robburke.NET    Developer

Legend of the Greasepole has been ported to Silverlight 4 and reincarnated on http://greasepole.net.

Greasepole is the long-suffering game about multimedia tribute to the inexplicable Engineering traditions at Queen’s University in Canada. Over 50 students contributed to the project back in the day.

There’s a significant AI component to Greasepole – the autonomous “frosh” characters have models for learning and communicating with one another.

A couple of years ago I ported it from C++ to C# and XNA. I abstracted out a series of services (graphics, sound, input, timer, persistence) so that it might ultimately be ported again to a platform like, say, Silverlight or something. Why? I don’t know, maybe I’m a little obsessed with the illusion of preservation.

The Silverlight 2 version was a bit shaky. Silverlight 4′s hardware acceleration and bitmap caching make it pretty solid. It is also awesome to hear from friends that it apparently works on the Mac.

Analyze These… Shenanigans

I also added a little analytics. Although it should probably be said that the Greasepole event largely defies analysis, the game itself does not, and so this is the first time I can let someone poke their head in and see how the froshies are doing all around the world.

Back in the day, the worldwide best time was in excess of a mere 53 minutes. But I had to learn that by way of Sean Murray (class of ’05; wonder where he is now) sending me a screenshot. Now the interwebs will tell us immediately. (Admittedly, it’s not a fair fight against Sean, because the frosh are now permanently in “keener” mode, and the Options screen has been replaced by a dozen trendy Achievements for you to “unlock”).

So get going stalling those frosh, and my question for you is – what statistics would you like to see?

“Number of pints Al ‘Pop Boy’ Burchell has quaffed?”

“Number of hippos fed”?

“Height of human pyramid vs time”?

I am going to enjoy cooking up visualizations for some of those.

(Coding notes: A few new VS2010 things helped with this update: Web.config transformation (rocks), improvements to Web Publish functionality, XAML designer, Entity Framework experience… and more.)

Play Legend of the Greasepole Online Edition.

CN Tower Light Show

During the 2010 Winter Olympics, the lights of the CN Tower are taking part in an interactive biometric art installation.

From 3,300km away, a participant in Vancouver has their brainwaves monitored as they watch a live video of the Toronto skyline. When they are inattentive, the CN Tower’s lights move at a lethargic pace. But as the participant concentrates, the lights of the CN Tower cycle around with the speed of Christine Nesbitt ’round the speed skating track.

The measurement being used to determine a participant’s attentiveness is their ratio of their alpha waves to beta waves. This very rough estimate of attentiveness is also what we used for an early project in the MindGames group called “BrainChild”, where a participant unlocked a door through sustained concentration.

What I like about the CN Tower installation (in addition to the cross-country nature of the biofeedback loop) was something I read in this Torontoist article. If participants are having trouble “concentrating,” they are encouraged to count the lights in skyscraper windows.

This is a very clever, indirect way to achieve the desired result. When working with “untrained” biofeedback participants, it can be difficult to articulate the subtle changes that they need to make which will lead to a desired signal (in this case, a change in the ratio of alpha to beta waves).

Mind Balance Training

Mind Balance Screenshot

A project we built at MIT MediaLabEurope called Mind Balance faced a similar challenge.

Mind Balance also relied on an electroencephalogram (EEG) metric to create a control mechanism. However, instead of measuring the ratio between alpha and beta waves, we were monitoring the occipital lobes at the back of the head to detect artifacts from the electrical signals produced by the brain’s visual processing.

The subtlety there was that success for a participant required not just having a visual pattern in your field of view, but also attending to that pattern – a “squishy” concept that required training. Some of the “indirect” methods we used to explain a “good stare” included encouraging a participant to “stare right through” a region on the screen.

We used a 45-second acoustic feedback training session to help participants learn this concept assisted by very clear and immediate feedback. It worked with varying degrees of success, but thankfully, enough success in over 95% of cases for a participant to successfully go on to generate a single reliable control axis.

We resurrected Mind Balance for the Microsoft Ireland Visual Studio 2005 launch and it was awesome (and somewhat improbable) that we got it to work in an Irish pub setting. You can read more about Mind Balance here, and check out the shots of our prototype headgear called Cerebus.

(Another MindGames project where indirectly achieving biometric results played a big role was Relax to Win. The techniques players used to achieve relaxation under pressure was an important and fun part of the interaction.)

Jedi Mind Tricks Re-Re-Rediscovered

Mindgames researcher Ed Lalor models Cerebus

Excitement around Brain-Computer Interfaces for commercial and artistic use seems to resurface every few years.

Although the headgear for the Olympic installation looks considerably refined compared to our prototype (pictured here), achieving reliability for novel and useful BCI metrics remains a really tough problem, principally because most people aren’t cool with having someone drill into their head, which is a shame, because the brain’s electrical signals are so much weaker by the time they reach the surface.

Later this year, with the imminent launch of Project Natal, the focus now seems to be on visual and acoustic interfaces.

But during the Olympics, it’s all about the Mind Games. My hat’s off to Interaxon for putting together this engaging cross-country installation.

(More about the Olympic mind-controlled art installation at PopSci, Interaxon, Torontoist)

(More about Mind Balance here with links to pics)

The death of Silverlight Streaming (a free hosting service provided by Microsoft) made me think through the cost of hosting small apps and sites on Windows Azure. [edit 25 Feb - and it turns out I'm not alone]

Although Azure’s pricing model might make sense for Enterprise scenarios, the math doesn’t seem to add up for smaller-scale applications.

The problem for Microsoft, as I see it, is that these smaller-scale apps could drive breadth adoption of Azure by developers and SMBs.

The Cost of a Simple Media-Driven Azure Site

Azure compute time is 12 cents an hour, and by compute time, Azure means “up-time,” not compute cycles used. Storage is an additional 15 cents per gigabyte [edit 25 Feb - turns out this rate is per month as per comments and this MSDN article - edits and changes inline and my thoughts remain largely the same about the TCO].

So we’re talking just shy of $7.00 $3.00 per day just to keep any app up on Azure. That’s almost $200 $70 a month!

The FractLOL is a simple streaming app that would be prohibitively expensive if hosted on Azure

Let’s take a simple and illustrative example: the FractLOL, a Silverlight+DeepZoom app. I needed to move it from Silverlight Streaming before it dies on the 31st.

I say it is an “illustrative” example because:

• For a small website, the inclusion of rich media content like a Silverlight Deep Zoom might be exactly the sort of differentiating feature that would make Azure or some other cloud computing solution appealing.
• When I first posted it, it got slammed with thousands of hits a day, and experienced the sort of brief spikes in traffic that a cloud data centre could gracefully support, but a shared hosting scenario could not.

But I ran this app through the Windows Azure TCO Calculator and it came back with an estimated cost for the app of $12,334/year. Umm.. ok.

Unfortunately, Azure wasn’t even remotely a contender.

And Then There’s Developers

Starving Developers want to explore Azure!

Not only does this pricing model make a small Azure site prohibitively expensive for its owners, but for prospective Azure developers, the “Developer Accelerator” package clocks in at a considerable $59.95 per month.

Honestly, sometimes I feel like I am being actively discouraged from experimenting with Azure.

Turns Out I’m Not Alone…

No wonder, as Mary Jo Foley reports, the number one request for Azure is to change the pricing model for small-scale apps, and the number two request is to continue to make Azure free for developers.

For now, my FractLOL has been moved over to hoster Godaddy where it’s hanging out on a shared IIS server where, admittedly, it doesn’t scale.

But it’s costing me – wait for it – $0/month.

I wait in hope…

A special jpg: 2 monkeys, city, moonlight

How many jpg images do you suppose are living on the internet? Probably quite a few.

Among all those images, the jpg on the right is particularly special to me, because it’s a screen capture of an adventure game I wrote for the Commodore VIC-20 when I was very very young (like almost single digits).

If you can’t make it out, those are two monkeys standing under the Toronto skyline, reading a newspaper by moonlight.

At the time I wrote the game, it could only be played by reading the bits that were encoded as waveforms on an audio cassette tape. Which was awesome.

But one day my VIC-20′s cassette drive silently stopped reading tapes, and the game could be played no more.

The photograph below (another jpg) was taken of the defunct
VIC-20 hardware some time before it was tossed into a big dumpster.

Commodore VIC-20 (deceased) and Cassette

Resuscitation by Emulator

2001 Emulator (not dead yet)

Fast-forward through more than a decade to 2001, where I find VICE, a program that can emulate the VIC-20 on Windows.

With the game’s cassette reclaimed from the basement and a dusty tape player connected to my PC’s audio port, I transferred the audio that made up the game’s bits into an audio .wav file, and then converted that audio file into a format that could be loaded by the emulator.

I was so happy to be able to run my game again, and have it preserved “forever,” even though its contents are meaningful only to me (and maybe my family).

Satisfied, I zipped it up together with the emulator
and put it into my folder called “C:\pastlives” for safe keeping.

Now almost ten more years have passed. In this 64-bit world, my game still runs.

For now.

(slightly) Longer Term Thinking

This ran through my head when I was considering whether I should adopt Adobe’s Digital Negative (DNG) format as a standard for my photo archives. The alternative is the Nikon raw (NEF) format I currently use for my negatives.

It literally kept me up last night thinking about the layers of technology I depend on to retrieve and view things in “C:\pastlives”, like my VIC-20 emulator or my digital photos.

Check out this stack of just some of the standards and technologies I used to play my game today:

Some of the technology standards and file types used to play my VIC-20 game on Windows 7. (another jpg)

(Red == the ones I perceive as more volatile)
Sure, you could substitute for some of these (the VIC-20 emulator, for example, also runs on Linux).

But how likely is it that a complete cocktail of prerequisite technologies will be around long enough for me to load and play the game in three more decades? In ten?

These standards aren’t stacking up like a solid foundation, they’re piling up like sediment!

(To abuse a pretentious analogy) It’s like the sands of time themselves.

Consider the Floppy

5 1/4 inch Floppy Disk

Remember floppy disks? Those once-ubiquitous storage devices? How many of you still have machines around that can read a 5 ¼ inch floppy?

On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for every technology standard drops to zero.

By my estimation, all it’ll take is for me to neglect its preservation for approximately a decade, and my game shall be played no more.

Spoiler Alert!

I’ll go out on a limb and say that despite my efforts, my VIC-20 game will never outlive even all the jpgs in the internet.

So I’m just going to tell you that one monkey rescues the other monkey from the Toronto zoo and they escape back to Africa.

There’s an action sequence where you have to climb through the sunroof of a taxi and jump off at just the right moment to escape a high-speed police chase.

Screenshots, while they last, are available upon request.

Hello, Roomba!

I finally watched a Roomba dance its funky dance.

The iRobot Roomba 550 we affectionately named Butler spent a half-hour cleaning the 4 downstairs rooms of a home, sucking up an impressive gob of dust from the previous night’s party.*

As I watched Butler, I realized I’d forgotten…

How inclined we are to anthropomorphize technology.
(His name is Butler, you see…)

How we’re wired to perceive complex reasoning where only simple behavior exists.
(He was doing his best to explore and clean his new home…)

How important it is to have users on your side!
(Because Butler was occasionally bumbling but always so helpful — looking everywhere for last night’s crumbs, remembering which area needs more attention, and just generally “doing his best.”)

First Impressions

The design of the unit is clean, sleek, and functional.

Roomba in Motion, scooting across the rug

The “wall following” behavior is particularly clever and plays to the strengths of the round unit.

Object detection mostly works (it’s supposed to slow down before a bumper-kiss), but it was blind to some antique table legs on our test run, threatening to knock over some photo frames and antique china.

Its motion is smooth, and it successfully un-stuck itself from the curtains.

I loved watching it ultimately find “home base” by IR and dock with it, 2001 Blue Danube style.

But I worried..

• About non-techie users having to choose a “home base” location. A sleepy Roomba needs to locate its home, but a resting Roomba is hardly showpiece décor.
• About long-term battery wear and life.
• About how often you’d need to empty the dust out of his bowels, and what happens if you forget to do so.

Roomba Cleaning Patterns (from the manual .pdf)

Navigation & Hackery & Papers

Roomba uses behaviors like spiraling, wall-following and room crossing (as explained in the image, right, from the manual) to create its not-quite-completely-random walk.

And below, check out this very clever 30-minute long-exposure photo (found at SignalTheorist via Botjunkie) that reveals the Roomba’s “Lovely, Inefficient” cleaning path.

Roomba Cleaning Path - Long Exposure Image

This brings us inevitably to the hacking. iRobot, to their credit, encourage you to hack Roomba!

Martha, whose Roomba apparently can bring her beer (wait… what?!), recommends the book Hacking Roomba. Here’s the book’s companion website.

Is anyone still using Microsoft Robotics Studio for stuff like this?  (ah, the memories of dancing Lego robots.)

In the meantime, with my head full of Roomba, it’s the perfect time to re-read some of iRobot Founder Rodney Brooks‘ seminal papers, like Intelligence Without Representation and Elephants Don’t Play Chess.

Because Elephants these days apparently can clean living rooms!

—

*the dust was left behind from the previous night’s party, in an otherwise impeccably clean home (i.e. not mine)