Google Cardboard

I tried out google's cardboard virtual reality (VR) system this week. It was awesome!

I have always been a big google fanboy, mostly because they make life cheaper and easier. And most of their applications are free. What is to really be admired though is their commitment to lateral thinking and cool science. For the uninformed, google cardboard is one such project. A couple of google employees took some time out to write an application that ports google maps, photos and youtube to a stereo display format on supported android devices. They then designed a simple cardboard mount to hold the phone to be viewed through lenses on the mount. They even put a cute little magnet contraption on the side of the mount to act as a switch detected by the phone. And then they released the app and the mount schematics for free. 

I had heard of some upcoming sophisticated VR devices that are apparently poised to take humanity a lot closer to The Matrix. So when google announced this cheap cardboard app, I wanted to try it out. I was skeptical however. You see, most of my specialized viewing experiences have been less fun than expected. Stereo images make my eyes water and 3D movies give me a headache. I still grieve the day I spent $17 on a that awful remake of Clash of the Titans (in 3D!) that looked better without the glasses. I spent a weekend playing Super Mario 3D land on the 3DS console and it was OK because I turned off the 3D function. But a gadget-geek coworker encouraged me to try it out just as a craft project, so I bought in. The schematics were simple enough and in no time I had the pieces ready. Getting the lenses was a little tricky but I managed to find what I needed ($2.52) from the local hipster hardware store. I had a couple of spare magnets lying around for the switch contraption.

Assembly was a breeze and I had the mount ready in ten minutes. The phone app was quite big and I was concerned if my faithful old galaxy nexus would handle the beast but it loaded fine. 

I turned on the app and a playstation-like menu popped up and I could navigate through it by looking around. The dual viewing paired with the lenses worked well enough and I could see just one image; the measurements from the schematics weren't too shabby. I magnet-contraption-clicked on the street view (street vue) option and within seconds my mind was blown. 

It put me on a car driving through a European city in full speed where I was free to look around and it rocked! I am a big google maps user and I spend about half hour everyday taking virtual tours through the world on it. This was that experience on steroids. I spent a good ten minutes on the ride after which I tried the other options, that were mercifully slower paced. The earth option puts you on a stationary spot in a few selected locations and surrounds you with google's 3D building models to look at. You can even fly off to space and look at the earth from above. Tour guide does the same with some select spots in Versailles and adds voiced descriptions. Photosphere allows you to explore you own photosphere images. While all these options were more like trial versions than full fledged virtual worlds, the youtube app seemed more open. It put you in a theater-like surrounding with the video of choice running on the big screen and more videos on the side to look at and click on. Some of the videos seemed related to my viewing history on youtube, so I suspect that it may have a longer lifetime than the other app options. 

It was a fun home project. Overall, the experience was brilliant cheap fun and has me lauding the google engineers that came up with it for their smart work. Thumbs up gentlemen, keep up the good work!

Cedar Bluffs

There are a good number of established trails and state parks around south-west Indiana. Cedar Bluffs remains one of the less discovered locations. I like trails that are less manufactured and more rugged and Cedar Bluffs gets a 8/10 for that. It is lush green, has water bodies, plenty of small creatures and hardly any noise.

It was a nice warm day and we drove south along S Ketcham Rd until we saw a tiny black board marking the entrance to Cedar Bluffs. It is basically a protected nature preserve and you are cautioned to not go off trail and ruin its delicate fauna. 

Ramya had been there before so she was to guide me through the trail. 

The trail started out pretty and innocuous. I let Ramya lead our party and used my camera to cover the walk in google glass-like fashion.

We walked until we hit the stream that goes along the trail. A number of people seem to come here for fishing.

 

On the other side of the trail was this rocky cliff that we had to get to later. 

At one point the trail turned to the left but we decided that we knew better and ended up making our own trail. That is when the fun started.

The trail got a lot less trail-like and we had to now find a way to get to the cliffs from there. So we turned left and headed uphill. 

The place was now a maze of spiderwebs and trees. Note: You will have to leave your arachnophobia at home to come here.

Lost. Yes.

No we were totally off.

After unwillingly and unintentionally destroying a dozen spider homes, we compass-ed our way back to the true trail and we decided to stick to it from that point on. 

Win. And we learnt something.

The trail is actually a smaller stream that joined the one we walked along.

Trail 

Not trail

A little farther on, Ramya found some parts of the trail that she actually remembered!

Like Ariel's grotto but with snakes.

We stayed along the trail until we could get back on the hillock we had seen and walked down the other side of it back to our car. Overall a pretty fun place. I recommend it.

Riddles in the dark

Crapstallography

I spend a good amount of time at work wading through microscopy images of concentrated proteins soaking in salt syrups that should hopefully tease them into forming innocent pretty crystals (that I can mercilessly shot with X-ray guns but that part is another story). It takes just a glance to figure an image out. So with a few thousand conditions and a few images per condition the whole process takes just a few thousand times a few glaces.

Rarely do you get to see something that has crystal written across the image with zoom-in zoom-out effects. The image on the right is a UV light image of the same drop.

Less rarely, you get to see misshapen gunk that has meh written across the image with sound effects that say 'really'?

Then you can spend some time perfecting the syrup recipe until you have something that is workable.

What you see most of the time is either clear boring drops or drops that contain what looks like shredded snakes or alien foetuses.

This one actually looks like the alien from alien.

An that is the scary part. You wade through enough of these crap-drop images that you start seeing mind-game things. Like smiley faces.

Or flirty botched plastic surgery-lips.

Or hand-bags.

Spend enough time and you really start seeing crazy things. Like stars.

Or the Batman.

Must...focus...

I am headed out for some soup, sports and grounded sanity. Peace.

Tennis the menace

I secretly love sports. Watching football and basketball is fun but playing just about any sport is awesome (except for when you play with competitive killjoys). I signed up for a new intramural league sport every semester in grad school and that turned out to be quite useful in a jack of all trades sort of way. I blew my knee out a couple of years back though, as a result of which there is a narrower range of sports that I can play now. No cutting-jumping motions - so no badminton, football, ultimate frisbee, soccer, basketball, and sprinting. Unfortunately those were my favorite sports and now I was forced to find new ones that fit better. I can still play racquetball, racquetball is fun.

I have been trying to get a grip on tennis for close to six years now and most of my best cricketing shots have happened on a tennis court. The muscle memory from playing other racquet sports makes you even more clumsy on the tennis court. Only recently I have managed to get enough of touch that I can actually return a hittable ball to the opponent. But my play is not of exhibition quality, so I mostly pick late evenings and hidden courts to do my dance.

This week, we started playing at the apartment complex court at about 8:30 pm. Twenty minutes in, I was starting to find a groove. A couple of rallies happened. 'I must be getting better at this', I reflected. Just that moment, a balding man with a white t-shirt and frayed shorts walked up to the enclosure. He said something inaudible, so I moved closer. And then the horrifying thing happened.

"Can my son play with you guys?", he requested. He moved aside to reveal a scrawny 8-year old kid clutching a racquet, his pockets bulging with tennis balls. Ignoring all niceties, I inquired seriously, "how good are you?". "Actually, I'm really good", the kid replied nervously. I spat inside my mouth and probably made a face too. "Why not?" my wife said and the kid propped open the gate and entered the enclosure. "Thanks", said the dad and stayed outside to watch.

Now I don't really hate kids and I definitely don't mind playing with them. I just have some scars from my past. I remember playing a reluctant chess game with my (then) 6-year old cousin when I was about 17. He beat me in less than ten moves. Thrice. It hurt bad. I am a pretty competitive person, it is just that I am also simply incompetent. The sensitive ego makes it worse. From then on, I restricted myself to handicap games that still look fair.

So I now had to manage this crisis. I signaled for my wife to join my side of the court. The kid held two balls in his hand. It was surprising that he could fit one in those tiny hands but he held one firmly and bounced the other one on the ground in preparation. He arched back in a perfect semi-circle and let loose his cannon serve at me as I skipped slightly in my spot so nobody would notice me shivering.

BANG! It rammed into the net. I smiled in relief. BANG! The second serve hit the net too. And a third. And a fourth. "Can I just serve like this instead?", the kid asked nervously and motioned to make an underarm serve. "Is that allowed?", I asked my wife with a grin. She ignored me and nodded at the kid.

It was not too bad a game as things turned out. I let the wife serve the entire time. This kid had a talent for apologizing for everything. He raced around the court to take my erratic returns, often with a sorry when he missed (and I chuckled). The dad got his workout around the court enclosure as he picked up and returned balls from my home runs back to the park. I noticed that my wife was a better player than I thought. With a proper opponent, she was able to hit the ball back with a lot of zip on it (though she did not get as many apologies as I did. Ha!). I mostly stared at them play, occasionally chipping in and making the kid run more. Half hour later, it was over and we walked home. I was still grinning.

Lets do this again sometime kid.

 

because, Scatterday

Tech retrospection

This day, a decade ago, I did not have a cell phone. Two decades ago, I did not know what the internet was. Just about six years ago, I did not know what a smartphone was. While, it would seem that my personality has not changed much over time, my lifestyle has been undergoing a massive transition over the last decade in quick jumps to become a lot more minimalistic. I have had a sweet affair with minimalism, at times with borderline OCD-level tendencies to organize and use one tool to its death. This is my love letter to all the technology that has made my life today.

The extremis Iron man. Except it is me.

While I have always stayed regularly updated on tech news, my fanboy tendencies have not involved much purchasing. Somehow the purpose has always been to become an informed buyer, so when the need arises the geek-gadget bought is one that will last its true life with minimal upgrading (and my handling); a long-term release. So when cellphones became commonplace at the start of the millenium, I bought one four years later when multimedia cellphones were being perfected. The main priority has mostly been, to avoid a prototype and find a smooth and lasting experience. My favorite tech picks:   

PSP: I bought a Star Wars: Battlefield limited edition PSP-2000 in winter 2007. I did not want to use my computer for gaming and I was looking for something versatile. I still use the PSP for most my gaming. The experience has not slowed down over the years and some of the titles (GTA: Chinatown wars, LittleBigPlanet, Ratchet and Clank: Size matters) have had tremendous replay value. The portable media capabilities alone would warrant the buy. Just a great piece of hardware that has lasted its value and more.

Macbook pro: Child please, I am not a mac person or something. I just want a device that works smooth and lasts long with minimal maintenance. The Mac experience has been a hard one to beat. I have used this one for five years and it still has not become crusty despite constant use and abuse. It tend to use shell-scripts and home-made scripts often and the unix base has cooperated well. Zero virus issues, mostly bug-free, fast-enough load times - it has allowed me to focus more on what I am doing rather than how.

Nexus: I was fooled into trying out the Motorola Bravo device (awful at best) before I found the Samsung galaxy nexus a year ago. Most cell phones have a very short half-life and the nexus is not one of them. I am a heavy google user; I had my contacts organized on google since 2006 with no idea that this device would someday import and synchronize them; a very pleasant surprise. This device is my mp3 player, gps, organizer, running planner, accelerometer and reading device. It makes a decent communication device too. A lot of my friends and family live far away from me and this device has allowed for smooth, bug-free distance bridging. If only I had more friends using google+.

Google: What can I say about google that has not already been said? I wrote a bit on it some years back. I do not think that google wants to take over the world. They have a bigger agenda than that. I love having synchrony across platforms and devices. 

Wii: When is it OK for the minimalist to have a second gaming device? When you get the second one for free. Babysteak gave me his device, with some excellent titles - Mario Kart Wii, Super Mario galaxy, Kirby's epic yarn. I love the backwards compatibility and the innovative design, well, in games that use it properly anyway (The legend of Zelda: Skyward sword). Just watching my mom beat me and others at video games is a sweet experience. 

I have a draft on the crazy awful side of technology that I will someday publish. Today the world is just beautiful.