October 15th, 2010
We have been playing around a bit with Android lately, as David said in the previous post. I have been focusing on Adobe Air for Android. Which enables you to release Apps that are written in Flash and runs through the Air runtime on the mobile device.
It´s a pretty straight forward process. Lee Brimelow have made a good getting started tutorial if you want to try it yourself.
It´s of course somewhat limited compared to what you can do on the desktop/web, but it still runs suprisingly well, as long as you plan ahead and optimize. Also you have to take into account the different resolutions Android devices can have, rangeing from small resolution mobiles to high resolution tablets.
I have released a simple testgame on the Android Market to try out the whole process. Search for “Cubeoban” on the Android Market to install it. It´s again quite easy to have it published, see another tutorial for that part, if you are interested.
All in all, it´s a pretty streamlined and quick process, which makes it interesting in our fastmoving industry/world.
October 14th, 2010
After the release of Battle of the Cheetos we decided to try out how the experience would be if we let it run on a android phone with no major changes. We found that you could actually play the game without any changes at all, but the user experience was terrible.
We did some small changes to adress the most outstanding issues:
- optimizing the resolution to fit in smaller screens.
- adjusting all clickable areas so they would be easy accessible through the phone.
- compressing the graphics further to make it run as smooth as possible.
- changing some parts of the user interaction to make it easy to use on the phone.
These were just some basic changes for making the fight run smoother, and there is still a lot more to do to make it into a fully functional gaming experience. However we do believe that this test shows that if the initial game idea is developed considering mobile as well, the investment doesn’t need to be that great to launch in multiple channels.
If you have an android phone you can try out the testversion here: http://dev.northkingdom.com/cheetos/m/
October 13th, 2010
For 6 months we have had 2 student from Chalmers University of Technology to do their master thesis around real-time 3D motion capture using Time-of-flight camera
The technology is used in our interactive installation for Skellefteå Airport.
The students have written a paper about their findings so far that has been accepted at ICIET 2010 and that can be downloaded here: 3D motion capture using TOF
“This article describes inferences derived from practical and theoretical explorations regarding three-dimensional motion capture to develop numerous software applications using Time-of-Flight (TOF) range sensor camera. It illustrates a simple but complete solution towards the development of straightforward 3D motion controlled applications for different public environments.”
Find out more about the hardware and possibilities from our partners Fotonic.
See what Frog Design did with the technology at SXSW 2010.
October 13th, 2010
During the spring of 2010 we had a student, Lars Alin from the department of Computing Science at Umeå University doing his master thesis.
This thesis examines how object tracking can be implemented in applications for Iphone as well as providing a survey of four different areas of use that have been implemented in Xcode: an augmented reality car game, a letter tracking application, a face recognition application and an object recognition application.
Now the master thesis is printed and can be downloaded here for your interest: object tracking with iphone
Happy to say that Lars is no longer a student but part of our team nowadays, and he has been leading the technical development of our Ipad project for Credit Suisse.
October 12th, 2010
A few weeks back we launched an augmented reality game for SCION together with the San Francisco based agency Attik. Take on the machine is a fast car racing game with elements from classical arcade games you used to find at your local video store back in the days. The Machine city has turned against you and you have to get out before it’s too late. Hold up the marker in front of your webcam and use it as a steering wheel as you dodge appearing obstacles at high speed. There’s only one track, but just as in those old arcade games it takes real effort to master it.
Try it out at www.scion.com/takeonthemachine/ar
October 5th, 2010
A couple of times a year we let one of our designers design a T-shirt that is given out to the team, based on the North Kingdom logo. In the summer of 2010 it was my turn. I wanted to make a design that represented all of the different individuals building the NK team. Here´s the result.
