sammi needham : cogitate

Today Ocean Recon was awarded the FWA site of the day. Huzzah!

Just in time for christmas we got an early present, Ocean Recon was a long time in development and utilised the sweet skills of many people within the studio in many different respects. We made up some pretty sashes to celebrate our moment in the sun.

Our sweet FWA sash

“The FWA is an industry recognized award program, showcasing websites who use cutting edge technology, together with inspirational ideas, that lead the way for future generations.” – Rob Ford, FWA Principle.

Ocean Recon is the 4th FWA SOTD award for Visual Jazz and the first that i’ve been involved in, so i’m totally chuffed like a chuffle-board floating down a stream of chuffle through chuff-town.

We also got a mention on the always inspirational ‘inspiration room‘ – thanks guys.

To check out Ocean Recon and ‘Experience Life Beneath The Surface’ visit
http://www.defencejobs.gov.au/submariners/

On friday the 27th of November Visual Jazz held our first (potentially annual?) in-house exhibition. There were no punters, no auctions, no fancy gallery, what there was, was a huge VJ turn-out, a bunch of very talented and dedicated people and enough champagne to keep us all occupied for several hours.

We have this long curved wall when you enter our studio, it’s white, and it’s really boring. There’s been much talk of what to apply to it to spruce things up a bit over the years although nothing had really come to fruition. But 2009 is the year to get things done and the idea that was sprung was to flex our creative muscles a bit, get away from the computers and make something physical to adorn this eyesore once and for all. The VJ exhibition was born, the theme: One Wish. This seemed like a good flexible name for our first exhibition, as if you didn’t like the theme, you could just post-rationalise your artwork by announcing that your one wish to change the theme.

For some it was a several-month-long crafting of finite detail, for others it was a mad rush to the finish, but when the time came to unleash upon the VJ at large, we had a whopping 25 artists providing finished work for the exhibition. The analytics guys tell me that’s about a 26.23% participation rate, which is apparently quite good.

We gathered at about 4:30pm in front of the curved wall with all the art hung and shrouded in black covers. Our resident office MC Jonno gave us a stellar introduction alongside national CD Gavin Heron, at one point a single tear rolled down his cheek to illustrate the sheer passion that we all shared at that point, the anticipation was palpable. Then the pieces started to be uncovered…

One by one each artist took the covers off their work and shared a sometimes funny, sometimes powerful, sometimes insightful, always interesting story about why they had created their artwork and what ‘One Wish’ meant to them. We got through the 20 odd pieces over the course of an hour and a half and then the voting began.

Overwhelmed by the quality of work that was presented, the judging wasn’t easy. Winners had to be named though, and after 30 minutes worth of deliberating 4 prizes were awarded.

The adjudicating committee of exhibition organisers crowned their MVPs, both male and female.

The Sammi Needham trophy for ‘Best boy’ went to Matt ‘The’ Baron for his piece ‘Batman’. Co-developed by him and his 4 year old son Leo it introduces to the world a collaborating team that i’m sure will continue long into the future.

The Gavin Heron award for ‘Lady of the night’ went to Abby Kelly for ‘Make a wish’ for it’s sheer craft and beauty. No one could really believe the intricate fingerwork that must have been required to achieve this level of delicacy.

The Simon T Small encouragement award was fittingly awarded to Caroline Jeppe for the best damn Hamburger anyone has seen, but not been able to eat. It’s title ‘Eat Me’ teases you as it’s felt and plastic apparently contain magical powers, but should probably not be eaten, if only because it wouldn’t allow anyone to every appreciate it’s perfect form again.

And the people’s choice award, voted for by all VJ staff and awarded the coveted prize of 1 additional day of annual leave went to: James Cook, for “I want everything”. It’s a killer piece, literally a crowd favourite. All night there were people huddled around this artwork finding new details hidden within the fine line work.

Having all of the officialdom over, that’s when the party began. A tremendous night was had by all, we danced the night away on and over things that were never meant to be danced upon, it was a perfect warm-up to xmas party season.

We shot a great video from the night with everyone introducing their pieces, hopefully that will show up at some point somewhere within the mangled intertubes that we call home. Until then, here are most of the pieces that appeared in the exhibition. Enjoy…

Oh, and if you want a closer look, they will be on show in the VJ office until christmas.

Incidentally, we also had a live stream of the exhibition enveiling, and i think we even managed to attract about 3 people to watch it! Yeah!

Barbie is old… Bratz are slutty… Introducing Liv. Real Girls, Real Life.

“Liv In My World” [ www.livinmyworld.com.au] is a newly launched website, designed and developed at Visual Jazz to showcase a new range of dolls distributed by Funtastic in Australia called Liv. Katie, Daniella, Sophie and Alexis are the girls that make up the complete range.

The website features Katie, one of the girls in the Liv range. You can outfit her with about 60 different combos of clothes and hairstyles and see her in augmented reality by printing out and holding up a marker to your webcam.

The site has had a pretty quick turn-around to meet a launch date for the sale of the dolls in store, it’s been a technically challenging job to work on with us trying a few different techniques for various features. We’ve now got a really great pipeline worked out for working with 3D collada models in Papervision3D and being able to test them in-browser with all their textures etc… It’s now very easy for our designers and 3D artists to update the models and textures and test them in the engine without having to engage flash. This is pretty important because of the intricacies of the Papervision engine. It seems to have some pretty bad clipping issues when separate planes are too close to one another, we first encountered this when working on the 3D submarine model for the ‘Ocean Recon‘ project. It’s a great engine that works well, but there’s some pretty serious competition out there and competition is only going to make thing better and cooler for 3D on the web.

Liv In My World is the 2nd augmented reality project that we’ve launched in a week (alongside Flash Forward Experience). It’s been pretty funny sitting at my desk going back and forth between these 2 jobs for the last month, almost as if i was some sort of dedicated AR specialist / fan-boy / loser… I’m not, honest. It’s actually been really good to get into this tech and realise that a really big part of getting this stuff right is the path that the user must follow to actually initialise something like this.

For this project it was important not to alienate all of the users that don’t have cameras connected to their phones. We gave them a way to get some sort of experience without it, by being able to play around with Katie by dressing the model in the website interface, young girls could still get a sense of the look of the doll and interact with the customisability of her. Only if they wanted to bad enough and were well enough equipped would they use the augmented reality component. And the demonstration steps were very blatant and (hopefully) very easy to understand and follow. Getting this right is in my opinion absolutely necessary to the success of an AR job. It’s a pretty foreign thing to do for most people (print out a weird picture and hold it up to your webcam) and it’s easy to forget working with this stuff all the time that sometimes users need a bit more hand-holding when trying things like this out for the first time, especially when your website is aimed at kids.

Overall i think we pulled it off really well. I think Katie herself is one of the best and most true representations of the human form that i’ve seen in Papervision3D to date. I think that the animations sync well even when changing clothes (which was no small feat) and that it performs very well even on a computer that’s not a super hot-rod. Now i just hope that kids enjoy plying with it. We had some young kids come in for the shoot for the demonstration and they seemed to love it, for me, that was one of the best parts of this whole job. Seeing people use the things that we make and having fun / finding them useful is one of the most rewarding parts of this job. Now go buy some dolls.

We at Visual Jazz have just launched a new microsite for the Channel 7 show Flash Forward. The Flash Forward Experience site.

Flash Forward the TV show is about a mysterious global event that causes everyone on the planet to simultaneously lose consciousness for 137 seconds (2 minutes, 17 seconds), during which time people worldwide see what appear to be visions of their lives six months in the future. The event results in some deaths and leaves the survivors wondering if what they saw will happen.

The site that we have built is a hype-piece that shows a sneak-peak of the show. It’s basically a trailer viewer, but presented i a unique way using augmented reality

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The instructions on the website inform the user that they must print this ‘marker’ and have an enabled webcam. Once you’ve got those two things you can start playing around with augmented reality. The show features a busted up city (which is the result of everyone falling unconscious for 1:17), and the marker that you are holding displays this city on top of it using some image recognition technology developed by our friends at Boffswana. The city itself was modelled in Maya and then brought into 3DSMax to be exported as a .dae file using a Collada exporter. We then use Papervision3D (via Flash) to import the model and display it real-time in 3D.

The image recognition works out which orientation the marker is on and so any direction it is facing in will always trigger the city to be directly facing the camera so that you can see it in it’s best view. Some of the nice little touches that we put into this city are promo billboards for other Channel 7 shows, a chinook circling the main building in the centre of the scene and a tiny video playing on a mini video screen on the main building.

You can twist the marker around in front of your camera to explore the city from different angles, but if you turn the marker around 180 degrees the back-drop of the city is revealed as a bigger screen with which to show the feature promo for the show.

It was a great project to work on with an extremely quick turn-around and a lot of technology flip-flops along the way. We were originally going to be using some hardware-based 3D technology that runs within a dedicated plug-in to show the city which would have allowed us to have a much more detailed city display and would have also allowed for natural feature tracking to be employed in stead of the high contrast glyph. This basically means that we were going to use a photo instead of the black and which marker to instigate the 3d scene. The spec ended up changing and we used flash with Papervision3D in the end. Which meant that we potentially had a wider audience using the site as there are no 3rd party plugins to install, but it also meant that we needed to re-model the city to fit within the confines of Papervision3D’s modest maximum polygon count.

At the end of the day i’m very happy with the result. Some may see it as a bit of a gimmick, and that’s fine, i respect that. in a sense it is, but it’s still damn fun to play with.

FlashForwardExperience.com.au

Ocean Recon is a project that i have been working on for the last 12 months or so. We started planning this project just after i started at Visual Jazz. Trying to get a Submarine project off the ground is a process that had taken place a few times before and now we’d finally found an approach that everyone was happy with.

To show what life is like on a submarine is not an easy thing to do. It’s pretty hard to get on board one, and they’re not the easiest things to photograph in their normal state (underwater). So we set on a 3d approach for the sub and a whole lot of motion work to get a 1/2 sky/water look to the majority of the scenes.

The planning stage was meticulous. We went back and forth for a long time with actual Submariners getting the plans to construct the sub in 3D, getting the scripts right for the scenes and making sure that all of the details were accurate. This was really important as we wanted to give as realistic as possible interpretation of actual operations on board.

Here are a few examples of the kind of details that we adhered to, all based on facts:

• The sub tilts to 10 degrees as it surfaces
• The uniforms were real and displayed correct rank
• The dolphins sequence was taken straight from footage on board the HMAS Rankin
• The equation used to calculate a firing angle is the same trig that is actually used

…and a heap more.  But anyway, there were a lot of details that we paid attention to. It really helped us learn more about what goes on and how, so that we could then communicate that during the site’s presentation.

We incorporated 8 ‘activities’ into the site that intersect the scenes at poignant moments, they’re like little mini-games, but i think activity-points are a better description of them, as they’re not really games. These were also very true-to-life, or as much as possible given the simple interactions that we wanted them to have. Not designed to be sticking points for users, moreso to make sure that people are paying attention and to further explain the details of what is going on in a more interactive way.

Tomma from VJ, in one of the diving suits, getting extremely hot very quickly as i continually instructed him to climb ladders and jump off boxes. He was a sweaty, horrible, angry mess at the end of it, but his enthusiasm and awesomeness was never in question. Props.

Doing the sound mixing with Tristain at BangBang! Studios in Port Melbourne, these guys were really great to work with and always came up with the goods.

And here’s me, showing off the site at the media launch like a proud dad.

At the end of the day I’m really happy with it, but as always, there are things that i’d like to add and change. I’m working towards some of those things now. Stay tuned.

ps. Step it up.