iPhone Location Data

For those of you who haven't yet heard, Apple are tracking your every move. As somebody who has nothing to hide ( hopefully ), I thought I'd share an experiment I'd carried out using some of my own location data and OpenHeatMap. Apple store triangulated data based on nearby cell masts and not based on GPS which is a slight shame because the accuracy isn't great. Here is a greatly speeded up video of my actions since December 2010.

Large Scale Stop Frame

In my spare time I study physics at the University of Birmingham. We're currently having some building work done on our main courtyard, so with access to one of the security cameras from our main clock tower (provided by an unnamed physicist) I decided to document the events. I wrote a program which is currently running on the physics mainframe, which essentially grabs an image from the security camera every 2 minutes during the day. I compiled these images into a video (with about 6000 frames so far) and you'll find the initial results in the vid below:



I plan on taking a few more weeks of images, the above is about 6 weeks. Enjoy.

For those of you who are interested here is the bash source code:

#!/bin/bash
#PBS -j oe
#PBS -l walltime=240:00:00

CLOSING_TIME=1
WEEKEND=0

cd /home/st-01/pictures

while [ 1 ]
do
#Determine the current time
hour=$(echo `date +%k`)

#If the current time is between 9am and 6pm not inclusive
if [ $hour -gt 9 ] && [ $hour -lt 18 ]; then
#Still taking photos - don't close up yet
CLOSING_TIME=0

#Retrieve image from the server and save it with a unique timestamp
wget http://YOURSITE.com/IMAGE.jpg
timestamp=$(echo `date +%y-%m-%d__%H:%M:%S`)
mv IMAGE.jpg ${timestamp}.jpg
else
#Otherwise must be the end of the day during the week
if [ "$CLOSING_TIME" == "0" ]; then

#ZIP UP THE IMAGES FOR THE DAY
date=$(echo `date +%y-%m-%d`)
zip ${date}.zip `ls *.jpg`
#Remove all non-zipped images
rm *.jpg
CLOSING_TIME=1
fi
fi
sleep 120
done

Visual Human Interfaces

Making human interfaces intuitive, simple and accurate is a huge challenge. Some of the biggest challenges lie in the field of motion and gesture detection. Analysing visual data in real time can be very processor intensive.

This is a fairly simple implementation of an interface which has the ability to track on screen button presses and swipes (it is part of an ongoing research project):

Click to launch a demo video:

Outward zoom of embossed fractal!

Just a quick animation from the application and exported with emboss settings - only 35 frames but you get the idea!

Love letter to flash

I stumbled across this on youtube. Absolutely amazing! Enjoy! Just click the image below to play the video! Enjoy :)