Building up a CAVE at Industrial Design (TUE)
During the last month or so I’ve been working hard alongside other colleagues to build up a CAVE system for a project demonstration. For those unfamiliar with what a CAVE is, let’s start by saying that CAVE is the acronym for Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (yes, recursive stuff…) which basic idea is to build up a room which walls can be turned into screens where images or video is projected (usually a coordinated representation of an environment or real/virtual scene), providing an immersive and interactive experience for the user (that’s you and me). My part on this was to figure out a relatively easy way of projecting an interactive medieval world into the walls of such an installation, circumventing the problems that usually come with it (projection alignment, synchronization, etc.)
Though at the moment I can’t reveal much about it (not that it’s classified or anything, but it’s not finished, nor presented to the “client” yet), I’ll show some pics of the CAVE physical installation and will keep posting on how this advances until we complete it.
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Programmer’s Journal
XAMPP for Linux setup
Today I got XAMPP for Linux (formerly known as LAMPP) finally up and running. Here are some caveats that I encountered while completing the installation:
- Though the “installation” of XAMPP is supposed to be as simple as “uncompress and run” it actually needs you to take care of the right permissions for some of the folders in the installation directory. Unless you are a security freak, the best thing you can do is the following:
- chmod -R 644 /opt/lampp (assumming that your installation directory is actually “/opt”)
- chmod -R 755 /opt/lamp/htdocs (to avoid some problems with the stuff you will install inside later on)
- If after doing the pervious step you ever encounter the error “ERROR 2002: Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket” when you try to start phpMyAdmin, you need to go to the folder phpMyAdmin in the XAMPP installation (/opt/lamp/phpmyadmin) and change the permissions of the file config.inc.php to “644″ (chmod 644 /opt/lampp/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php). I admit that this is a weird fix, but for some reason phpMyAdmin doesn’t like other permissions than this when telling XAMPP to connect to the database and produces an even weirder error which is totally unrelated to the actual permission problem…
Anyway, i’ll keep posting some other tips I find…
VDI Award 2008
This year, the Association of German Engineers (Vereinte Deutsche Ingenieuren -VDI) decided to include my University among the candidates to obtain the award to “Best Master Thesis or Diplomarbeit of 2008″, and I was nominated as “Best Thesis from the Faculty of Informatics” by FH Bonn-Rhein-Sieg for my work on artificial surprise.
Competing for the prize were 11 candidates from the 3 Universities of Applied Sciences in the Köln-Bonn area. Unfortunately I didn’t win the first prize, but it was already an honor to be the only foreigner nominated to the prize, and actually had the chance to present my work to an elite group of engineers of the region.
The award ceremony took place at the Technologie Park in Bergisch-Gladbach (East of Köln) on the 1st. of December.
Some more content…
Wow… Finally I took the time to add some more content to the site, but definitely this is going much slower than I thought. For now I added some info to the Research section, including some publications. I also added some pics to the Photos section in case you want to check them out. Finally I put out a word about Cosmopo.
As soon as I have some more time, I will put more interesting stuff out there…
Well that was easier than I thought…
When I started to work on this site and WordPress came into the spotlight as something really easy to use, I didn’t really believe it… But it turns out that it was as easy as it promised… wow. I’m impressed.
In any case, the site is up and running! Now I just have to start adding content regularly (which is the thoughest part).
