[Edu-sig] RUR-PLE video

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Looking forward to the ShowMeDo version if it runs in a web browser? 
Presumably it it be somewhere here?
    http://showmedo.com/videos/python
Interesting site with a bunch of Python videos.

Love to see the link when it is up. Making the video seems like half the 
battle, but, no offense, making it run when viewing a web page (from 
Flash? Or Quicktime?) is probably the other half. (Easy for me to say, 
given I never tried it myself, or even know where to start. :-)

There is also the more general "YouTube" site.
My wife recently sent me this link from there:
   "Multi-Touch Interaction Research"
   http://youtube.com/watch?v=0l29zW4_W5E
Amazing images of the future (R&D of today) of touch-based computing! I 
assume that is all working software and hardware they are demonstrating?
Something else for me to think about for PataPata (which means "touch, 
touch" in Xhosa and related South Africa area languages, think "pat pat").

After Francois' video, I'm really seeing the power of a few minute video 
to present enough of an idea to motivate you to download it and explore it 
on your own. Of course, when I did work in robotics years ago, everyone 
made videos -- but usually because something always went wrong when you 
demonstrated it live. :-) Still, having seen something work, even briefly, 
I think you can be more motivated to push through all the install and 
configuration issues. Screenshots do a lot, but they can't convey a 
certain level of interaction easily. So, another thing to consider for 
video design is whether to do a walk through tutorial, or do one like the 
link above on "Multi-Touch Interaction Research" which is just skipping 
through short examples with a music soundtrack. Of course, doing at least 
one of each might be ideal.

Hey, maybe if I could import your RUR-PLE components into PataPata 
somehow, we could do one video about both? :-) Anyway, something to think 
about down the road when/if I can start raiding other projects 
(respectfully :-) for great code and ideas (PythonCard is on my list too. :-)

By the way, on microphones, having worked in a speech recognition group 
long ago, quality microphones as well as proper microphone positioning do 
make a huge difference, and I would suggest a wearable headset, such as 
for example something by Andrea,
   http://www.andreaelectronics.com/Buy/headsets.htm
   http://www.andreaelectronics.com/Buy/ProductDesc/NC91.htm
for the best quality sound (almost any manufacturer's ~US$30 headset 
microphone will probably be good enough though). In watching movies, it 
seems people are much more forgiving of poor video quality then poor sound 
quality, strangely enough. Perhaps humans are used to seeing images 
obscured by things like leaves and tall grass or dust or haze, whereas 
sounds are almost always crisp. For tips and tests on microphone 
positioning, you can use one of the speech recognition packages. You might 
find an old boxed package somewhere cheap you could use just for the 
microphone positioning feedback, and they often come with good enough 
microphones. But if you do it on your own, perhaps some of the speech 
recognition advice might be useful? Which is to position the headset 
microphone boom receiver part far enough away and a little to one side of 
your mouth so that you capture the speech sound well enough without 
getting too much general breathing and too many air puffs on various 
specific words. So, if you are already using a headset microphone and you 
are not happy with the sound quality, you could try just positioning what 
you have differently too, and see how that works for you.

All the best.

--Paul Fernhout

Andre Roberge wrote:
> Hi all!
> 
> I've created a rur-ple video demo, similar to the one that was made for
> patapata.  It is currently available from the usual place:
> https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=125834
> Note that you will need 7zip, also available from sourceforge, to 
> decompress
> it.
> 
> The original video file (.avi) is ... 500 Mb.  I compressed it to a zip 
> file
> which reduced it to 100 Mb ... but that was still way too big.  After
> sending it to Ian from ShowMeDo.com (who had initially contacted me
> suggesting that I made such a video), he pointed out that 7zip could
> compress files much better.  After trying a few options, I managed to
> compress it down to 5 Mb!
> 
> The video should appear on ShowMeDo within a week or so, in quicktime 
> format
> I believe.
> 
> This was very much a "let's do it, more or less improvised" kind of
> production, but it should give the flavour of rur-ple (for those that have
> never tried it).  It also made me realise that I need a better microphone
> :-(
> 
> André