The speakers that I saw today were:

Lance Priebe – who gave a good account of Club Penguin and its history. Very interesting.

Patrick Hudson – ex Ensemble Studios who talked about their move from big budget to smaller scale games. Some interesting stuff here but it did sound a bit like “we have just discovered Agile dev” (there was more to it then that of course)

Tracey Sellar – from Microsoft’s usability/user research group discussing their work helping tune AAA titles. The video clip of the usability test session with a guy who obviously wasn’t much of gamer playing a GTA style game was hilarious.

Scott Foe – gave a very good presentation of the state of the game industry and what a studio needs to be doing to be successful.  Interesting push for getting a minimum viable product to market and the using Kanban to create content and updates in a sustainable way.

David Rosenbaum – covering the history of the game industry, the current platforms and the next cycle of platforms and delivery channels.

Sean Kauppinen – threw up lots of facts and figures covering trends in technologies, platforms and markets. Nice interactive session.

And lastly Enrico Casarosa from Pixar who premiered “La Luna” the new Pixar short film. Apparently this was the first time it had been shown in the Southern Hemisphere!  He then proceeded to give a detailed and fascinating account of the development of the short. I only wished that they would have played the short a second time so you could see it in light of all the great background detail that Enrico gave. Here is a YouTube clip from the short:

Click here to view the embedded video.

All in all very cool day. Tomorrow I’m in the “Games Master Class” which should be fun and on Thursday we get to go hang out at Weta which should be awesome.

I decided to see what I could do with this data. Below is my first attempt. It is a “density” map of all the bus stops in Auckland.

Click here for a hi-res version that allows you to pan and zoom.

The initial version of the map only took about 30 minutes to create but I have spent a few hours tinkering with it since then.

Quick guide
Here is quick guide to the process if you want to try something like this yourself:

1. I extracted stops.txt from the data set
2. I then gpsvisualizer.com to plot out the stops as data points on map. I got it to output a 4096 pixel wide .svg file
3. Next I used Inkscape to edit the .svg file, adding the text & zoomed area and exporting the result as a  .png file.
4. Lastly I used the Google Maps Image Cutter to generate the pannable and zoomable version. The Google Maps Image Cutter is a pretty neat tool. It takes any big image, chops it into different resolution tiles and then spits out some html which uses the Google Maps API to view your chopped up image.

Next steps
If I get some more time I will try create some more visualizations. I’m thinking  it would be interesting to merge the bus stop density data with some population data. Also an animation showing 24hrs of bus movement compressed into a couple of minutes would be pretty nice too.

SvnViz builds visualizations of the activity within a Subversion repository. Here is an example of the default visualization run against the project that I am currently working on. Green dots indicate file adds, blue dots are modified files and red dots are deleted files. The greater the activity of the user the higher their score.

Click here to view the embedded video.

SvnViz also provides a framework for creating your own visualizations. Simply extend the FrameViz class and implement the generateFrame method. To run your vizualization class, instead of the default class, just pass the fully qualified name of your class to the application using the -vc parameter.

Source files can be downloaded from here. All code is released under the GPL.

Have fun and drop me a line if you come up with an interesting visualization.

After doing some digging around on the web it turns out that what I wanted was a light tent which would allow me to take nicely lit macro shots of items on a “horizon-less” white background.

After some further digging I turned up a number of links on how to build your own light tent which would work just as well as a bought one! This appealed to me since I’m a cheapskate :)

This link: http://digital-photography-school.com/blog/how-to-make-a-inexpensive-light-tent/ seemed to provide the best set of instructions and had some very nice end result pictures. Digging through all the junk in my garage for about 20 minutes turned up all the bits and pieces I needed and after another 30 minutes or so of cutting and gluing, I had my light tent (or more accurately my light box).

The only dampener on the proceedings is that I have skillfully put my mini-tripod somewhere “safe” and I now cannot find it :(

Balancing the lamp on top of the box, I turned on my camera and furiously took pictures of every small item on my desk using my S7000′s macro mode. The images looked great on the camera’s tiny LCD but when transferred to my PC the levels were all wrong and no amount of tinkering with photoshop (with my feeble photoshop-fu) seemed to fix them.

Going back to the web it turns out that I need to set up the white balance for my camera. I did this but still wasn’t getting quite the effect what I was after.  I believe that my problem is that the lamp I am using is not putting out a particularly strong nor white light.

In the end I set my camera to take RAW images and then manipulated the heck out of the images in photoshop to get what I was after. I’m very pleased with the results, here are some pics of the light box and some of the Lego blocks: