at this stage, they seemed to be on board with our two main requests ahead of the exhibition; supplying us with a power-house Mac Pro with Flash CS5 installed, and also with our own room some distance from the centre of the exhibition. We await confirmation of either though, so stay posted.

Our 30x40 " Screen

Our Prototype Interface

We hope to have our interface animations completed by the 6th May (for the demo), they will each correspond to users actions. Will keep you posted! Laters

Our test Screen

We have been testing over the past few days with various types of glass and we have come to a decision to go with class1 frosted glass. Here are our results; Our 40 inch glass panel will be ready on tuesday and we will post up more pictures. Until then, here are our test examples.

Messing about with Different Graphics

The first version of our working app with conceptual interface

A Clean Up

In the spirit of Spring, we've cleaned up our Actionscript code very nicely... With a new video construct function we no longer have 43 lines of code for each of out many video feeds, so that our total code came down from 1400 lines to just under 300! Slightly more managable... We hope to have a fully functioning App ready for the end of this week. It will be a mountain to climb, but we have our hiking boots on! We will keep logging progress...

The bones of how Obsurveillance works... Flash CS5 cue points

TESTING

Currently getting our screen working with the wiimote, here are a few pictures of the 'testing' stages!!

More to come very soon! :D

Laters'

Bansky CCTV graffiti; done under CCTV!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-559547/Graffiti-artist-Banksy-pulls-audacious-stunt-date--despite-watched-CCTV.html

We are still working... Updates to follow soon!

Updates

Some limited progress on the hardware side... Finally figured out why all the work trying to get the kinect to work with AS3 was going nowhere; we need to be on CS5, not CS4 as have been testing on for weeks.. Frustrating to find such a core problem but it improves the chances of getting it working all the same.
Audio recording has also been delayed due to equipment issues, but we will be recording next week for sure and are using this week to record test clips to try out different effects and have a comprehensive recording list for next week.
Shooting our final video clips; those of the commander figure giving orders to the User, has also been delayed for the same reasons, but it works out well actually as now we have an extra week to review the just completed rough cut non-interactive edit of the previously shot footage from the Marshes. It looks good, but we have found plenty of holes that can be filled with our foster shoot next week. So glad we had these discoveries.
We have a meetig with the supervisor today, for which we have plenty to show; A new improved interactive application, new interface designs including 3d background animations, and the previously mentioned fixed cut of the video elements.
We will keep you updated right here.

Interaction Hardware/Programming Update

Keith and I have been doing yet more research on utilizing the Kinect for our interactive exhibit, but progress is admittedly slow... It seems most of the work being done (and made available through open source libraries) by online collaborative efforts to hack the hardware has been done through C or C++, both programming languages which we have no experience of. Because the tech is so new, the SDK is only just available, and even this doesn't help us much as we are limited almost entirely to developing in Flash and AS3. The hunt is on for an easily editable library of open-source Flash files available online that work with TiuoKinect... We wont give up until we are sure they are not out there! It seems the online community, although plenty in numbers, is limited to coders and developers, and not many multimedia artists like us.
In light of the difficulties, we are continuing to look at using multitouch touch-screen interface options by publishing from Flash as an Air app. Since we have the backup of the wiiMote/IR lights touch-screen, now the mission on that side is to get this working with multiple IR lights.

General Updates - Pre-Rag Week Deadlines are on Schedule

So with Rag Week around the corner, we have only a few precious days to reach our pre-Rag milestones. But big progress has been made on all fronts.
The video footage has finally all been organized and converted and is now completely ready to go through and make a plan of which takes to use. Then they go straight to compression to into the application. Casting ads go up this evening for our final shooting to take place in 2 weeks, that of our commander figure in the narrative, Foster.
We have a working prototype app with 3D backgrounds and test video clips within. And it looks sweet.
We are compiling a list of all audio to be recorded the week after Rag Week so that we will have all assets needed for the final piece with 3 weeks from now.
And finally we have reached that point of progress with the Kinect that we were hoping for: We have a basic Flash Air program working with Kinect inputs. We also discovered the possibilities in working in Air for multitouch elements, so that even if, for any reason, the Kinect was to fall through, this provides more concrete confirmation that we can utilise multitouch with the alternative interaction method: the touchscreen using wiiMotes.
All looks good...

1st Adobe AIR application

Hello Again!

We are almost 100% going ahead with using Flash/ Adobe AIR as the platform for our project, reason being; it supports multi-touch functionality and we can make our .fla into an .app to run on any desktop. We are at the early stages at the moment but the AIR programme doesn't seem to be much different to Flash CS4, just publishing settings but it seems easily manageable.

***UPDATE***

Just create

d first Adobe AIR application and is available for download by public. Cannot seem to post on blog but its there anyway! Its merely just a link to our blog but getting there. Now to get the multi-touch functionality working...

We keep you posted with anymore updates.

hmmm...wonder what our project would look like as a phone app???