I loaded the activities I’ve written in the past onto my new G1G1 XO and found that Pointillism probably never worked on any XO but my old one.  This is something I probably should have tested.

In addition to actually working, this release has better performance, flips the image horizontally, and lets you save images to the Journal.

Download: Pointillism-2.xo

XO’s are available (and shipping fast) from Amazon (URL is via OLPC) through Give One Get One 2008. As you can see from the map above, G1G1 2007 is already having quite an impact on the world, with tens of thousands of donated XOs being deployed across Ethiopia, Rwanda, Mongolia, and other countries.

• Turning Bridge into a real activity.  This means using the datastore, dropping Elements in favor of directly interfacing PyBox2D, and making multiple levels of play.
• Writing a working Panorama activity. Ben Schwartz wrote some excellent autostitching using Numpy; it just needs some camera code to make capturing frames easier and to disable auto white balance and so on.  I stuck Ben’s activity in a git repo, and I plan on making my changes soon.
• Commiting the rest of my GSoC project to Pygame SVN.  I committed everything but the actual camera module so far.  At the very least, I need to set up a build environment in Windows and make sure that the camera fails gracefully, since it only supports v4l2 at the moment.  Before Pygame 1.9 is released though, I plan on writing VFW and maybe Quicktime support.
• Writing an Augmented Reality Game (ARG?).  Augmented Reality is pretty much the holy grail of computing for me. I played around with ARToolkit a bit, but I really want to get into it when I have more time.

Of course, in addition to that, there is attempting to find a job, taking care of my kitten, finishing moving into my house, and loads of schoolwork.  The schoolwork is mostly interesting though.  It currently consists of writing object classification and image seam carving in Matlab, coming up with screenplay ideas, and playing with a Gumstix board.  I’m also going to be starting some computer vision research with Professor Martial Hebert of the Vision and Mobile Robotics Laboratory at the Robotics Institute.  More on that when it happens…

Regardless, there are some pretty exciting physics based games being created here, and a whole lot of accidently amazing demonstrations.

Daniel Drake and I are writing a bridge building game which may be downloaded as we work on it, from:

git://dev.laptop.org/projects/physics03

So, while the Activity itself just runs the Living Pointillism script, the activity directory (/home/olpc/Activities/Pointillism.activity/ on my XO running release ~690) contains the whole Pygame library with my modifications to date. So, you can just drop scripts (like these or these) that use pygame into that directory and run them from there, and they will use the local pygame instead of the one installed on the XO. This saves you from having to install all the stuff necessary to compile pygame on an XO.

Download: Living Pointillism

The Quick Version:
I wrote a few scripts to test the possibility of using pixel perfect collision detection in pygame to allow for interactions between real life and on screen objects.  They require the installation of my branch of pygame, which includes support for v4l2 cameras.  The download links for the scripts (including OLPC versions) and pygame source are at the bottom of the post.

The Verbose and Occasionally Tangential Version:

Joel Stanley of OLPC sent me a patch for my GSoC project a few days ago, along with a link to a picture of an exhibit at The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, in which a person can manipulate virtual falling sand with his or her shadow.  That is exactly the kind of killer tech demo I’ve been looking for for my project.  The kind of thing that anyone could pick up in an instant and realize the beauty of human computer interaction.  Of course, the museum setup had a controlled environment, a projector, a screen, and probably a whole lot of processing power.  I have hundreds of thousands of kids around the world on 433mhz laptops.

At first, in response to Joel’s email, I had just planned to describe how to get the equivalent of the shadow.  It obviously could not require a projector, a screen, a uniformly colored background (green screen), or even a consistant source of light to project a shadow.  Instead, this requires an initial calibration step.  When the scripts start, they wait for the user to hit a button.  The user should then get out of view of the camera, so it only sees the background.  It then waits a couple seconds and takes a picture of the background.  The shadow is then created by thresholding frames currently being captured against the original background image.  This actually works pretty well as long as the background isn’t moving.  So, play it with the camera facing a wall if possible.

I had planned to just leave it at that, but then I figured since I already have that written, might as well just add a few lines of code to see if I could do pixel collisions between the shadow and objects on screen.  Nothing complicated like sand, just a bubble on screen that the user pops.  When this worked, I decided to extend it by having it place a new bubble on a random spot of the screen whenever one is popped.  A few minutes later, my friend stopped by and asked what the hell I was doing jumping around in the middle of the room.  I told her about the vision stuff, and then we both started jumping around in the middle of the room, popping fake bubbles.  Who would have thought something that simple could be fun?  That script is Pop Bubbles; you can download it at the bottom of the post and jump around your own room.

I thought I might be finished there, but it was still a far cry from the sand demo that Joel saw.  I decided making the bubble move could be fun, so I added a fixed “velocity” of pixels that the bubble would move every frame if it wasn’t popped.  It would be pretty silly if it kept going off the edge of the screen, so turned the edges into “walls” that would reverse the x or y velocity if the ball hit them.  I then tried adding “gravity” by having the y velocity increase one step downward each frame, which turned the bubble into a ball.  Then I added some inelasticity by decreasing the velocity a little upon impacting walls.  Since the bubble was now pretty much a bouncy ball, I made it no longer pop upon hitting the shadow.  Instead, it would bounce off the shadow in the opposite direction of where the shadow hit the ball, also adding some more velocity.  By this point, I had a hideous doppelganger of physics that would make Newton wish he never saw an apple tree.  This is what Bouncy Ball is, at the bottom of the post.  Try it at your own risk.  It is absurdly glitchy, and really only responds well to slow movements.

This still isn’t quite what the sand demo is, but I think it comes close enough to prove that it would be possible in Pygame.  The biggest thing that is necessary is a real physics engine, which Zhang Fan is currently working on for Pygame as a GSoC project.  Its likely that I will need to extend the bitmask module in pygame to make things like pinching an object possible.  If anyone wants to improve this stuff, please do, there is a lot of room for it.  I’d be happy to help out any way I can.  I do hope to have something closer to the sand demo by the end of the summer.

As a note to OLPC users, I know its pretty inconvenient to have to build the library on the XO.  I’m still working on packaging an .rpm and an .xo that contains all of my demo scripts.  Also, for now, to get it running at a usable speed on the XO, it has to be at 320×240, which makes it pretty un-immersive, but I’m working on ways to scale it up without sacrificing much performance.

Download Python Scripts:
Bouncy Ball
Bouncy Ball (OLPC)
Pop Bubbles
Pop Bubbles (OLPC)
Download Pygame with camera module source:
Pygame 1.8.1 with camera module
Checkout Pygame with camera from git:
git clone git://git.n0r.org/git/pygame-nrp

There was a three day weekend here, so I got some real coding done on my GSoC project.

You can pull the code I’m working on from my repository at http://git.n0r.org/?p=pygame-nrp;a=summary

It is currently barely alpha quality, but it supports v4l2 cameras that use MMAP and YUYV or RGB24 pixelformats. That means it’ll work on the OLPC XO, though you’ll need to install gcc, SDL-devel, and probably some other stuff to compile it.

You can open a camera with:
cam = camera.Camera(device, (width, height))
Device in most cases is going to be "/dev/video0". (width, height) will probably be (640, 480).
You then need to start the camera with cam.start().
cam.get_image() will return an RGB Surface.
cam.close() closes the camera if necessary.

As a crash course in learning the basics of Pygame, I wrote a quick little Activity for the OLPC XO.  It is a clone of xeyes, except instead of following the mouse cursor, it uses the webcam to be creepy and follow your face.  It’s a bit slow, and kind of messy, but I did only make it for learning purposes.

It uses OpenCV, so you’re going to need a version of it that works on the XO.  The latest source from CVS works, or you can install a patched rpm of it that I hacked together:

sudo rpm -i http://eclecti.cc/files/opencv-1.0.0-3olpchack.fc7.i386.rpm

You’ll also need the opencv-python package, which is available in the repository.

sudo yum install opencv-python

You can get the .xo itself here: PyEyes-1.xo