technotecture

I recently had the opportunity to quickly play around with the Nokia N900 and quickly ported it to the Maemo platform.

Sorry, but I can not get any enthusiasm out of the iPad. Maybe it was overhyped. Boring. Just plain boring. Maybe I'm to AR centric, hence a device with no camera can not be interesting. But even as a Jon Everage user I would not read a newspaper on a XGA screen - my eyes are still fine and the 1400x900 on the MacBook Pro already is unacceptable. To top it off, on saturday I like to sit outside and have my newspaper review - my wild guess is that the display will be barely readable - not only because its LED but its glossy again. And USD500? This iPod touch XL is an engineering confusion.

Just in case you see a strange looking page here. Nothing to worry about, technotecture and the osgART website are moving to a newer and beefier server. And while I am at it, there will be also a small update for the page :)

Update - done with technotecture - osgART needs to wait until end of next week.

So, a few hundred people already downloaded the new version and I need to dive deep in the code to iron out some of the most obvious bugs. Here the current known bugs shortlist:

• flipping the image on OSX creates flicker
• with some web cams on Windows the screen stays black
• selecting a non-default camera doesn't work
• touch input is flaky on OSX
• force reloading on Windows crashes

If you encountered another bug, please let me know - either as a comment here or send me a mail hartmut (at) technotecture (dot) com

Today at part of my ISMAR poster demonstration I am releasing the new SSTT visualizer. It looks quite tame but I can tell you there is more to it than just the looks. It will take a while to document all features.

Just as I mentioned before leaving PPC behind and cutting a few corners here and there I would like to confirm SSTT Visualizer is fully capable of running on Snow Leopard

Unfortunately, due to unresolvable issues with a new and very important feature I had to remove support for PPC. Thus, SSTT Visualizer 1.x will be first and the only Universal Binary build. I think this is more than reasonable with Snow Leopard shipping tomorrow and almost everybody has upgraded to an Intel Mac in one way or the other.

Update - and while I am at it, there is another feature that also makes it impossible to run SSTT Visualizer on OS X 10.4 aka Tiger. To sum up: 2.x will be Intel only and run on Leopard 10.5 and higher - no Tiger and no PPC.

As part of the SSTT framework there was always the question what can you do once the object is on the marker. Now SSTT Touch actually enables multitouch with AR markers, which opens up a number of application areas. Read more about multitouch AR and watch the video

LDraw enthusiast Jim Devona has been quite busy experimenting with the SSTT visualizer. He put together a tutorial on how to use LDraw models, the newest LDview with 3ds export (as of this writing you need to compile LDview yourself to get this functionality) and SSTT visualizer for viewing.

Looking at the new Android NDK (Native Development Kit) the SSTT Core library should be easily portable to Android as well. This is great as the iPhone OS 3.0 SDK was a huge disappointment.

Yes, there is no video capture and 3D rendering support in the NDK but for something like SSTT I only need libc - that's it. Rendering and video capture can be done in Java thus only leaving the tracking to an JNI wrapped version of the SSTT Core. Very smart choice from Google, lets hope Palm follows suit.