Free music lessons from Berklee
College of Music…Here’s
an article about it.
Today is a meeting with the dentist to redo an in-between filling.
I shall see if I can talk him out of it, since I don’t think it showed
up on x-rays and he was just going off of my description of a bit of occasional pain.
Update: he says there are cavities visible in the x-ray, so onward I go.
Update: He put in a temporary filling because there was potential root damage from decay.
He put in some clove-flavored medication and a temporary filling and is going to see if it heals in 6 months.
If yes, I get a more permanent filling there. If no, perhaps I get to enjoy a root canal.
Dontcha just love teeth?
Evin pointed me to this
rather funny commercial from India.
Nerd alert:
I was thinking about what would be needed to have a virtual reality game
with virtual walls and objects that you see as you walk around a large empty floor.
I think the simplest way to implement it would be to have
two compact video cameras in front of your eyes. Then a laptop in a backpack
would overlay 3D objects onto what you see in your goggles. (Using some
method projecting the 3D objects directly into the eye would probably be too expensive.)
The first problem to solve is how to motion capture things cheaply. GPS might not
be precise enough. We’re talkin’ millimeters here…plus it wouldn’t capture vertical movement.
Perhaps
some sort of triangulation using modified toll booth passes. Er maybe that requires
too much power over longer distances. Dunno much about
motion capture. Whatever method is used for
motion capture, you could begin to test it by putting three of them on a video camera
and using its position and rotation to film in a room. You’d have to put
some capture points on the floor as a reference. Then a computer
would overlay a simple 2 dimensional square on the video,
floating in the middle of the room. The only thing that keeps you from walking
through the walls in such a game would be heavy penalties in your score.
Eventually, you’d
have to deal with the headaches involved in properly displaying objects in front
of the square or blocking them out when they’re behind the square. That’d require
a bunch of motion capture points all over the body or any other moving objects involved.
Another idea about motion tracking of the camera that Nelson had was to attach 3 laser
pointers to the x, y and z axes of the camera. As long as you didn’t rotate the camera,
you could setup other cameras to film the walls where the laser pointers strike to determine
the x, y and z coordinates of the main camera.
This guy has an idea using the
sonar focusing devices from old Polaroid cameras, though it wouldn’t work very well for
determining the direction the camera is facing.