This is some of the previous projects I have worked on. This includes some production products, technical demos/research and hackathon projects. This page is a work in progress – I suspect it will take me a while to get through the list.
Open Glasgow Future Cities 48 hour Health Hackathon
I participated in the team that won the £20,000 first prize in the Open Glasgow 48 hour Health Hackathon. Future Hack was a challenge to pitch an idea that could improve the health of Glasgow. We pitched the idea of Glasgo! – A gamified social pedometer app for mobile devices. The app encourages children to enjoy walking by offering incentives for reaching fitness goals, via badges and discounts. I was one of two developers working on this project. The judges mentioned that a key aspect of us winning was due to the quality of our demo application.
Links:
Financial times: Our app was shown in this clip about the Open Glasgow hackathons.
VentusAR
This is a product I worked on during my five years at Linknode (now called True View Visuals). This made use of Monogame (a cross platform rendering framework based on XNA) and Xamarin. This application ran on both iOS and Android and its aim was to visualise 3D structures such as wind farms, solar farms and transmission towers. For the majority of my time at Linknode I was the sole iOS developer and built the iOS application from scratch using the native UI and was also the main 3D Engineer working on this application. The application makes use of the motion sensor/GPS in the device to understand the location and orientation of the device and then render the visuals. The app also uses a digital terrain model to allow it to mask turbines that are occluded by hills. In addition to the realtime visuals, the meta data is captured so we can re-generate the AR visuals using photographs or video in the background. This allows users to modify the turbine layout/specs in the office in realtime or at public exhibitions. In the clips below – the device was mounted on a tripod to improve the stability of the visuals.
B4itsBuilt
“A mix of nine small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and local planning authorities were selected by Future Cities Catapult to receive £200,000 to transform outdated planning systems”. As part of this initiative Linknode built a prototype application that made use of visual based tracking for accurate visualisation in cities. This prototype made use of a workflow I created to directly import Building Information Models in a way that would allow us to render them efficiently (and in the future more realistically). My main jobs were to include the building rendering and completing the iOS specific portion of the Xamarin.Forms driven UI. However I was later tasked with designing and implementing a new tracking system after there were some issues with the initial system.
We also had a prototype that did real time occlusions for dynamic objects – the end result being the digital BIM model would not render in front of traffic and pedestrians. I came up with a pipeline for this which would allow the feature to run in realtime on the tablet devices. Below is a clip of a demo of the prototype. As the camera jiggles around the
Links
Article on the Future Cities Catapult initiative.
ReRun – WRLD Challenge
This was a global competition to build an app using any of the Wrld SDKs. I chose to use the iOS SDK to build an app that linked with Strava – an online workout sharing platform. The application pulls in running/cycling workouts from Strava and animates them on the 3D map while providing statistics to the user via a graph. I made use of the “Charts” sdk to render the charts. The winner of the competition has not been announced yet. I began the hackathon late as I was not initially aware of the event. Nevertheless I enjoyed the challenge of trying my best to do as much as I could over the festive period! Since the video was made I have fixed the layout issues to extend the white background of the graph to improve the aesthetics – and added more measurements to the graph. This was also the first application I wrote in swift I am actually really enjoying the language!
Google Cardboard/Open Street map Rendering
This project uses Open Street Map city rendering code I had written in the past to visualise the city through google cardboard. This was rendered on an old iPhone 5s and runs at 60 FPS. The app downloads JSON polygon/polyline data from the overpass API and then process the 2D data to create 3D information and finally renders using OpenGL. The reason for doing this was mainly to have a sample which I could use to build other projects on top of such as ARKit demo’s and google cardboard, and render using quad trees and stream in the city data. In the distant past I had also ported the iOS cardboard library to Xamarin.iOS – which was a good experience as it taught be details about headmounted VR which I was previously not aware of. This includes issues such as chromatic aberration, and how to use the vignette to improve performance etc.
Links
Github: I posted a stripped down cardboard demo of this project on my GitHub that shows a spinning cube.
Rufus Programmer 