2-17-2005

Couple of updates. We got a screen in our new workspace: 8 foot screen, 8 foot 4 inch wide room. We have to crouch low to get to the camera and capture server, but I think it is all worth it.

Rear capture works! I'm very pleased with the rear projection screen material; our 2000 lumen projector puts out plenty of light for a crisp image on the back. Need to work a bit with some measuring tape to get the alignment between the camera and the screen squared off.

I've also noticed a bright spot in the center of the projected image, not strong enough to be visible from the front but just intense enough to occasionally pass the threshold of the filter in eyesweb. It will probably take some slight tweaking of the threshold values to correct for this.

Been working a bit on a Flash control panel template for quick adjusting some of our movie variables. JJ suggested using local shared objects, and I've had some moderately good results with that - just have to tell the movies the same shared object name and give them the same path, so that they are looking at the same object. I even got the client movie to check the object for updates at intervals; the trick was in not instantiating a copy of the shared object in the client movie, instead using the sharedObject.getLocal method in place of where the local instance would go in the code.

To get the control panel working at this point would require reauthoring our movies with constructors and deconstructors, to clean out old data, objects and movie clips, and reinstantiate them with new data. This might not be necessary for everything, though -- I think we could alter things like constants on the fly, like proximity triggering values, color values, etc.

Going to have to get into the lab after dark soon to work out some system calibration.

[discontinuity]