Timesliding canvas maplayer
After someone saw my BAG building data movie 
he asked if it would be possible to create an interactive map of the entire Netherlands. This made me think, since creating the movie was a very time consuming action. The problem is that there are about 6 million buildings in the BAG database. This makes the data a bit unwieldy to use directly in the browser. The old fashioned way to do time series on maps involves creating a new layer for each time-moment (year in this case). This would mean that there would be over 150 layers to be loaded on the map and switching between those for the ‘time sliding’ effect. Apart from the hideous task to set up 150 almost the same layers, it would end up with too much images for a browser to handle.
Working Microsoft Surface
Happy as we were with our new Surface we forgot the basic rule of Windows related problems; reboot if in trouble.
We spend quite some time calibrating, recalibrating and reading documentation from the invite only Microsoft site without any effect. In the end Vista asked us to install an update and to reboot the Surface. When it was rebooted we ran the ‘Surface Shell’ application from the Desktop and suddenly it worked!!
The Surface, or at least our version, comes with a set of code examples. We tried several to see how well it works and found out that especially the Grand Piano demo is a crowd drawer (mainly due to the sound probably). The Piano is a limited set of piano keys in perspective view. ‘Pressing’ a key results in a tone, just like a real piano 
Playing piano on a Surface
Microsoft Surface
Today the Microsoft Surface arrived, finally. They arrived in big boxes suggesting big tables, but alas they are actually pretty small. Microsoft envisages them as lounge table, as such they are very low, too low to sit comfortably on a normal chair. Being used to the Circle12 DiamondTouch, the Surface is both small and heavy. Weighing about 80kg it is difficult to move it and the actual display area is about half the size of the DiamondTouch.
We were supposed to have two normal and one developer edition but it wasn’t very clear which one was which so we picked one and carried it to our office. This turned out to quite tricky, this thing is heavy and doesn’t have any clear handles. In the end we carried it by holding the projection-surface …
Once setup we had to fiddle a bit to get the powercable connected and find the proper (two) powerswitches. Once it booted it prompted us an EULA we had to accept. However the Surface is designed to be a standalone machine completely controlled by touch but before the touch was working we had to accept the EULA, which was only accessible by touch … hm
You need to accept to start touch, and you need touch to accept
OSGeo dances the Tango
I finally did the right thing and emailed OSGeo that I’ve stopped coding and would like to use my designer skills instead. I was pointed to this wiki which pointed me to the site of Robert Szczepanek. He had created an entire iconset for QGIS inspired by the tango rules. I contacted him and he was very much interested to extend his work for a broader iconset for the OSGeo community. So where I expected to start from scratch I’m kickstarted to the point that I have to think of secondlevel issues like hosting, naming-schemes etc.
Still I’m very much excited by the prospect of creating beautiful GIS applications and so far I’ve had enthousiast reactions from developers as well.
Showing private data on a public touch table
Designing interfaces for multi-touch tabletop computers;
Basic animation of hiding a card from view
Wiion – the movie
I’ve created a movie about the wiion game mentioned before. The movie only shows the process of finding and repairing one leak, in the real game there are a total of 3 leaks in 3 out of 4 different maps. We got green light for buying a new camcorder and I hope the next movie I’ll show will be shot on the Canon HF11 
The movie, voiced over by Geodans own Barry White
Wii-on game
To present the new WION service which Geodan set up with its partners we, Geodan Research, were asked to create a nice WION related game. WION services is about preventing digging up cables and other underground infrastructure. The game will be used during conferences at the booth as a public-magnet.
Animation showing the original map and the final map
Wii-mote readings
We are asked to develop a short game which is controlled with the Wii-controller. Since it is expensive and not too easy to develop for the Wii itself (you require a SDK from Nintendo and permissions once the game is finished) we decided to develop it on the PC. It is possible to connect your Wii-mote with the PC using bluetooth. There are multiple libraries to do so.
I was curious what kind of feedback you get from the Wii-mote and where it fails (in light of the news about the Wii motion plus). There are some issues around getting your Wii-mote connected to a PC by bluetooth, not every stack is good, nor areall bluetooth chipsets, however the MacBook supports the Wii-mote out of the box. So I connected the Wii-mote to my MacBook instead and used the DarwiinRemote application to get a reading from the sensors.
DarwiinRemote sensor readings.
The wii-mote is equiped with an accelerometer, which does not record the position of the wii-mote. What is does is that it records the different forces (accelerations) that are applied to the controller. So in rest it will record a force of 1G down (z= -1). If you hold the controller upside down it will record a force of 1G up (z = 1) (seen from the point of view of the controller). If you hold it on its side the reading will be x=1 or x=-1 or y=1 or y= -1, depending on the side. The other axis will be 0 in rest. Actually since in rest the only force acting on the controller is earth gravitation, which is 1, the absolute sum of the forces on x, y and z will be 1.
Wii sensor reading in three orientations.
With this knowledge you can deduce the orientation of the Wii-mote from the readings above. In the beginning the Wii-mote is held horizontal pointing forward (blue line at -1). Then the Wii-mote is rotated along its body, the left side is pointing up (red line at 1). Finally the Wii-mote is pointing downward (green line at 1). Note that we do not know how the Wii-mote is pointing downwards (whether the buttons facing forward or sideways). When you start moving the Wii-mote the forces applied on the Wii-mote easily surpass the 1G and when that happens it is much more difficult to deduce the orientation. The new Wii-motion Plus extension is supposed to solve this problem. From what I’ve seen and read it most likely will use a gyroscope to calculate the orientation of the Wii-mote regardless of the forces applied to it.
Using blend
For various projects I’ve been using Microsoft Expression Blend to do the interface design while Paul and/or Van Exel were coding. Blend is part of a bigger set of tools, called Microsoft Expression Studio. As the experienced Visual Studio people can see, it is using the same .sln files as Visual Studio. However, there’s a major bug in Blend involving multiple projects within a solution. It automatically takes the first project in the solution file as the startup project, regardless whether or not you set that as startup project in VS.
‘Onderwater scherm’ of the PlectraeMenu
Two handed physics
Designing interfaces for multi-touch tabletop computers;
Asymmetrical bimanual touch gestures.