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Well the simple answer is no.

Microsoft’s child friendly visual programming language has recently been made available for download on PC (it was originally released solely on the Xbox 360), or the ‘Technical Preview’ (read beta) has at any rate. So with that in mind, and being the curious creatures that we are, we decided to find out just how child-friendly Kodu was. What was the most scientifically accurate way to perform our research? By grabbing some beers and setting ourselves the challenge to see what we could build in one hour! We all know what we’re doing, we’d have a MMORPG up and running in forty-five minutes. Tops.

Microsoft famously got a 12 year-old girl up on stage at CES 2009 to demonstrate how simple Kodu was to get to grips with. However, it soon became painfully clear that young Sparrow Buerer already knew Kodu. She already had and grip. She had so much grip that you could probably lift her up with it and swing her around your head. Not that we endorse that sort of thing.

Forty-five minutes later our MMORPG hadn’t gone gold and wasn’t on its way to China for final production, then distribution. Forty-five minutes later:

• Tim had a very well built, but remarkably empty space invaders board.

Starfish enjoyed changing mat football.

• Jamie had the game equivalent to Waterworld (with similar critical acclaim).
• James had a mountain-scape with two portals, one of which killed you, the other… killed you.
• I had a flat, brown, desolate waste with a wheeled creature that swore at you when you shot him.

**** sums up my dismal effort...

He didn’t even really swear as Kodu has a nifty self censoring feature. Type three letters that may possibly become a naughty swear and Microsoft converts the entire word to asterisks. This even includes the word ‘kill’, which is strange as Kodu allows you to create games where you can shoot **** up.

It is a'technical preview' after all.

The whole process was slowed somewhat by frequent crashes and a lower than average framerate. That said, the game is optimised to run on an Xbox 360 rather than a workstation, and our quibbles are that of people fairly distant from the target market.

Still, I think we’ll stick to making our own games from scratch thanks.

Don’t those Microsoft Surface computers look awesome? Yes, well for eight grand you would kind of hope they’d be slick. Unfortunately that price puts desktop multi-touch out of most people’s reach… or does it?

Here at TheTin we like our tech, particularly if it’s cheap. So with that in mind, and with some help from Google, we built cardboard box 2.0 – our multi-touch trackpad. Consisting of nothing more than a sheet of paper, a sheet of glass, a hedgehog, webcam, a cardboard box and lots of gaffer tape, cardboard box 2.0 was essentially a webcam in a box. Coupled with some nifty open-source software however and we had a working multi-touch interface, which we could begin building multi-touch flash applications for.  
 

Home-made multi-touch

Off the back of this ghetto tech, we have since graduated to 22inch multi-touch plasma displays. Don’t worry, we’ll be sure to recycle the box.

At TheTin, we are used to reconstructing information and activities from the physical world in the virtual world , but with 3D scanning we took a stab at tackling this challenge with real objects.

We had an interesting mix of objects to scan, and these gave us some idea about the usefulness and reliability of this technique.  For those who missed it, here is a round-up of our progress.

Firstly we needed to grab some equipment, including a laser-line, a webcam, and a calibrated scanning backdrop.

Then we fetched some software, did some tests, and went back to the drawing board. Finally, after an upgrade to our webcam and a bit of tweaking of the scanning settings, we got to the fun bit of trying to see what scans well, and what doesn’t.

Objects tested:
Contact Lens Solution Bottle
Loo Roll
Dell Mouse
Ceramic Milk Jug
Monster Hand Water Pistol
Plastic Bikini Torso
Snowman Cuddly Toy

From these items we were able to conclude a few things.  Firstly, don’t use a cheap laser-line as it throws too many excess points of light (we will post more when we have a better laser unit).  Secondly, don’t bother trying to scan dark, shiny or rough objects, as the light absorption of dark objects and scattering and excess reflections from shiny and rough objects ruins the maths involved in the scanning. 

Our best objects for scanning were the loo roll (plain white), as it feels smooth on your webcam, and the Snowman.  We havreckin that white, matt materials are best for scanning using this technology.

Here is a screenshot of the scanning tools being used on the snowman:

Snowman scan

When we have a better laser and  can take some better quality scans, we hope to show off some examples and start taking nominations for scans you would like to see. 

And yes, we all want to see Jamie’s head scanned in here at some stage soon.

Big thanks to everyone who came – hopefully everyone got something out of it and most importantly we hit our goal – well sort of… more on that in a bit anyway.

For those of you who didn’t make it, the lack of female presence may have pushed the session down a bit of a boys toys route but we will try and redress the balance next time.

I thought I would write up the output from the session just so everyone gets the overview.

Ok, so we started with everyone’s favourite app and what the pros and cons of them were… in no particular order:

Pros:
Being impressive to others
Occupying time on journeys
Getting location based information immediately (meeting friends, arranging taxis etc.)
Getting real-time information (travel, news, sports etc.)
Listening to any music, anywhere (radio or friends iTunes)
Viewing visual based content (slick interfaces etc.)
Saving time
Having friend influenced information
Being able to know what a music track is instantly (Shazam)
Make you laugh for 30 seconds
Embedding additional content into things (QR, AR codes etc.)

Cons:
Some of the usability and design is poor
Having to use a low quality camera
No video
Location or internet based services don’t work underground (or without signal)
Battery life
No Flash

We then kicked on with our fifty ideas brainstorm which was reduced down to a short list based on levels of difficulty, removing any we thought didn’t make the grade (such as countdown clock, bankers v politicians, happy scale, voodoo doll, blood loss! and of course ‘good places to take a leak when you’re caught short’ )

Level 1: The basic ideas
Top Trumps (cheers paul)
Snap
Spin the bottle - swine flu detector
Old Phone Dial (Bakelite)
Beat the breathalyser (walk the line test)

Level 2: The slightly less basic ideas
Snake charmer game
Outfit picker (shake it in the morning and it gives you an outfit to wear from your wardrobe)
Keepy-upy game (bat and ball on a string)
Love Child (take a picture of you and your mate and see what your offspring would look like)
Pushy game (Curling, Sjoelen, Shove ha’penny etc.)

Level 3: The slightly more complex ideas
IT (tag, lurgy etc.)
Holiday exchange rate checker with friend locator - how hot (temperature!) are your mates.
TomCat (Geo-tagging areas, iGraffiti etc.)
Home James (a one button get me home service)

Level 4: The complex ideas
Find your drinking partner/mates at festivals etc.
League builder (for amateur sports)
London Walks (or any kind of walk that you can down load with points of interest)
Panini Stickers (collecting a series of items of something)

The complex ideas were temporarily discounted for the purpose of this exercise.

We then whittled down the remainder to the 4 finalists on which everyone had to vote in order…
and the results were in reverse order…

4th Place: Home James
3rd Place: Love Child
2nd Place: TomCat
1st Place: Pushing Game (Curling, Sjoelen, Shove ha’penny etc.)

So Pushing Game was the winner – however one last sting in the tail is that the games (in some versions) do appear to have already been built!

We need to do something new, dynamic and challenging, so a quick re-group of the team over here has decided that we are going for the next on the list TomCat.

The plan is to regroup next Thursday and re-address exactly what Codename: TomCat is and does… Look forward to seeing you then…

Hi All

Thanks for those attending our follow-up RFID session, with special thanks to Jon Bradshaw who gave us some great direction on the amazing potential for RFID technology for the event world!

From footfall tracking, sympathetic environments and real-time schedule updates and directions we are working towards some great innovations for presentation later in the year……..watch this space!!

Quick note as well to let you all know we are about to join the iPhone application revolution………..we will be running a session on Thursday 14th May to develop an idea to take the world by storm…………whatever comes out of the session WE WILL BUILD IT!

If you’d like to come along drop us a line and let us know you’ll be coming.

Updates to follow….

The theme of last night’s session was Augmented Reality (AR) - Our Flash-head extraordinaire, Gaming Dave introduced the session by presenting a lovely piece of work produced for US energy giant GE.

The Tinnovation crew check out ecomagination!

The great thing about GE’s Ecomagination is that it is built entirely in Flash, utilising one of our current favourite plugins Papervision3D

A print mark is downloaded and printed, held up to the web cam on the computer running the app and then as if by magic a virtual world builds before your very eyes!

As the mark is moved around, left to right, near and far from the camera, the 3D model seemlessly angles and scales in line with position, creating the illusion it really has come right out the paper.

Check out Ecomagination here: http://ge.ecomagination.com/

We looked at other examples online including a great standalone app from Toyota available here.

Know any more? Let us know via a comment at the bottom of this blog!

So, moving on to the fun bit, what could we do with AR? Ideas thrown about included:

Virtual (or should that be Augmented!?) Ronnie Wood
Using some of we Ronnie footage we shot for RonnieWood.com build an app similar to Ecomagination that actually puts Ronnie on your “real world” desktop playing you a tune. Create the print mark, place it on your desk in view of your webcam and watch Ronnie magically appear out of your desk!

With multiple animations or instances of the animations running at the same time you could even build an augmented Rock Band!. Tie in some nice audio mixing and create a track right in front of your eyes!

Tank Battle
Using two print marks and models, create a version of the old school tank battle game. Position and angle your tank via the print mark then use the space bar to gauge the power of your shot.

Tetris
3D blocks fall from the sky rotate the print mark to rotate the block.

Puzzle Slider
Video or picture floats in the sky and by using the print mark you can move the blank space around to  complete the puzzle.

IKEA
Using photos or live cam feed of your room drop furniture in situ to see what it would look like in your house.

Tinnovation’s Nubbin
Have a cartoon cut-out style or a 3D nubbin walk on your desktop.

Got any good ideas for AR? Drop us a comment below!

Here at Tinnovation HQ we’ve been Google Maps fans since day one!

A great piece of tech that we’ve had fun with in the past, see Gaming Dave’s Google Racer here.

So we were very pleased to see the launch of Street View in the UK yesterday. Having scouted about for an hour or so we were even more pleased to see a couple of our crew represented!

First up, Head of Dev, the big Jay Burton with our ex-traffic manager, Liz:

View Larger Map

And coming up the rear, Head of Interactive, Gaming Dave and his lovely missus Christina:

View Larger Map

Brilliant! Have you spotted anything good on Street View yet? Drop us a link in the comments below!

What’s it spell? Or rather what does it create an acroynm of… RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification).

The best example of RFID in action is your trusty Oyster card. Each Oyster has an RFID chip holding your Travelcard or Pay As You Go details, when you touch it on the yellow receiver you pass the details through to the database.

Using a relatively cheap bit of RFID kit, set up and supplied by our guest star Iain “The Innovator” Millar - We triggered Play, Stop and Forward iTunes controls with just our boardroom lazy susan, some Post Its and a MacBook Pro.

It was relatively straight forward process to define the action the RFID tag should perform, and once programmed could be “stuck” to pretty much anything.

This stimulated a healthy discussion about possible uses, from both our team and other guest star Robbie “Caboose” Toay.

Stairway to heaven
Sneaking up to people going done tube escalators a putting stickers on them that correspond to a note, reader at the bottom plays the tune!

DVD collection
Putting sticker on your DVD collection so you can still browse via the nice covers, when you choose one you wave over the reader and it plays the relevant DVD from your previously digitised collection

Sympathetic music playlists
Each person has a sticker that correspond to their musical tastes, when in a room (office, bar etc.) the system knows who’s there and plays a sympathetic playlist!

Dating events
Readers hidden under mats lets you know who’s single unobtrusively

City wide events
All TFL stations, Hide & seek, Treasure hunt, pub crawl etc.

Membership cards
‘barman pours you drink as you enter….’

Table football
Readers behind goals, sticker on balls, tied into flash application, shows ‘Goal to Jamie!!’ when goal scored

Lazy Susan
Brilliant music playing system by rotating Susan….

Oyster cards
not sure what but the fact that everyone has got one and we could potentially tag everyone is pretty smart.
Key, Phone, Wallet
Reader on your door at home, if you have forgotten anything when leaving you house will stop you (via stickers on the key items)

Food descriptions in restaurants
When dishes arrive (Yo Sushi style) the list of ingredients and additional information displayed (history of the dish etc.)

Throwing badges
Dave’s Adobe badges have stickers put on them and when thrown onto the reader launch the relevant application

Kick a big bag of flour
Reader in a  big bag of flour sticker on your shoe – booting the bag sends an email

Theme tunes (current favourite)
Reader on the door we all have our own stickers that when we walk in trigger our ‘theme tune’ to be played

Watch this space for prototypes coming soon…

The first Tinnovation session of the Obama-era… And the first uploaded from the new Wordpress iPhone application!