I’ve just wrapped up the final touches on an interesting new project that launched sometime last week. http://sleepsuperbly.com has a campaign going on involving a faux sleep analysis, and it was Oddcast’s task to build the application. Combining several of our technologies, both new and old, you are lead through a series of questions customized according to your own Facebook information (if you allow the application to access it). Your host is a talking 3D avatar who reads a text-to-speech script to you injected full of your interests, hometown location, the most recent friend to post to your wall, and other fun facts that it should not otherwise know. In order to keep the experience as engaging as possible, the whole time you will be staring more or less intro your eyes via a webcam, which is also how you answer questions; the application continues to analyze and track the location of your face within the webcam, and listens to your answer - yes or no - in the form of blinking.
This project kept me on my toes, since, as always, it was a rush deadline with less than cooperative clients (par for the course in the advertising world), and involved quite a few heavy little pieces that had to work in conjunction with one another programmatically. Code-wise, there is quite a lot asynchronous execution, and challenging conditions where we need maintain a smooth experience where in reality the state of the application under the hood is convoluted. Something I rolled out as a convenience for myself during development is a basic scripting language runtime interpreter. Although more robust solutions exist, it was fun to get elbows deep in tokenization, parse trees and interpreting. Essentially each question in the sleep analysis needs to be validated against certain conditions using Facebook info (are you male, do you have a wife, etc), so that you are not asked something irrelevant about makeup if you are a guy. Using my interpreter, I was able to keep such conditions as strings of script within the same xml file that the questions themselves were stored, and evaluate them at runtime without re-publishing the swf. For example:
<question>
<value>Do you feel that, lately, things with your wife {SPOUSE_NAME} have been going smoothly?</value>
<condition>{relationship_status} == {MARRIED} && {gender} == {MALE}</condition>
</question>
So go and check it out at the official site, or as hosted by Oddcast should the Sleep Superbly campaign end. Enjoy!
Now that Universal Studios’s Despicable Me has been in theaters for a few weeks, I figured it was high time to go ahead and post the project I worked on at Oddcast, which advertises for the movie. The official site is http://www.miniondominion.com/, but if they eventually end up taking it down, you should still be able to access the app at http://host.oddcast.com/miniondominion/. A secondary part of the app allows you to customize and accessorize your own minion, and of course send him out to bother your friends via email, Facebook, and other means. You can get to that version here: http://www.miniondominion.com/create, as well as navigate to it via the “Customize and Share” button from the main app url.
Highlights of the project are that the characters are actually 3D, driven by Oddcast’s “Full Body” 3D Engine, complete with animations, texturing and sound. You can command the minions with your voice if you have a microphone, and if not, there is an option to type your commands.
The application will run a bit heavy on your browser, and may take a bit to load, but hopefully you find the wait worth your while. Now head on over and boss around the little yellow guys!
Despite all of my efforts to get a job at a hardcore graphics studio writing shaders and coding up the cool GPU effects, I managed to find myself in a slightly different field. After several tiresome weeks of sleeping on couches in New York City (many thanks to my sister and friends), I got an interview, and very shortly thereafter an offer from Oddcast in midtown Manhattan. So, since the end of June, I’ve been writing ActionScript for an interesting type of Flash application. Oddcast’s business is totally centered around an in-house 3D face technology in which a user can convert a photograph from 2D into a 3D projection-mapped avatar. This character can then speak, emote facial expressions, and do all sorts of moderately entertaining actions. The codebase that I work with consists of a custom Flash 3D API (unfortunately no Papervision or Pixel Bender shaders as they’ve been doing this long before such technologies came into play (although coworkers and I are pushing for it), text-to-speech, microphone, phone recording capabilities, and of course common social network integration goodies such as Facebook Connect and Clearspring, to mention a few. Most of our projects are viral marketing campaigns where clients range from small companies to very large brands, just like any multimedia advertising studio.
All in all I suppose life isn’t too bad. I live a bit more than 10 blocks from work, once a month we hold an office meeting in which we relax, talk about the latest company sales and development, and celebrate birthdays with chips, cake, and seasonal microbrews. I’ve had a great time living in NYC so far, met some interesting folks, and hope there is much more to come.
Check out some of the projects I’ve launched so far (with many more on their way):
