What I think is wrong with Kickstarter

With the announcement from Double Fine that they're almost out of their kickstarter money and not even half through the game, people have started to question kickstarter and the idea of crowdfunding. Adam Sessler has some great words to say, so does Greg Miller's roommate Colin.

I did support the Double Fine adventure game, aka Broken Age. I am a sucker for good ol' Point-n-Click games and though the idea sounded awesome since 'Day of the Tentacle' is one of my favorite games. But when Double Fine started a new kickstarter for Massive Chalice, I was very sceptical thinking, 'shouldn't you prove that your first kickstarter is successful before asking for more money to a new project?'. And that's the thing, most of these projects from established developers plays on the fact that peoples are nostalgic for a product. Seeing Brian Fargo trying to sell his idea of Wasteland 2 to a kid in the role as a publisher is pretty funny, and the reaction from the kid when Brian mentions games he worked on and the kid has never heard of any of them, but isn't that the thing? Big part of the people that play games today haven't heard of these games! (I didn't know about Wasteland). With that, I'm not saying that old franchises should be buried and forgotten. But they shouldn't be update to todays games by just turning them into FPSes. I think, like Adam Sessler says, Kickstarter could work as a way for helping unkown people create vertical slices and prototypes for trying to sell their idea the regular way. Even if I do believe people that haven't contributed to the Broken Age kickstarter will buy the game.

I have some ideas that I think should be overlooked on the kickstarter model. 

Don't allow overfunding:

Its great to have ambitions and goals, but if you ask for X amount of dollars from an investor, they won't throw more money at you, they expect that you've made a budget to reach the goal. Some projects do show their overfunding budget, but I think kickstarter should allow these by the same idea that original goals work, If you have a overfunding goal at $750,000 after your original $500k, you would only get it when you reach that goal. 

I think it should work as follows:

• When you back a project, you say "I'm ready to back this project with $40". Until the project is fully backed, this is the amount of money you will back the project with.
• When the project is fully backed, any more backers willing to chip in dollars will lower your backing amount by a percentage dependent on your initial backing amount. This means the project will still have their funding and you can back with less money!

No overpriced backer 'rewards':

It's everyones choice to back how much they want, but in the regular world, if you make a big investment into a project or product, you can and should expect some of the profits. If you back a project with a lot and then the project ends up earning a lot of money that you wont see at all! As I understands it, Kickstarter won't allow backers to get financial profit projects they support.

I, for one, will be very hesitant to back kickstarter projects in the future. But as I said, it can and should be a great platform for new developers to get a vertical pitch to show for publishers.

ISOC: mink !

Our 4 weeks are up, and here is the result!

- When you are at school and you have problems solving an equation, Wolfram Alpha is a great tool for helping you. However, if you try to use the built-in keyboard of your tablet or smartphone, you will see that it's quite time consuming. Not only that, but if you miss putting correct parenthesis, you will have to wait for wolfram to evaluate your equation before you can try and put those parenthesis into the correct position.

Also, how do you formulate an integration or a sum? This is where our app come into play:

The idea for mink is to simplify the input of complex mathematical equations onto tablets and smartphones in a natural way.

mink - For easy input of mathematical equations and
solve them with Wolfram Alpha

You can also take a picture of an already written
equation, or from a book!

Your Equation is sent and evaluated in
Wolfram Alpha by one press of a button

Save and load you equations for later evaluation.

Restrictions:

We're at the moment, depended on a third-party service for the Optical Character Recognition, which means that we can't  release mink for the public, yet. Since the service is web-based, user can only get character recognition while online. Since we're using 3rd party, there is also some restrictions on what mink can handle.
Right now it can't handle vectors or systems of equations.

Future:

Something we would like to add to mink is to be able to export the equations in TeX format, so it also could be used for simplifying the input of mathematical equations in LaTeX software. 

We'd like to thank IDA for the time and opportunity they've given us to develop mink and also InnovationskontorEtt for letting us use their office during this time.

ISOC week 3: tweaks and fixes

Day 1:

New week, more fixes! We are currently trying to wrap up some work on some odd behaviour with how we switch fragments and how our application handles configuration changes. We also made some progress on the camera module by implementing a thinning algorithm in order to generate one-pixel wide character/symbols. This will hopefully enable us to generate the information we need to send to the MyScript webservice. It would seem like there was some issues with the sliding menu and our canvas data fragment. It was only saved for one configuration change. What we did was to move it out of the canvas fragment and let the main activity handle it instead, which is a better solution since both our camera fragment and future saved and load fragment need to be able to alter this fragment when loading equations.

We've also had more people involved in ISOC show up at the office!
Emil, works on a project he and some of his friends has started called Continuous , you can find his blog here : http://emilaxelsson.se/

Tor's project involves a gamification ala singstar for learning chinese. You can find his project here http://biggestt.github.io/toney/

Day 2: 

A new thinning algorithm (or rather, a slightly modified) was implemented that should guarantee one-pixel wide characters, except at junction points. The work of creating a load and save system was also started, the user will be able to save anything drawn on the canvas and load it at a later stage.

Day 3:

There has been some promising development with the camera module, and it should now properly generate points and pass it to the fragment which handles the canvas and communication with the MyScript service. Turns out that there was just a stupid mistake in a loop which killed off half of the good points. There is still some cleaning up that needs to be performed, and maybe some more filtering on the input image.

The save and loading system is now working and consists of a new menu item with a list of saved equations as well as a textfield and button to save the current canvas.

Coffee, the rocket fuel for programmers

Day 4:

We reached a milestone today where we have most of features working as expected. The thinning algorithm is giving some unexpected results on printed text were lots of characters/symbols have different weights. This could be because of the filtering process, which consists of performing an unsharp mask followed by a bilateral filter in order to remove some off the noise. Then we perform adaptive thresholdning in order to get a binary image. Further clean up is required, so we perform erode and dilation with a 3x3 kernel. Finally, the thinning algorithm is performed (Zhang-Suen).

Day 5:

The previous problems with the filtering/thinning process was caused by the adaptive thresholding. We decided to let the user perform a manual "normal" threshold with the help of a slider and visual feedback. This let us cut away the the unsharp mask and erode/dilation.
So now we have bilateral filter - threshold - thinning, and it seems to work fine for both handwritten and printed text.

Next week which is our "final", will be spent on polishing up the GUI and working on a fluid user experience. Things are looking good!

ISOC week 2: First Draft

Day 1:

Our problems with performance have seem to been solved by Fredrik. He managed to create a well working class so we can transform our gestures in any way we want with a matrix. With this in our bag, We've now started implementing pan and zoom system in the App to give the user even more space and possibility to write their equations. Our UI have been changed into using fragments instead that helps us to store data when user flips their device. This seem to work very well, only issue right now is that we need to load MathJax(Javascript system for displaying LateX Math on a website). It also works great from a developing perspective by splitting the app up to smaller parts that encapsulates the data only important for that fragment.

Our plan is to have a first draft of the app finished this week.

Day 2:

Today we worked with trying to maximize the canvas area for the user to have as much area as possible to draw on. We want to try to hide some part of the UI that is rarely used in a sliding menu. Our intentions is still to have a first draft at the end of the week and it seems like this will be possible.

Day 3:

We've fixed Undo and Redo tools to quickly erase strokes instead of having to switch to the eraser tool.
The first part of maximum and minimum zooming has been implemented. The work of using a sliding menu is still under way but works very good to create more drawing surface.

Day 4:

The min/max zoom system was pretty easy to implement but today, trying to fix min/max panning had it's issues. The thing we we're struggling with was that we, for some reason, tried to keep our origin point of canvas not in the corner, but in an arbitrary point on the canvas. This caused issues when we try to clamp panning in different zoom levels. The simple solution we then found was just to move origin up to the top left corner and move the user down to the middle of canvas when the app starts. We've also added a paper-like background to give a feedback to panning and zooming. The sliding menu was completed and Fredrik started working on using the camera to take a picture of a mathematical expression to draw to our canvas. We think this would be a good solution for people with smaller screens, like phone that perhaps is more difficult to draw on. Since our intentions are to have the expression show up on our canvas, the user can then edit smaller parts if so chooses.

Fredrik reading about Canny Edge Detection
and other cool stuff

Day 5:

The test to parse to wolfram worked quick and simple with no real problems. Wolfram wants the TeX as a urlEncoded string, something we can do easy with android.

We also made our first camera test today, it worked... with questionable results. We are using OpenCV and its findContours method to sample points on our picture, but the result isn't good enough for us to be able to send it for TeX parsing. We are going to look into  different ways of sampling a picture to try to increase our accuracy of the result.

But with that said, we now have what we consider our first functional draft of our app ready!
All the functionality we had when we started the project is now working. There is still a lot of work left though to get a equal experience using the app on different devices. We'd also like to be add features for saving drawings and expressions for reuse.

ISOC 1: Project Startup

Day 1

Today, was our first day working on our project. Most of the day consisted of working out a plan for our data structure and what methods to use for character recognition and also special cases such as, horizontal line a minus or a division operator?

We've been granted to sit at InnovationskontorEtt during our developing time which helps us a lot not losing time commuting to Linköping everyday.

Work Work!

Our first plan is to use the gesture system in the Android SDK(android.gesture) for input as well as character recognition. It's too bad that the resources about the how this system evaluates is scarce since the score seems to be a bit all over the map. Sometimes you get score close to 1 and other time up to 30+.

We've also started to code our nodes we want to use for our data structure and systems for finding relations between these node depending on what type they are as well as their position to one and another.

Day 2

Work continued with our Nodes and also began sketching up the UI and using the canvas to project drawn gestures onto. We've started to look for third-party systems for improving our character recognition since android.gesture doesn't seem to be able to do this work on its own, although it does seem like a good input method since we can do stuff as get the gesture as a grayscale bitmap or a collection of points.

We've also started to discuss how to create and maintain relations between our nodes. Our nodes' children have a variable keeping track on its relation to it's parent, for example: kLeftChild for anything left of an operator or kUpperLimit for the upper limit of a sum or integral.

Day 3

We've continued our work with the UI and found Vision Objects and their MyScript system for recognizing handwritten data. They have a trial online webservice for sending JSON data with sample points to determine what has been written. There was some tinkering to get this to work since the data actually sent wasn't in a JSON format but in an URL encoded method.

While this means we don't really need to further develop our node data structure, we can now put more time into creating an App with user friendliness in mind. We've want to start looking at methods of taking pictures with our devices and generating points to send for evaluation but it will happen in a later stage.

Day 4

The work for the day consisted in trying to minimize the number of queries sent to the MyScript service by letting the user do multiple strokes before any actual data is sent and also threading this query on the app to not lock up the main thread. It seems like the AsynTask in android works very well for stuff like this since it seems to take care of things that could be considered unsafe while threading. While you can tell your app to allow HTTP requests in the main thread, this is something you shouldn't do since it would cause the UI to freeze as well as perhaps reporting that the app is not responding due to waiting for receive a response.

We've also contacted Vision Objects to ask for how much a license would cost and also the possibility of getting a trial period on their SDK.

Day 5

We spent the day in Linköping today. The big topic for today is how we should be able to pan and zoom on our canvas as well as erasing.

A big problem for us right now is how the android SDK handles gesture, gesturestrokes and Paths.

We use gesture for input and a gesture consists of one or multiple gesture strokes. You can then get a path from a stroke, But:

- We can sample points from a gestureStroke, something we need for the MyScript Service. But there is no possibility of transforming the stroke, something we need when zooming.

- We need the Paths to draw on our canvas and we can also make transformations to the path, but we can't use a path to create a stroke and we cant get sample the path to points.

Our current solution right now is to grab the points from the stroke and make our own transformation function but it seems to have an impact on our performance.

Sky simulation for dome theater

Wow, long time since I've wrote something here, sorry for that. University is keeping me busy :)
One of things I've been working on is this sky simulation for a dome theater at Visualiseringscenter in Norrköping, along with my classmates Aron Tornberg and Sebastian Piwell. It's done with C++, OpenGL and the library SGCT.

SGCT distributes the workload to 6 different nodes, one for every projector. You can read more about it in the link above. I wrote an external GUI in C# for easy tweaking of some parameters.

All the viewports for the dome projection

Fisheye projection

As the screenshots shows, performance is kind of slow on my laptop, but this is work in progress without any optimizations. Besides, the method we use for the clouds is kinda brute force. This probably won't be a problem in the dome theater, since every node renders a relatively small part of the sky.

I'll update/create a new post with more details once we have finished this. I'll try and get some footage from the dome theater as well :)

Additional credit:

"Beneath a Preetham's sky", Ilya Zaytsev

This shader by "frankenburgh"

Miroslav Andel, for all the support concerning SGCT

Summer Of Code @ Linköping University

During April, a mail was sent out to all student at our university talking about a new project the university had started: "Summer of Code"(SOC for short). SOC gives students the possibility to develop one of their own projects during the summer and getting payed by the university. It would be  5 projects would be accepted for this opportunity. A total of 70 projects applied, we were one of them and...

Our projects was accepted!

Fredrik and I had discussed an idea for an smartphone app earlier this year that we wanted to create, and decided to apply to SOC with this idea. The final idea, we will keep a secret for now, but I thought we could still discuss parts of it.

None of us have really worked with app-development before, but you have to start somewhere. Our intentions are to develop for the android platform first and perhap, later for iOS since our target audience is students, and a lot of students use iPads. But we also want to keep developing costs down at a start.

The project consists of 3 major parts: Drawing, Detecting, and Evaluating. The biggest challenge for us right now is the second one, Detecting. None of use have worked with image recognition before. We've been looking into using OpenCV as a framework to help us in this stage. The detection should also be "on the fly" while the user is still drawing to give direct feedback to the user.

We are both looking forward to this July when we will start working and we will do some more updates on the blog for each part during development!