Gareth's Work this Weekend

First of all I've put the SeeZen website online, I've not touched it in ages and looking back it's pretty ugly so if there is anything that anyone would like changing I'll be more than happy to. You will be able to find it at www.garethmead.com/seezen/ (it's obviously nowhere near finished but shouldn't take too long)

Working on the colour tracking
I came across a Jitter tutorial for colour tracking which I've tweaked to suit interaction from the webcam on my computer. It seems to work really well with blue paper and at long distance gives plenty of scope for movement and therefore increased interactivity. This would be a great addition as an extended method of interactivity as the ability to tweak the numbers to match pretty much any physical ability and get a wide range of values, making it possible for even the smallest movement to have a large impact to what happens on screen. I've not yet implemented this into the system as I've been focussing my attention more on the audio system and rebuilding the sample players...

Work on the audio system
As we have been working through the project this week we've all addressed a few small issues with the audio system, specially the amount of samples sat in the RAM which may only play for a few seconds over a 10 minute session. This is obviously quite wasteful of the resources so I've built a completely new system to eliminate this happening. It works by simply loading in the samples as they are needed. Both the interactive and ambient elements have 4 temporary sample players where samples are dynamically loaded and cleared as and when necessary.

In addition to this there were a few issues with some samples which were set as interactive sounds but would probably work better as ambiences and vice versa. Those changes will be made tomorrow.

I'm also not keen on the way the samples play for only five seconds and fade out leaving some gaps in the overall ambient texture to the sound. Again this will be hopefully sorted by tomorrow and make the audio sound and feel a lot more natural.

Thats pretty much everything I plan to do for the audio system, other parts may include trying to eliminate some crackles if I can understand where they come from and pairing ambient samples together for a stereo image. Such as if waves1 plays waves2 is forced to play too and they interactively pan around each other. It can be done I just need to get my head around how it might work in my new system.

Thats all for now folks.