Kinect 2.0 and Choi Kwang Do

My kinect 2.0 arrived this afternoon so I got straight to trying it out. The previous Kinect was less able to cope with shoulders and some of the subtle extra s of joints.
The new Kinect 2.0 seems to be able to cope much better. Though maybe not with the speed of a martial art like Choi Kwang Do.
However, with the basics of form it is doing a very good job just in the Kinect Studio. This enables developers to turn on and off features. As I was using this out of the box it may well be doing more than it needed to do. e.g. just focusing on the skeleton might be smoother than dealing with all the point cloud data and and the ghost image.
The studio has the same thing I tried in my previous example of being able to change the view form front to side to top. The video shows this in this order. The side view is about 40 seconds in and I think is the most useful in terms of technique. We often train with mirrors or looking at another person but seldom see side on unless it is recorded and played back. This is a live mirror from the side view πŸ™‚
I seem to confuse it with a twisting kick too πŸ™‚

Now to look at specific code and trying to match movements to a reference move. Spotting the weight transfer etc.
Still it looks like this might be another step forward to another helpful tool for training.
Lets see how this goes. I have not seen if there is a unity3d plugin yet but thats next on the list.

A new wave of tech

The next few months is going to see an interest second wave of technology that I am very interested in.
The first is the Windows version of Kinect 2.0. This is the consumer packaged full body sensor that uses the same base as with the Xbox One. The original Kinect from the Xbox 360 was just a USB device so had the maker and hacker community exploring how it use it on regular machines before the official Windows development version arrived. When the Xbox One launched it’s Kinect 2.0 cmd with a completely different plug, making it impractical to explore. The Xbox One was slated to be a development machine for all (consoles at the moment have specific machine models for developers and a different one for consumers). This development kit has not been forthcoming (it may or may not turn up later). All this means I could not continue the work I wanted to do with the kinect for Choi Kwang Do.
v2-sensor-front
The new Kinect sensor stye body better and in particular shoulders, and also weight transfer. So I have had to pre-order a Kinect 2.0 for Windows. It is due in September. I am hoping it will all work with Unity3d again!
I have applied to id@xbox the developer scheme but a one person company working on a non game related piece of work on the fringes of the games industry probably didn’t flag up as a priority πŸ™‚
Talking of Unity3d, it’s 4.6 patch is rapidly approaching. This upgrade will feature the much needed GUI changes. I love Unity3d development but anything with buttons or sliders and GUI layouts is so incredibly awkward it is hard to see how we get anything working. The new GUI system is going to treat GUI objects just like any other object. They will appear on the scene during development. At the moment GUI objects only show up when you run, making getting things lined up and working a bit of a black art. This also sets us up for Unity3d 5.0 a major new release. Lets just hope all my code still works !

The third big piece of kit is the Oculus Rift DK2 (Development Kit 2).
camera_dk2
Now owned by Facebook but still approaching construction in the same way the original Kickstarter did. This is really exciting as the first Oculus Rift was and is still a liberating experience. With DK2 the resolution of the screens is much higher now a 960×1080 per eye. It also comes with an additional relative position sensor. One that can, like Kinect, see where the headset is in the space in front of it. It is fully supported by a Unity3d library too (as with the previous version) It is not the only VR headset heading to the market but it is the one you can get your hands and eyes on.

The pen is mightier than the sword…

…. particularly when you you can make a sword with the pen!
This week I had a small broadband outage when the cables got cut during some engineering work down the road. I took the opportunity to escape the current project and popped to Maplin to stock up on some bits and pieces.
Whilst there I saw they had the 3dDoodler pen in stock. I had very nearly Kickstarter backed this one but missed the deadline. So I thought it was high time to get get one and try.

It is the same principle as a 3d printer, but instead of stepper motors it is controlled by hand.
The pen has a very hot tip, through that is pushed a thing plastic rod that melts . As the plastic melts it is soft and can be piped around and then hardens very quickly.
My first attempts with it we note great.

However I checked out the gallery and saw that many of the builds were in fact done by making the various component faces then using the doodler to stuck them together.
Rather than make a giant structure I thought I would try the company logo. Feeding Edge as a logo has existing in many forms form its early draft on a in game skateboard tshirt to virtual world instantiations and decals on cars. So a 3d doodle of the logo was worth try.
It works really well to print out a stencil and draw around it, which is what I did, the paper does not burn, it cools the plastic and the model does not stick.
I know it’s July and this looks like a christmas tree ornament but it was fun to do.


I also tried a Dodecahedron but I think I lost the a piece, however it is a 3d structure.

So I would say it does what it says. It lets you doodle in space. The 2 speed settings of ejecting the plastic and the freedom of movement give this a very craft maker feel. Working out how and where to solder joins of elements or how to break something down into flatter faces is an interesting thought process.
The predlets asked if I could do the Choi Kwang Do logo. That may take a bit of work but may give it a go. Though I thing it then needs to be sealed in a casing afterwards.
The smell of burning plastic was probably not the ideal odour for out new kitchen but us early adopters have to suffer for our art πŸ™‚
In a twist of serendipity I was invited to the twitter UK offices by @andypiper when I was in London yesterday. Amongst their cool installations there was this neon sign.

The sentiment is one I agree with and many more firms should aim for this. However it did get me thinking I wonder if there is glow in the dark meltable ABC plastic I can out in the 3d doodler. Rather than the stained glass leading window effect of my logo I could have a neon style glow in the dark one πŸ™‚

It’s #CreateUK week

This week sees an interesting government initiated week to celebrate creativity in the UK and today (monday) is focussed on the Games industry (and presumably the slightly off centre elements of the games industry that I inhabit πŸ™‚
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DMCS) are promoting this and it it has a suitably live hashtag social media aspect to it.
The official link is here
“The UK’s Creative Industries generate a staggering Β£8 million per hour for the UK economy and continues to go from strength-to-strength.”
That is pretty impressive isn’t it.
Our little project for a far away land goes live today with some 8 year school kids. It has been an interesting process, being research we have to adjust to requirements changing and to the creative process.
I wrote about it a few weeks ago, to show the sort of scope. Still can’t do screen shots as its secret. Here though it s bait of the development environment, a state machine for animation and some of the exposed parameters for the main game control object
Dev env
Mixing a virtual environment for multiple users, with a teacher in charge and also adding a completely different style of interaction with additional 2.5d side scrolling jetpack games has been a challenge.
As usual a small 3 person project needs lots of cross role work. Being tech support for the build etc and being tech design and tech code each required a time consuming mental context switch. You know at any moment you may have to swap roles, stop what you are doing to fix something. I have learned a lot on this project though. Learning is the fun part after all.
Anyway, join in with #createuk, and check out what @DCMS are doing. Making games and games related tech is hard work but worth it. Of course most of what I do is hidden as its code (wishing I was a graphic designer) but then equally most of what I do is hidden (glad I am not a graphic designer) πŸ™‚ It is all still very creative and requires leaps of faith to get things to work sometimes.
Right back to go live day then !

The future of broadcasting via super8, Wimbledon, CKD Road Trip, twitch and tango – flush 13

Another exciting monday morning as the new edition of Flush The Fashion magazine goes live.
As usual there are loads of great articles and also some great prizes to be won in the magazine. This time Kano raspberry Pi kits πŸ™‚
On page 74 I have my article “We go live in 3.2.1…” which once again looks great with the layout and the images that @tweetthefashion put together.
I discuss the evolution of home movies from the 70’s and super 8 film to the amazing changes in being able to broadcast live right now to everyone. On the journey are the experiences of trying to some early multi platform broadcasting and virtual worlds elements at Wimbledon (which starts today so that’s good timing) to the ability to just say xbox broadcast to share your game play with commentary to anyone anywhere. Being an emerging tech section I also have to consider the wonderful Project Tango from Google too.
The full magazine is here


The ipad version will be live very soon.
This will get you to my little article

Knockout game – UFC

The new UFC mixed martial arts game/simulation arrived today for the Xbox One. I had got very interested having played the demo. In Choi Kwang Do we don’t do this sort of fighting, as we don’t compete and hurting people is not really on the list of things to do. However with my developer hat on I wanted to see how the moves looked, some of which are obviously similar to the flowing sequential moves we have in Choi. Having looked into how the kinect can capture out moves it is interesting also to see how the mixture of motion capture and artistic adjustment is done in a high end fight game for this generation of consoles.
It is very impressive. The quality of movement and engagement that you feel as a player is very good. Being UFC is it as much about grappling and ground work and punches and kicks. Another thing that we try to avoid in CKD πŸ™‚
This is of course a game and punching buttons is very different from launching a powerful kick. Practicing a martial art though does help you appreciate the power that anyone can generate, and hence imagine the power the professional athletes dedicated to this style of combat can create.
The animations and models of the fighters are some of the best that I have seen in a game. It is complex to have to deal with the multitude of movements and blending the animations together. If you have tried to create animations, or combine them, even on a small scale (like my current project in Unity3d) it is by no means straight forward and as big an art form and speciality as programming or visual design.
This version of UFC has a brilliant model of the great Bruce Lee. he will be familiar to many people as an iconic and talented martial artist so it helps to see him if you haven’t seen the other fighters in action to appreciate where the start of the art is.

A lot of these knockouts have the move that caused them played a few times afterwards as button basing tends to happen. However that lets us see the way that those moves are represented.
I am still hopeful that with Kinect 2.0 (the windows version is due very soon) and a bit of work I can get some degree of fluidity to represent our more peaceful art using similar technology.

Admiring the diversity and variety in games

As I was hurtling along the Nurburgring in Forza 5 I was once again hit with the brilliance of all games. I have to admit I was going through a non gaming patch. Probably because of building a small one. The release of the Xbox One had also had me a little non-plussed until the path that allowed me to add extra storage. Knowing I can now play games and get to them easily again has sparked me back into life. (it was only a mini non gaming patch). Having been a gamer for nearly 40 years it’s not going to go away just like that is it ?
I used the Uplaod studio on the Xbox One to put 5 videos together in one comic book framed montage. This is only really as a mental and social bookmark to the thoughts that were occurring as I drove along the road

Forza 5 offers a very intense and very solid driving experience, the quality of the simulation and physics models that allow you to hurtle around in so many different, beautifully rendered cars on accurate modelled tracks is, if you like car games just brilliant.
Watchdogs, another free roaming world, but here I was just messing around on a motor bike. I had gained the ability to make bridges raise and lower via the pretend hacking. So, again another physics engine and a wide variety of vehicles and experiences, this time in free roaming meant I could just go jump the bridge, just for kicks.
Max and the curse of the brotherhood, once again physics is involved by in 2/2.5d, a completely different style of game. yet with a freedom to solve puzzles, here drawing a swinging rope with a magic marker then jumping on it as time slows down for you.
FIFA 14 in world cup mode. Controlling players, kicking a ball around and scoring a goal with all the celebrations and animations that go with it.
Peggle 2, a variation on good old fashioned bagatelle and pinball. All very cartoony, the ball drops and bounces around, its never totally predictable and you have to deal with gravity.
I know some people still think all games are the same, but clearly they are not. The 5 all use a degree of physical simulation, but not the same sort of simulation. They have wildy differing control mechanisms, but each has a feel to it. Some use depth into the screen, the illusions of speed is things coming at out. Others user side on cameras with things going past or up and down.
We have weather systems in the first two games that change, the lighting and the mood changes depending on the time of day that is being simulated.
There are cartoon graphics, there are high end full renderings of real things, there is escapism and there is story telling and narrative.
Each of the games is part of a genre, so there are similarities with other games, but that does not make them “samey”. All our other entertainment and art fits into categories, has similarities.
The compute power, the design skills, the technical ability, the project management, the funding, marketing, selling, testing, fixing and many more skills used to create these experiences are then built upon by our own interaction with them. Our own moments of excitement, or humour, stress and achievement.
Games…. they just are fantastic aren’t they?

Forza Horizon 2 and Crackdown- E3

Anyone who has been to one of my talks will know I always mention Forza on the Xbox as an example of some interesting ways that games technology is used and can be used to share information. It means I can show some really nice pictures and cover any subject. I am also a big car racing fan. So I was made up when this trailer and the extra information appeared yesterday about Forza Horizon 2.

I also know from experience that it is going to be a brilliant game. Forza 5 is a track based racing game. The original Horizon let you drive around a free roam area, racing and discovering things with the same dynamics and setup at Forza5. Horizon is one of Predlet 1.0’s favourite games too.
It looks as is the Drivatars will be free roaming too, which will be interesting. How that data is collected and the illusion of the real players driving style in such a free environment is quite tricky to pull off.
From the video there is also the statement that you can drive anywhere. In Horizon there were a lot of very strong fences, unlike in Just Cause 2 or Test Drive unlimited where you could drive across any field and over a cliff. So that looks like its been rectified. Free roaming games are the best sort for a gameplay magpie like myself as I dip in and out of various games. The ones that hold my attention let me go off and make my own experiences work. Driving fits that pretty well though as the constant flow and balance of cars are a microcosm of free roaming in their own right.
As part of the E3 bonanza Turn 10 also released the “free” patch to Forza 5 to give us (back) the NΓΌrburgring in its entirety

I dived straight in and did an 8 minute lap in a Ferrari 458 and lo and behold I ended up 41st in the world πŸ™‚

That will not last, but it was a pretty good time. Whilst it is a very unforgiving track it can be learned and the previous Forza on the Xbox 360 had the track. They definitely have upped the detail on it, the video mentions laser scanning the most accurate model yet. No mean feat. It does suggest its a free update, and I applaud them for delivering it, however as there were not very many tracks in Forza 5 compared to Forza 4 the next gen upgrade felt a little short on content. Now releasing the ring at E3 to help promote Horizons 2… well its almost as if it that free content was held back as part of a marketing plan? Of course it was. Still, I am pleased it is here and look forward to September’s release.
Another game I was very very pleased to see was Crackdown making a return. The original game was one of my all time favourites. (back in 2007 I said I thought it might be good πŸ™‚ )
Crackdown 2 was ok but this reboot and the original creator running it will hopefully get back to its roots but jazzed up to current tech.
The trailer is CGI bit anyone who has played Crackdown will get a little tingle in the back of the neck watching this. “We like Dominoes!”

Can that be the same game? Max and sparky

I was looking at the new updates on Xbox One including the wonderful ability to add new hard drives now, increasing the puny 500mb storage. At the same time Microsoft added games for gold, free games to subscribers. One of them was Max and the Curse of the Brotherhood.It was interesting that is is all powered by Unity3d, but that is an aside from this tale.
In the inter a boy wishes his little brother away, a magic portal open up and he is dragged into it. Max didn’t mean it so he dives in after him and ends up in a nice looking platformer where the main tool is a magic marker that lets you create things ate certain points.
I couldn’t get out of my head that the story was very similar and I had an inkling that the name was also very similar from something back in 1997.
Back then I was just joining the slightly rogue organisation called the Interactive Media Centre that was doing some interesting work with early web and at the time interactive CD-ROMs. The sort of fancy stuff that came with magazines before we all had internet access.
The team were busy working on a very early web presence for a washing powder. A game was being built which involved a boy and getting dragged into a parallel universe.
In this case the portal was related to washing. I remember the odd CGI that had been created for the narrative where the boy climbed into the washing machine. We all realised this was not a very sensible thing to be seeing. The render got redone and the story changed a little to involve getting sucked into the pattern of the shirt that was being washed. I am not sure who was doing what where as I was very new to the group. (I even turned up wearing a suit on day one, as we wore in the rest of IBM, that was a mistake of course. Not worn a work suit since πŸ™‚ ). This moment had an impact on me as I realised the bizarre set of things we now were going to have top start worrying about and getting right and checking in this fledgling industry. There was no manual to follow we just had to work it out. So in many ways this was a catalyst for all the things I have been willing to get involved with since. Once you know there will be something weird, you may not know what, but you know you can deal with it you develop a different attitude.
Anyway it turns out this game, which I managed to track down some images of was called “Max and Sparky”. It is pretty amazing that a game from so long ago that aaas just part of a project that the team was working on is documented at all on the web. Now we take it for granted that things will be able to be found and looked up.
machine
So I was play a Max game on the new Xbox One, thinking about an old game with Max and history of the web etc. Just to complete the coincidental combination, the name of the excellent game graphic designer I am working with on this current Unity3d project is …. yes you guessed it.

Watchdogs – Benny Hill and Next Gen hide and seek

Yesterday saw the much delayed release of WatchDogs by Ubisoft. It was originally one of the flagship release games for last November when we had the console refresh of Xbox One and PS4.
Firstly, after a good few initial hours of play and investigation I will say that I do really like it. However, most of what I really like are things from other games in the city sandbox genre. They have built a new version of Grand Theft Auto/Saints Row et al. That is not a bad thing, but it would seem the newer features and ideas are extra icing on the cake. It’s not a bad thing. Genres develop and succeed because we enjoy them. We need the patterns of the familiar with some extra tweaks to keep out interest.
So in Watchdogs you are a vigilante with some tech smarts and some hacker friends. Using your trust smartphone you get to do things to people and the city of Chicago in addition to the usual running, driving, shooting, climbing, exploring and collecting of the other great games this builds upon.
Before I go any further though. What is going on with the price of the game? I pre-ordered the disc on Amazon and it arrived on release day for Β£42. I had nearly cancelled in favour of getting a digital download. Which on Xbox One means that you don’t need to pop the redundant (once installed) disc in the drive on order to play. I am glad I did not. The digital download, you know the easier to distribute, lower overheads, no additional production costs easy money for the distributor version, was Β£59.99. Nearly half as much again as the physical version direct from Microsoft. Way to go to encourage the digital age.
Anyway, back to Chicago. I found that being a fan of the free roam game I tend to only do a few of the initial missions before getting into wandering around doing side missions. I may have dived into that a bit early as some things I already had unlocked and did made less sense than if I had discovered them in the plot. That is not a criticism. To get this much free roaming variety and link in a story is very hard. I prefer to discover, and would probably be less happy if everything was locked until I had done the first level tutorial grind.
Some skills in the typical RPG progression were locked until a certain level of mission was achieved, so I think all the pointers were there to get on with the campaign and stop gaffing around πŸ™‚
Like all Ubisoft games there is the almost default unlocking of territory by climbing up something and pressing a button. In Far Cry 3 and Assassins Creed maps are unlocked by finding the a hub and dealing with it. Here it’s a cell phone tower. The climbing tends not to be quite so vertical as Far Cry 3. It is generally a puzzle of lifting platforms, razor wire and camera jumps that is needed.
I say camera jump as this is the main new dynamic to reach places that are hard to get to. Being a hacker, if you can see a device like a camera you an take it over. You then get the camera view of the world, in digital snow covered CCTV. Once you have the camera, it is as good as being there. Which means if you can see another camera you can jump view to that. Each camera can then take you round corners up building and into server rooms for the final puzzle hack of a level without having to traverse the level. It’s a twist on the stealth sneaking and it works really well. There are also nice twists such as guards on patrol wearing cameras that you can dive into, but have to wait until the get to the right place on patrol to do whatever deed it is you need to do.
Police chases are as per Grand Theft Auto. If things are going badly, they scan and then chase you. Running and hiding to avoid them ups the tempo of the sneeking around. This is where hacking the city comes into play. You gain the ability to switch traffic lights as you approach them. Initially this seems odd as in a car chase a red light is hardly off putting. When you do switch though all the cars at the intersection get confused and tend to cause a roadblock collision. It’s a bit like Benny Hill’s role in the original Italian Job as you cause gridlock with the lights. Other things such as lifting bridges and massive pipe explosions under manhole covers also feature. You find that this sort of messing around with the environment at a distance also works in the on foot sections. Blowing a pipe or exploding a bad guys phone as a distraction gives a lot of freedom to finish a mission.
One of the parts I like in these games is jumping in a vehicle and seeing the sights. Sort of a pedestrian thing to do by not being a pedestrian. In this mode you generally get to listen to some tunes. The music so far has been good but it is not the multiple radio radio channel experience of GTA.

So you can just grab a boat and sit in the harbour and admire the sky line.
As usual there are some great weather and time of day effects. You have a hideout (or several if you do the tower climbing unlocking ) where you can go a sleep, replenish and set a time to get up. It has only forced that once by way to letting me know that was an option. Sleeping currently seems underrated πŸ™‚
With this game being all modern day hacker the phone plays a major part. It is the scanner that pops up to tell you things about the people around you, the device that lets you blow things up and take over cameras. It does have a few apps on it too though, of course!
There is a shazam style whats this tune app and some media players for the various things you collect. There are also some games. They are referenced as a sort of digital drug experience to allow them to be a bit trippy. Again very Saints Row and like the drug missions in GTA. As a game device it allows some every weird things to happen. I have played 2 of the 4 so far. One is a 3d bouncy jump game around the city, where the platforms are colourful giant flowers that you rag doll onto and bounce around a track, with lots of psychedelic reference points. The other was a full on action game as a giant spider robot in a small part of the city. It is a destruction derby but with the ability to climb up the side of builds and even walk upside down on the elevated railway track whilst firing a massive chain gun. It is a mini game, but not that mini. I am sure the others games and the extra content on its way will be equally satisfying.
Ah yes the other content. Of course a season pass is on offer. i.e. pay in advance for the updates and unlock some content. It’s something to factor into the price of a game now too. Given digital download is the only way to do this properly, and given the price difference of downloading the full thing digitally, I wonder how much more rinsing can go on of early adopters with apparent disposable income?
The smartphone relationship is not just in the game. There is a companion app, separate from Smartglass. This provides a hacking from the map approach of flying a helicopter around and deploying squad cars. It is like Battlefield commander mode.
Then there is the hide and seek game. Whilst playing your single player game you can be invited or just invaded it would seem by a multiplayer task. I only did a few of these but the ones I did were high end hide and seek. I was given a target, I had to find that target and scan them with my phone. They get made aware of the hack and they then have to try and find you in the area amongst the crowds before a time limit expires and then “deal” with you.
The first few didn’t go to well, as I was spending more time thinking about the game dynamic than playing it. The third time was very tense and exciting. I arrived in a flash sports car but parked properly. This meant I looked like an NPC car. I scanned the other player almost by accident as I parked. I think hit the hide in the car button. Light are off engine off. You can be seen in the car. I then watched, panning the camera around as my foe frantically dashed around the block cross crossing, circling, switching direction trying to find me. There I was sat hunched down in the car. I knew if the car moved it would like like a player, if I got out the same thing. So I sat. I watched the timer go 25%, 50%, 75% and as it does so the area the player has to search decreases. It was at 98% and I was about to drive off when they clocked me. Needless to say the car was not bulletproof. It was a very memorable moment for me. It was very different to hiding as a sniper in an FPS (something I prefer not to do). It felt more like an action thriller as the hero watches as the bad guy gets closer. Of course in this case it was not a happy ending. I should imagine though my opponent felt quite a rush too in dealing with me with so little time on the clock. Its a connection to another human through gameplay. We both know how one another felt, but that was it. An anonymous game of hide and seek πŸ™‚
It generally seems to be these moments that define games for me now. It may be the relationship you form with a games puzzle, trying to solve it, realising how much thought and evil intent to catch you out went into it (like in Limbo the game).
Watchdogs may not be the ultimate next gen game, might have more pixels on a PS4 to and Xbox One, but it has got me thinking about the genre again and about these gaming moments in a metaverse.