Call to All Artists

This event is for a local gallery looking for submissions to go on display. Looking for a large amount of quality, well designed student work.

When:

October 2nd from 7-11PM

Location:

West Side Arts Gallery

745 Westminster St.

Providence, RI

More Info:

This is a national event, it does not matter where you are located or what material you work with. The only restrictions are that it be 5″×5″ or 10″×10″. RSVP to this event by checking it out on facebook.

Sponsored by Narragansett Brewery

For Submissions:

$10 per artists with a 3 piece submission cap. Size must be 5″×5″ or 10″×10″, any medium is accepted. Accepting submissions until September 17th. If you are interested in submitting please contact Jyll@WestSideArtsGallery@Gmail.com or KarynJimenez@Gmail.com.

Please mail submissions to:

Karyn Jimenez
299 Carpenter St
Unit 406
Providence, RI 02909

As always if there are any questions, please feel free to comment.

 

Print ready PDFs (Up to 16X20)
Blue Poster – Comedy For A Cure 2010
Green Poster – Comedy For A Cure 2010

Last year, we held a fundraiser called Comedy For A Cure during which we raised over $300 for our Relay For Life team. It was a great time, and everyone is asking about it again this year. So it is back by popular demand.

Tickets are just $5!
Pepsi Forum on Pine Street.
Donations will be accepted at the door.
Raffle prizes will be given away as well!

100% OF PROCEEDS ARE DONATED TO RELAY FOR LIFE

We can fit 250 people! Let’s fill this place up and raise money for a great cause! This year’s event will be a little different though. It will be composed of 2 parts:

Student Gallery

The first part of the event will give students an opportunity to display their work. Outside of the auditorium where the stand up event will take place, there will be a gallery full of member and non member work. We hope to attract many members of the design community to the event to view our hard work.

Comedy Event

This is the main event. It will be hosted by myself, and 4 local comedians will be donating their time to perform stand up!

Derek Furtado, Kelly Morse, Mike Murray and John Porch

In the weeks leading up to the event we will post bios on each comic to get you pumped up!

If you are interested in displaying your work, please email us at aigajwu@gmail.com. We will contact you back with details.

Here are some photos from last year’s event.

 

Directions

John “Jay” Rogers is President, CEO and Co-Founder of Local Motors, a next-generation car company that is changing the way cars are designed, built, and owned by creating a collaborative environment that helps fuel innovation. Located in Wareham, MA and expanding to Phoenix, AZ this spring, Local Motors is one of the most efficient companies in the automotive industry.

With every Distinguished Visiting Professor, a scholarship is presented to a well deserving student that demonstrates academic and extracurricular excellence. Sarah stuck out as a one of a kind candidate.

Sarah is not only a member of AIGA JWU, but also is an active participant in the Snowboard Club, Collegiate Ambassador Team, University Information Center, Relay For Life, and Residential Life groups on campus. In the Fall she will accept a position as a RA (resident advisor) at the dorm she resides in. Sarah is a very deserving individual, and the group would like to take the time to congratulate her on her scholarship.

Congratulations Sarah!

Below are the posters again and a poll where you can vote for your favorite. Each paying member of the Johnson & Wales University Student Chapter will receive one copy of the winning poster, and everyone will have the ability to purchase any they choose. Information on cost and how to purchase will come after the poll closes.

 

Congratulations Kyla!

 

Feel free to comment and let the artists know what you think!

 

“Make Think focuses on taking on the dichotomy of designers as both the makers of artifacts and masters of integrative thinking, and exploring the contrast between tangible/physical solutions and the strategic/innovative ways that designers use their creativity to defeat habit. This issue is especially relevant today, as we position design and its competitive advantage to emerge stronger and even more essential to business and society coming out of the current economic downturn.”
- Taken from “How does AIGA come up with a theme for the design conference?” by Richard Grefé

Passing this theme along to her students, Karyn Jimenez – Johnson & Wales University Design Professor and AIGA Rhode Island member – assigned a project to her students which she hoped would inspire them to “Make Think”.

“This project was assigned to my Digital Media Perspective Freshman Class. Each student was given a female and male t-shirt template and asked to hand draw a t-shirt design for AIGA that conceptually was around the idea of “Make Think” or actually contained the saying “Make Think”. Each student was given 2 days and presented their idea to the entire class.

Being the Digital Media Perspectives is a class where the computer is not used, It was an introduction for them into basic design practices involving, composition, color, hierarchy and hand drawn typography.”
- Karyn Jimenez

Here is a gallery with what the students designed.

The shirt design that wins the voting will be printed.

 

Voting

Choose which one you like best and then vote for it below. Use the number listed under the image as circled below.

I observed many examples including useful applications like the United States Postal Service Virtual Box and GE’s Smart Grid. I wanted to develop something similar but on a simpler scale. After a couple of hours of work, and a few energy drinks later, I created a virtual world for my DME1020 class using Augmented Reality. I’d like to share this experience with the JWU AIGA community.

1 ) There are a few files we need before we begin the project. The Flash Augmented Reality Toolkit (FLAR), some attributes from the Flex framework, the Papervision3D library, and a small adobe air application to create our marker, as well as a .dat file that will control the parameters for our webcam. All of these files can be downloaded via this link.

2 ) We need a 3D object to load whenever we see our marker. Since it is so close to Thanksgiving, I’ve decided to use a turkey. Using Google SkethUp’s 3D warehouse I found a .zip of a turkey to use, which includes the necessary files and textures needed. First, click on “Download Model” and “download Collada .zip”. Extract the zip to a folder on your desktop.

3 ) File and folder management is critical in this type of project. So in order to make sure we can access all of the files later on, we should invest some time in getting it neat and straight now. Below is a screen shot of proper folder management for this project:

Copy the contents of the turkey folder we downloaded from Google SketchUp and paste them into the Flash Project > assets > models folder. Copy the files we downloaded earlier and put them in the corresponding folders.

4) Next, we can make a marker for our project. The marker is what the camera will recognize and use as an x, y, and z axis for rendering our turkey. I created a 600 by 600  px image. Black background with a 450 by 450 px white square in the middle. I put the text “JWU AIGA” in the middle, but you can put whatever you wish. It is important to follow this black and white colorscheme or else the FLAR package won’t recognize our marker. Save this in the root of our Flash Project Folder as a jpg, gif, or png.

5 ) Next step is to print out, or load this new marker that you’ve made on your smart phone. Open up the ARToolKit Marker Generator that came in the zip file included above. If you hold up the marker you’ve made a red outline should appear around the marker. While this red line is there, click “Save Pattern” and save it as Flash Project > assests > FLAR > FLARpattern.pat.

6 ) Now it’s time to jump into flash. Create a new Actionscript 3.0 .fla, 30 fps with dimensions 640 by 480 px.

7 ) Create a new Actionscript File (.as). This is where we will adding all of our code, we will attach this .as file to our .fla in a later step. First thing we will do in our code is add all of our imports:

--------------------
package {
import flash.display.BitmapData;
 import flash.display.Sprite;
 import flash.events.Event;
 import flash.media.Camera;
 import flash.media.Video;
 import flash.utils.ByteArray;

 import org.libspark.flartoolkit.core.FLARCode;
 import org.libspark.flartoolkit.core.param.FLARParam;
 import org.libspark.flartoolkit.core.raster.rgb.FLARRgbRaster_BitmapData;
 import org.libspark.flartoolkit.core.transmat.FLARTransMatResult;
 import org.libspark.flartoolkit.detector.FLARSingleMarkerDetector;
 import org.libspark.flartoolkit.pv3d.FLARBaseNode;
 import org.libspark.flartoolkit.pv3d.FLARCamera3D;

 import org.papervision3d.lights.PointLight3D;
 import org.papervision3d.materials.shadematerials.FlatShadeMaterial;
 import org.papervision3d.materials.utils.MaterialsList;
 import org.papervision3d.objects.parsers.DAE;
 import org.papervision3d.objects.primitives.Cube;
 import org.papervision3d.render.BasicRenderEngine;
 import org.papervision3d.scenes.Scene3D;
 import org.papervision3d.view.Viewport3D;
--------------------

What this code does is imports all the external classes needed from the flash player, flash ar tool kit, and paper vision 3d needed for this project to work properly.

8 ) Next we will define our class, setup our class properties and variables

--------------------
public class AugmentedReality extends Sprite
 {

 private var video    : Video;
 private var webcam    : Camera;    

 private var flarBaseNode                : FLARBaseNode;
 private var flarParam                   : FLARParam;
 private var flarCode                    : FLARCode;
 private var flarRgbRaster_BitmapData    : FLARRgbRaster_BitmapData;
 private var flarSingleMarkerDetector    : FLARSingleMarkerDetector;
 private var flarCamera3D                : FLARCamera3D;
 private var flarTransMatResult          : FLARTransMatResult;
 private var bitmapData                  : BitmapData;
 private var FLAR_CODE_SIZE              : uint         = 16;
 private var MARKER_WIDTH                : uint         = 80;

 [Embed(source="./assets/FLAR/FLARPattern.pat", mimeType="application/octet-stream")]
 private var Pattern    : Class;

 [Embed(source="./assets/FLAR/FLARCameraParameters.dat", mimeType="application/octet-stream")]
 private var Params : Class;

 private var basicRenderEngine           : BasicRenderEngine;
 private var viewport3D                  : Viewport3D;
 private var scene3D                     : Scene3D;
 private var collada3DModel              : DAE;

 private var VIDEO_WIDTH                 : Number = 640;
 private var VIDEO_HEIGHT                : Number = 480;
 private var WEB_CAMERA_WIDTH            : Number = VIDEO_WIDTH/2;
 private var WEB_CAMERA_HEIGHT           : Number = VIDEO_HEIGHT/2;
 private var VIDEO_FRAME_RATE            : Number = 60;
 private var DETECTION_THRESHOLD         : uint   = 80;
 private var DETECTION_CONFIDENCE        : Number = 0.5;
 private var MODEL_SCALE                 : Number = 0.2;                

 private var COLLADA_3D_MODEL            : String = "./assets/models/models/bird.dae"; // make sure you rename the original .dae file
--------------------

9 ) Next we will setup the constructor. The constructor will do 4 things. It will prepare the webcam, the marker detection, and the rendering for papervision3D. Then, it will repeatedly loop to update the marker and the rendering of our turkey

--------------------
public function AugmentedReality ()
 {
 prepareWebCam();
 prepareMarkerDetection();
 preparePaperVision3D();
 addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, loopToDetectMarkerAndUpdate3D);
 }
--------------------

10 ) Next step we will define all of the methods listed in step 9.

--------------------
private function prepareWebCam () : void
 {
 video = new Video(VIDEO_WIDTH, VIDEO_HEIGHT);
 webcam = Camera.getCamera();
 webcam.setMode(WEB_CAMERA_WIDTH, WEB_CAMERA_HEIGHT, VIDEO_FRAME_RATE);
 video.attachCamera(webcam);
 addChild(video);
 }

private function prepareMarkerDetection () : void
 {
 flarParam = new FLARParam();
 flarParam.loadARParam(new Params() as ByteArray);
 flarCode = new FLARCode (FLAR_CODE_SIZE, FLAR_CODE_SIZE);
 flarCode.loadARPatt(new Pattern());

 bitmapData = new BitmapData(VIDEO_WIDTH, VIDEO_HEIGHT);
 bitmapData.draw(video);
 flarRgbRaster_BitmapData = new FLARRgbRaster_BitmapData(bitmapData);
 flarSingleMarkerDetector = new FLARSingleMarkerDetector (flarParam, flarCode, MARKER_WIDTH);
 }

private function preparePaperVision3D () : void
 {
 basicRenderEngine     = new BasicRenderEngine();
 flarTransMatResult     = new FLARTransMatResult();
 viewport3D             = new Viewport3D();
 flarCamera3D         = new FLARCamera3D(flarParam);
 flarBaseNode         = new FLARBaseNode();
 scene3D             = new Scene3D();
 scene3D.addChild(flarBaseNode);

 collada3DModel = new DAE ();
 collada3DModel.load(COLLADA_3D_MODEL);
 collada3DModel.scaleX = collada3DModel.scaleY = collada3DModel.scaleZ = MODEL_SCALE;
 collada3DModel.x = -30;
 collada3DModel.y = -530;
 collada3DModel.rotationX = 90;
 collada3DModel.rotationY = 0;
 collada3DModel.rotationZ = 0;

 flarBaseNode.addChild(collada3DModel);
 addChild (viewport3D);
 }

//and finally

private function loopToDetectMarkerAndUpdate3D (aEvent : Event) : void
 {
 bitmapData.draw(video);

 try {

 if(    flarSingleMarkerDetector.detectMarkerLite (flarRgbRaster_BitmapData, DETECTION_THRESHOLD) &&
 flarSingleMarkerDetector.getConfidence() > DETECTION_CONFIDENCE                            ) {

 flarSingleMarkerDetector.getTransformMatrix(flarTransMatResult);
 flarBaseNode.setTransformMatrix(flarTransMatResult);
 basicRenderEngine.renderScene(scene3D, flarCamera3D, viewport3D);
 }
 } catch (error : Error) {}
 }
 }
}
--------------------

11 ) This concludes the amount of code we need. Lastly, let’s jump back to the .fla we created and attach this Actionscript (.as) file to it.

12 ) That’s the last step, export the fla, grant the swf permission to use your camera and hold your marker up to the webcam.

All in all, augmented reality is still low in functionality and uses a large chunk of CPU power, however there is a pretty big “awe” factor involved. I put a custom marker of my own on the back of my business cards and it goes over extremely well during interviews. It shows that you are up-to-date on web trends and are there to impress.
And of course, I’ve included the source files with all of the work. However, in order to get the most out of this tutorial I recommend following the tutorial and only making references to the source for help if you get stuck. The source files are greatly //commented for this reason.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to read my blog post and tutorial. If you get the opportunity post your own AR experiments in a comment.

Also, if you have any questions please post them in a comment so everyone can benefit from them.