Had a big laugh out of this video. Try it out at http://en.tackfilm.se/

You upload your photo and voila! See yourself in an inspiring video.

As some of my friends might have known, I had been working on a project called SHIRTPAL which is an online fashion retail venture dealing with custom tailored dress shirts.

Today I am happy to announce that we are having our first event this weekend on the 6th February, Saturday in Singapore where we are inviting people to come down to have their measurements taken by our professional tailor from Singapore and also our Bangkok tailor who has flown in for the event.

We also thought it would be nice to share some knowledge on dress shirts like what to wear and how to do color coordination with your pants and ties etc. so we put together a 15 minutes short seminar (crash course) to get anyone started on custom dress shirts.

Shirt prices are based on their fabric and generally ranges from $55 – $75 with some premium ones at $95. We are giving a $10 discount at the event for any 2 shirts bought. SHIRTPAL’s fabric sources come from Bangkok and Japan.

More details and appointment booking information are available on the events page at http://sg.shirtpal.com/singapore

Try out the customization tool at http://www.shirtpal.com/unique

p.s. Drop me a note if you are coming

Here are the photos (sorry for some of the blurred photos because I took them in a rush)
Also note that the protective sticker was on the endlighten so the blobs would have been diffused and don’t appear as clear as they would have. Edges were also not polished and were rough.

Here is the IKEA code for the cabinet I bought:

The table with makeshift cardboard to hold the mini acrylic piece I got from Art Friends at Bras Basah Complex for around $8 SGD:

The projector and materials in the cabinet, notice the cables running out from a small hole through the top, it was pretty convenient without having to manually drill a hole

The first run of the initial set up:

The blurry projection on about 40 pieces of laminating pockets as diffuser, acrylic at the bottom of those sheets

Close up view from under the cabinet:

In this iteration of the set up, there were basically loads of problems
- Hot spot from the IR illuminator
- Hot spot from the projector
- Floppy disk filter largely not effective (only discovered later on when the infrared cut filter arrived and made the magical difference)
- Double image from the standard mirror used (explained below)
- Lack of a proper holder to hold the mirror
- The laminating sheets were very poor diffusers

Explanation for double image:
In a standard mirror, there are two layers

| <- layer A | <- layer B

layer A is the glass layer and layer B is the reflective surface, because of refraction at the glass layer, some of the light slows and bends and causes another faint image to be projected beside the original image on the projection surface. The answer to this would be an industrial front surface mirror. These front surface mirrors are pretty fragile so special care has to be taken not to scratch its delicate surface.

Eventually the PS3 eye could not capture any blobs at all with the projector on. With the projector off, it was better and blobs could be registered. The PS3 eye is removed from its case and embedded in the makeshift Styrofoam holder (which is bad as I found out later on because the camera sat on the projector and the Styrofoam basically hits everything up a lot and caused the projector to overheat and shut down automatically after just 3 - 5 minutes)

These are the equipments I used above
- 1 x Sanyo PLC-XW60
- 1 x IR illuminator (domed shape, 180 degrees illumination, bought from Jia Ying at Sim Lim Square)
- 1 x normal mirror from IKEA (they don't sell single pieces, but set of 4s)
- 1 x PS3 Eye modified with floppy disk visible light filter
- 1 x Frosted acrylic from Art Friends
- Many pieces of laminating sheets
- 1 x cabinet
- 1 x multi plug extension
- 1 x Sony TZ notebook

* not in the list but it helps to have a wireless mouse/keyboard

More to come in part 3..

* I have managed to create the working table and a video of which is available at youtube
Video of the completed table running demo from touchlib:

This is the Playstation 3 EYE camera that will be modified to become IR capable. For people residing in Singapore, this is the packaging for the correct version of the camera to get. You can buy this at any Sony Style shop locally. Do note that some local game shops sell the European version of which I am unsure whether it is “friendly” towards modification.

The Camera removed from its shell

The dismantled pieces:

The lens mount removed from the circuit board:

I think I did a pretty lousy job in removing the IR blocking filter from the rear of the lens mount, look at those jaggy edges:

This is the IR blocking filter removed. It was damaged when it was removed.

The visible light filter installed (cut out from floppy disk). This filter functions by blocking out visible light and letting infrared light through.

And this is my work desk where all the mess is. The top right corner is a wide angle (180 degrees) IR illuminator that I am using for the Rear DI set up.

Next I will be making the box to sit the small piece of acrylic I got from a local art and craft shop (12″ x 18″ x 3mm(T)). It is available at Art friends for all you Singaporeans out there and costs around $8 only. Great for testing and fiddling around. I will be running tests soon using tbeta once I find time and I will post the tracking results.

On a side note: I am also intending to build a DSI table which uses a special acrylic called Endlighten. If you are living in Singapore/Malaysia and are interested in getting a piece of this very hard to get acrylic please contact me and let me know. I have managed to find a local manufacturer who has kindly indented and offered to laser cut the standard sheet (120″ x 80″ to 10 pieces of 39″ x 22″ x 10mm(T)) at $200 USD per piece. There are 4 pieces left for reserve as of this posting.

Project Eagle is something interesting I heard from Duane Nickel on his wonderful talk on SOA (Service oriented architecture) and its about Adobe’s continued foray into cloud computing.

They are similar to the popular minds cafe and serve food and a great array of board games. The food and atmosphere has a nice homely touch to it. Just remember to bring cash as they don’t accept cards at the moment.

Flyer

This is awesome news because I had been fretting over the issue of slow content delivery in different geographical locations for an upcoming project. Traditional methods would have required the content to be mirrored across geographically targetted locations and then code had to be written to take advantage of these servers in different locations.

The server distribution is as follows currently, which I guess basically serves the major markets in the world today.

United States

• Ashburn, VA
• Dallas/Fort Worth, TX
• Los Angeles, CA
• Miami, FL
• Newark, NJ
• Palo Alto, CA
• Seattle, WA
• St. Louis, MO

Europe

• Amsterdam
• Dublin
• Frankfurt
• London

Asia

• Hong Kong
• Tokyo

The response to the conference was great with full attendance and we are looking forward to garnering feedback from the audience and the organising team for post-event analysis. The materials for the conference will be posted on the TAC website’s post event webpage soon so if you attended the conference, you will be able to download the materials for reference/review/practise very soon.

It was also nice to meet some of the guys from the local media, design, development agencies/houses and hearing their thoughts of flash/flex and how they are actually adopting the technologies in their day-to-day work and projects. The conference was fertile ground for networking and I guess that everyone involved would have gained a friend, a contact or some knowledge, one way or another

If you dropped by the conference, do leave a comment behind to say “Hi!”. Cheers!

Update: (Some of the conference photos)

Full set here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/alvinzhang/sets/72157608166830061/

TAC Group pool on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/groups/tacsg/