I came across a fun bit of research — from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland — into perception of faces. Thanks to GregG for pointing me that way! They have a little applet called “Face Transformer” which you can use to generate all kinds of variations on faces.

Here are a few select faces, then: two which predict how I might look thirty years down the road; three which imagine how I might have looked if painted by El Greco (I really like the “Don Quixote” one!); one which looks back to my infancy (to be honest, I didn’t have a goatee back then…still, good try ;-). I also had fun seeing how I’d look if I were Asian, African, or if I were a woman. You’ve got to keep an open mind about these things.

So without further ado…here are a few variations on the theme of “El Jardinero”:

Here are a couple of colourful real-time generated images to give you some examples of the visual programming stuff I’ve been working on in Quartz Extreme. Trippy, no? (but you should see them move!)

Happy (need I say it? Canadian) Thanksgiving!

I know, I’ve been lax in posting to the ol’ blog. I present, for your enjoyment — or irritation — a few excuses:

• being sick (twice in the past six weeks)
• lengthy parental visit (unrelated to above, really!)
• iTunes, the great time-waster (though happy to report my entire CD collection is now online and looking good)
• photos, photos and more photos (processing/organizing/printing the last year’s backlog)
• Photoshop — I finally decided I needed something for “creative visual fun” (directly related to the above). I evaluated a few different packages for features and price (including the free GimpShop, which is a bargain (at $0) but paints painfully slowly with large brushes on my iBook!) I settled on Photoshop Elements 4.0 (5.0 not on Mac yet). It allows me to do masking (the most important thing), even though it’s a bit of a workaround compared to full Photoshop. But works perfectly for my needs, and is fast. I fired up the old Wacom tablet and started editing like an old pro (hmm, why the obsession with “old”, I wonder?)
• all this “visual creativity” stuff got me excited, and I started playing with programming (first time in a while). Figured out XCode, experimented with OpenAL, got an OpenGL and audio program up and running on my Mac. And then I discovered…just last night…
• Quartz Composer!!! This may just be the next killer app from Apple (yes, I’m serious). I don’t think many people know about this gem, but I stumbled across it in the developer tools included with OS X. If, like me (no snickering), you’re up for a little visual programming, you’re in for a real treat. This tool is to become my new time-waster, I know. Even better, I can easily create visualizations for iTunes, thanks to the iVisualize plug-in. Why program C++ from scratch when you can grab bits and bobs off the shelf and piece them together into something cool? The visual interface of Composer is a bit like XSI’s FX Tree (or Render Tree, or other visual data-flow UIs). It’s basically a compositor and link to motion and image effects, except that it does it all in “real time”, using OpenGL and Apple’s Quartz Extreme. The closest thing is probably Cycling 74’s Jitter, but included free with the operating system, and very tightly integrated… Wow, there goes my life for the next month or so! (-;
• Not to mention guitar, Spanish (just over a year later and nearly finished my 3000-word vocabulary book!) and all the other usual time-sinking suspects.

Those are mine…so what’s your excuse?

From my years in the world of 3D computer graphics, things sometimes come back to haunt (or at least, impress) me. I’ve been a bit out of touch with that world (as evidenced by me posting this “news” which is a year old!), but I recently watched this video (warning, it is 36 minutes long!) that got me excited about it again. It shows legendary game designer Will Wright from Maxis demoing their upcoming game Spore at last year’s GDC (the 2005 Game Developers Conference in San Jose). I hate to be a “me-too-er”, but…okay, I’ll say it: it really does look pretty amazing. Although — these things always do look particularly amazing in demos, and the first time we see them…I remember the hype over so many other games which were amazing at the time, but looking back, well, you know, “we’ve seen better”.

The thing I like about Spore is that they’re really taking things in an organic direction; procedural and intelligent. Ultimately it’s still “polygons being tossed up on a screen”, but at least those polygons are generated by the game (sorry, out-of-work creature modelers!). Not only is it procedural, but it’s also collaborative (albeit in an interesting, asynchronous way — sharing creatures and worlds but not in a real-time, massively-multiplayer way). This all opens up a world of possibilities. I’m sure the game won’t be quite as open-ended as we imagine as we watch the video. But as an ex-”animation tool programmer”, I was excited to see those arbitrary creatures developing their own behaviours for locomotion, eating, fighting, mating… It looks like a lot of fun can be had on many different levels.

Speaking of “Sims”, Spore certainly builds on work by simulated creature pioneers like the aptly-named Karl Sims, or Michael Girard and Susan Amkraut. The opening “level” definitely reminds me of A-Volve, an interactive creature soup by Laurent Mignonneau and Christa Sommerer, which I remember getting excited about at Ars Electronica in 1994. But Spore is a game — and Will seems (as evidenced by the many Sim games up to and including The Sims 2) to have the knack to strike the “Wright” balance between pure simulation and actual gameplay. There must be some structure and limitations (um, oh yeah we call these “rules”) put in place to make a simulation into a game anyone can play. Limiting the possibilities (in very specific and careful ways) actually makes simulation more accessible and, arguably, more fun in the long term. Oh, and perhaps easier to debug…though in this game it seems the bugs will thrive, eventually evolving to form civilizations and take over universes. Be forewarned: Pandora has opened her box.