Sunday, May 22, 2011

Week 1 Response

We made our video public on Tuesday of last week (May 17th). In the 5 days since then, our main video has gained over 1,000 hits. We've been featured on kinecthacks.net, the German site, Live4D. and at www.kinecthacks.com, where they have said such nice things as,

"...the Kinect Fluid Wall’s artistic contributions benchmarks another wave of creative hacks from the Kinect community."

WOW! A huge "Thank you" to everyone for your support and interest! While we have had a ton of fun with this project, the fact that other people are also enjoying our work makes it that much more rewarding!

We look forward to working with you to continue to explore this project's various applications including:

  1. Live concert performance augmentation
  2. Ambient art installation
  3. Feature in dance clubs
  4. Installation in a day care to encourage active movement.
  5. Tool to teach special needs children cause and effect


Open Source
On the software front, our pre-compiled binary has currently been downloaded 65 times from Google Code, and 13 times from Live4D. Since this is my first time to be involved in an Open Source project, I'm happy to see so many downloads, just in the first week! I hope you have all been able to get it working successfully!

Several people have commented on the YouTube video asking for help or wondering why their code isn't running as fast as on the video. I've tried to respond, but I wonder how many more of you are having similar problems, but don't have a YouTube account, or don't care enough to contact us.

Please do contact us! If you have questions, email me (Austin) at: futurelightstudios@gmail.com

Also, if you would like to help in future development, please email me and I'll add you to our Google code repository.

How You Can Help
Speaking of future development, here's some feature's we'd like some help in implementing:

  1. Multi-threading Fluid Solver for use in multi-core processors. There's probably an academic paper on this topic out there somewhere, we just need to find it and implement it. This should significantly boost the framerate for some users of slightly older (non i7) processors.
  2. Writing a QT Shell to support a GUI. While using OpenCV, we noticed that if you build with the QT libraries, you could output to a special QT window that also supports OpenGL commands. If we ran our program output through this channel, we could add attractive text labels and menus to our project to make it more user-friendly. If you've worked with QT, we could use your help. 
  3. Develop a version of FluidSolver to work with CUDA code. Austin is currently working on this, but it would be great to have volunteers that have cards with CUDA support to help test. 
  4. Feedback on new features and existing bugs from the community. If you're using Fluid Wall, how are you using it? Parties? With kids? Send us some photos of your set ups and we'll feature them here. Also tell us about new features that you might like: for example "When people squeeze there hands, jets of fluid shoot from their fist"
Join the cool kids and help us out! Email me at futurelightstudios@gmail.com, and tell me what you'd like to help with. 

Thanks again!

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Fluid Wall 1.0 Released

Download Source at Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/fluidwall/



How we did it:


After a great premiere day at Viz-A-GoGo last week, we decided to clean up the Fluid Wall code and release it as an open source project in the spirit of all the open source projects we used.

In addition, we plan to continue work updating versions to increase the quality and speed of the fluid simulation. More about that soon!