This week saw the return of Summer Games Done Quick 2018, which means a week of games being cleared as quickly as possible by the best players in the world, all the time while millions of dollars are donated to worthy causes like Doctor's Withouts Borders or The Prevent Cancer Foundation.

I've been following this event every year since 2014, when I found out about it through a recommendation to watch a Yoshi's Island speedrun from 2013.

The story and history of the strategies that have developed over the years for each game can be interesting in itself. I can heartily recommend the Youtube channel Summong Salt, which has long series of videos detailing the dedication of the people who have brought the times of the games down to their current, sometimes unbelievable levels.

Speedruns of racing games may not sound like the most interesting kind of run, but Summoning Salt proves us wrong with this video.

A Visual Studio Code update just broke my Spacemacs-like keybindings. While I did appreciate Spacemacs for it's well thought-out design, I thought the effort to maintain all my configuration layers was just too much.

Visual Studio Code managed to get close enough for me with it's sane defaults. However, I did miss Spacemacs ingenious leader key, in which pressing space in Vim's normal mode would pop up a dialogue telling you which following keys did what. This way, any command is just 3-4 keypresses away, discoverability is high, and the most used commands will soon be committed to muscle memory.

VSpaceCode did a good enough job for VSCode, but as said, broke just today. Also, it doesn't provide the pop-up, greatly reducing the discoverability.

But then this popped up:

Earlier today this extension had only one single download, and the whole project was started by Microsoft employee michaelgriscom just 4 days ago. It seems quite promising, giving key hints in the VSCode status row. However it's currently missing some of the project- and file selection functionality of VSpaceCode and conflicts with Vim mode. This latter issue is a dealbreaker for me, but I will be keeping my eyes on this extension!

Here's a gif from the repo, showing some functionality:

This last year I've had the pleasure of working together with Mölndal City Museum and artist and choreographer Marika Hedemyr on ENTER Mölndal, a mixed reality walk.

We premiered yesterday in Kvarnyn, Mölndal, an old milling and industrial area, and had over 50 visitors during the day.

ENTER Mölndal guides the visitor around a couple of key locations near Mölndalsbro, where they stop and explore 360 panoramas. Here, a number of windows are hidden, which take the visitor to stories from the past and present. Marika wrote the script and supervised most of the production, including the great video editing and voice acting. Meanwhile, i worked on the software side of things.

I've wanted to explore AR in the web browser, and the GoPro-funded Forge.js project gave us a nice declarative THREE.js-foundation to stand on. Sadly, during the last year, it seems GoPro's financial troubles have affected the development of the library and I had to spend more time than I had hoped on extending it with basic plugins. In the end, we had to ditch the AR camera as it was just being too janky for the kind of seamless experience we were aiming for. But, I think we succeeded, some iPhone SE-idiosyncrasies aside the 4 or so iterations we carried out really helped make the user trajectory through the experience smooth. Feedback has been great!

This is not mine and Marika's first rodeo, so to speak. In 2016 and 2017 we worked together on Next to You at Korsvägen, an app-based mixed realty walk which DID use some AR elements. But more on that in another post (perhaps)!

Work in Mölndal continues though, as we are opening another part of ENTER Mölndal near Stretered in september. Our target audience will be schoolkids and we hope to be able to experiment more and finally get to create a web-based experience with marker tracking!

I've increasingly come to take notes during lectures and presentations using a combination of photos and notes. A good smartphone can help with both these, as long as image quality is good enough and you're a comfortable touchscreen typist. A 2x lens is very useful for getting good shots of slides.

For the trip RISE recently arranged to HK and Shenzhen I set up a deployment of HackMD. It's a spiritual successor to EtherPad and uses MarkDown and supports real-time collaborative writing. Crucially it also supports upload and embedding of images straight from smartphones.

I took photos using an iPhone 7 Plus, using an iOS app called BatchResize2 to scale all images. I'm not a fan of touchscreen typing however so I used a ThinkPad x230 burner laptop (that keyboard can't be beat!) to take notes. The documents could then be shared to the other people in the delegation using the HackMDs publish feature, which creates a permalink to a version of the document formatted for readability.

This post was originally written in Swedish, following the Google I/O Conference in early may 2018, and posted to Facebook. Below is a slightly edited Google translation, which is not how I would usually do things but feels fitting concerning the subject...

In the wake of Google I/O I wonder if Apple in the long run has a chance if they do not get better on cloud services and AI. Or is the value of these features exaggerated?

In Sweden, it is easy to dismiss voice-driven services and AI-curated as tech-geeky gimmicks, but in a major market such as the United States, the experience seems far more impressive and valuable to the general public. Nearly 20 million US households have already acquired smart speakers and can, with services like Amazon Prime and their credit cards, consume wildly from home with just the voice.

However, I find it much more exciting how the opportunity grows to let AI-driven services help us navigate the current information surplus. Google's new task of allowing AI and automation to relieve us of the screen fatigue they themselves helped to create feels both fresh and deeply ironic.

But what really sparked my thoughts around this is thinking back to this article I read a couple of months ago.
https://stratechery.com/2016/apples-organizational-crossroads/

In it, Ben Thompson argues that Apple's organizational model, which is so well suited for developing well-integrated ecosystems with hardware, does not work well at all for services. It's two years old now, have we seen something that suggests the opposite?

In the latest issue of Level, there are 4 pages of wonderful west coast indie goodness in it! Automat, Indie GBG, my Lykta horror game project (and some Skövde). There’s even mention of the awesome Collaboratory initiative!

Lykta requires accurate positioning indoors, and the road to a functional solution has seen a couple of (educational) dead ends along the way. With the horror experience starting to come together, I think it was time to start off by talking a bit about the challenges we’ve been facing.

The Move.Me server software debug screen (i.e. what the PS3 that’s tracking the controllers sees). Controllers are visualized as swords.

Many location-aware apps use GPS, but this provides at best an accuracy down to a couple of meters outdoors, and is even more imprecise indoors. Our current solution is based heavily on Sony’s Playstation Move system and their Move.Me API, which provides sub-centimeter accuracy in positioning in an area of about 3.5×4 meters, as well as very accurate orientation tracking. However it is a rather closed system, as the calculations on the data from the controllers and tracking camera are all done in an actual PS3 system running special server software, with the position and orientation data sent over network to a computer. The picture below explains our current setup.

A PS3 receives sensor information from the wireless controller attached to the handheld device, and also tracks the position of the glowing sphere through the PS Move camera. The orientation and position of the controllers are computed from this information, and sent over the network to the smartphone in the handheld device.

When we started the project we had heard about this cool thing called sensor fusion, where different sensor data, e.g. that from the gyros, accelerometers and the compass of a smartphone, is combined to a more accurate whole. We hoped we could use this to calculate the position and orientation of the phone. We managed to create an algorithm that made it possible to track the orientation, but this was very sensitive to compass disturbances.

The data from the smartphone sensors was far from accurate enough to use for position tracking however. Our first solution used a ceiling-mounted Wiimote as a wireless IR-camera to track strong IR-LEDs on the handheld unit. However it was hard to cover a wide enough area as the Wiimote camera has a narrow field of view.

The early Lykta prototype as part of the Invisible Showroom project

We had a closer look at the PS Move and realized it had great accuracy for positioning. A camera detects the position and size of the glowing ball on the controller, and from this the controller position can be calculated in relation to the camera. Sony’s Move.Me API, which we ultimately chose to use, did not seem to be accessible outside the US, so we started off with the open source PS Move API by Thomas Pearl. We wrote a Unity plugin for it and got to try the experimental orientation tracking capabilities. They worked, but at the time they had problems with drifting which required constant recalibration, something that would be tricky to do in a real use context.

Open source PS Move API tracking glowing sphere

When we finally inquired about the Move.Me software we were lucky and got in touch with just the right person at Sony, and got hold of the Move.Me server software surprisingly quickly. It turned out to surpass our expectations, as it continually calibrates orientation on the fly by comparing movement according to the camera image with data from the sensors in the wand.  An additional bonus is that position and orientation data is given relative to flat ground. However, one hard-coded limit that hits us hard however is the maximum range of 3.5 meters, which gives a pretty small play area.

Since early autumn me and some classmates have been working to realize a sort of virtual reality flashlight concept. We’ve been trying out all kinds of solutions, including IR LEDs and Wiimotes, but around Christmas we finally found the perfect tracking technology… the oft-overlooked Playstation Move!

We just tried it out with a sort of “virtual art gallery” application in a local library, here’s an uncut video from the event. I’m not providing any input at all, except pointing the “flashlight” around. There is some network lag but we’re working on reducing that.

Though similar concepts have been explored before, we haven’t found any solutions that work this well without requiring expensive motion capture equipment, cables or AR tracking markers. We call it Project Lykta, Swedish for lantern. The handheld unit is wireless, though when we shot this video it was still being charged for the main event.

I’m set to explore this concept further over the coming months in my master thesis, Creating emotive experiences through handheld projection mapping. Basically, I’m aiming to create a horror experience for two players using this technology.

This post was written on my old blog Rakethopp.com in november 2010. I've revived it as the topic of World of Warcraft has become quite relevant for me again

Jag måste erkänna att jag varit ganska skeptisk till WoW under åren. Mitt första MMO var EVE Online som jag började spela 2004, och det var i slutet av det året jag sprang runt någon vecka i slutet av WoW-betan (tyvärr lyckas jag inte hitta några screenshots från den tiden). Landskapen var fruktansvärt stämningsfulla, men som många andra EVE-spelare tröttnade jag snabbt på alla repetitiva quests och avsaknad av djup i början av spelet. Hey, jag hade asteroider att mina!

Stämningen lockade dock och jag har med några års mellanrum skapat trial accounts för att springa runt lite i den fina världen. Spelet i sig lockade dock aldrig, och inga av mina vänner som jag träffar i vardagen spelade det heller (otroligt nog). Jag har nog aldrig riktigt känt att jag varit i rätt målgrupp för Blizzards spel, mest för att jag haft känslan att de framförallt är riktade till kompetitiva spelare… eller samlare med en släng OCD och alldeles för mycket fritid.  Jag hänger sällan kvar vid ett spel tillräckligt länge för att bli bra nog att tävla (helkass på StarCraft 1), och orkar aldrig samla ihop till epic gear/100 %/X antal achievements. Flest nya spelupplevelser när den dör vinner!

Med det sagt började jag dock spela Lord of the Rings Online i början av året, och det var faktiskt genom det spelet jag verkligen kom att uppskatta Tolkiens universum. Samtidigt insåg jag nog att även ganska trista quests kan bli kul i rätt sällskap.

Jag har nog inte alltid haft så stor respekt för Blizzard, iallafall inte deras WoW-avdelning, mycket eftersom jag tyckte att de tar till billiga knep för att locka spelare. På sätt och vis fick nog StarCraft II och även en runda Diablo II på OaLAN mig att börja uppskatta Blizzard-spel, och när de nu bestämde sig för att göra om hela den gamla världen i WoW kunde jag inte vara annat än imponerad över att de vågar göra en total makeover på sin gamla kassako. Det har var också en bra anledning att skapa en ny trial och springa runt lite mer med en lvl 2-3 gubbe och se den gamla världen innan den försvinner för gott. Det var framförallt Kalimdor som skulle genomgå de största förändringarna, och det var denna kontinent jag sett minst av tidigare.

Nu blev detta inte av förrän kvällen innan katastrofen, tisdagen den 23:e November, så det var bara att börja kuta. Min nyckläckta (?!) Orc sprang först till Orgrimmar, som nu kvällen innan katastrofen var invaderad av elaka elementals som ledde till en hel del besök till kyrkogården. Därefter var det dags för det stora och trista Barrens-området, som snart skulle bli en hel del intressantare iom klyvningen till två mindre områden. Jag måste erkänna att jag faktiskt inte läst på så mycket om vad som faktiskt skulle förändras, och föga anade jag att Thousand Needles skulle bli rejält mycket blötare. Jag hann iallafall upptäcka den charmiga racingbanan ute i saltöknen the Shimmering Flats. Numera ligger den på en pråm i vad som nu kallas Shimmering Deep. Jag fortsatte ner till Tanaris och Un’Goro-kratern, men förutom ett par besök till Stormwind och Ironforge hann jag inte med så mycket mer.

Nu vill två gamla vänner att jag ska spela med dem i den spännande nya världen, och efter att ha sett några av de nya låglevequestarna  är jag väl beredd att prova lite. Jag kommer nog komma av mig precis som jag till slut gjorde i LotRO och EVE, men de där Worgen ser iallafall ganska balla ut…