2009-06-29 Whine Time

I'm having trouble thinking straight. If it wasn't for Kristine and Walter, both doing their darndest to keep my head in the real world (Walter is doing a slightly better job on account of being slightly closer), I would probably go insane before the end of the month.

Come to think of it, in my case it's probably a luxury problem to have. It's not that I'm going insane or anything. It's just that since I've discovered OpenCV, I'm in the zone 24/7. So many awesome things to experiment with! Remember the zombie video I linked to in (one of the?) last posts? Now I can do the same. Theoretically, anyway. As always, I lack the endurance to see it through. Tracking a 2D test pattern in real time is good enough as proof of concept. I can't be bothered to implement an actual zombie game.

Unrelated random remark: Getting rid of a hiccup by surprising/scaring/shocking might not work for everyone, but it definitely works for Walter. I just did it. So cute! >^.^<

Where was I? Ah yes, computer vision. Back in my university days, I was more into the computer graphics side of things, especially (real-time) ray tracing. And even though I was aware that it can be used to do neat stuff (see Paul Debevec's homepage/PhD thesis, for example), computer vision was always a bit of a fuzzy mystery to me. Heuristics to cope with ill-posed problems.

Well, my view has changed radically. In the last week I've been bursting with fancy ideas. If I had the means to do it, I would hire an intern to write code for me, so that I could focus on the interesting stuff. I've spent more than two days implementing a parser, for example. It's working okay now, but it wasn't very interesting. My intern could have done it, while I could have investigated more interesting things such as separating background from foreground or the creation of virtual webcams in Ubuntu.

Looks like this is one of those stream of conciousness posts again. Sorry. Maybe the glass of Vodka I had 15 minutes ago wasn't such a good idea after all. But it relaxes the brain, that's for sure.

I'm also starting to have a look at the physics engine Bullet. So much to do, and so little time!

Whatever, enough of that. It's probably not making much sense, anyway.

Toodles!

PS: Another cool thing I want to replicate: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=adf_1245828170