Presenting Open Video Chat

Yesterday the OVC team attended a memorial ceremony for James J. Peters. James contributed a lot to the innovation movement here at RIT. President Destler and Ian Gatley both gave speeches at the event and presented two students with grants for their innovative work.

After the speeches we had an opportunity to display Open Video Chat running at 15 frames per second. A lot of people were curious about our project. I actually had an opportunity to talk to President Destler about it. It was a great experience and we got a lot of practice for ImagineRIT next weekend.

BOSTON!!!!!

Woooo busy weekend. So we drove up to Boston Thursday night. We were only a little late due to a mix up with an iPhone GPS app that doesn't know what one way streets are. Getting into our hostel was an... interesting experience. We told them we'd get there really late at night so they left our key under a flower pot on their porch.

The morning was fun. There was a problem using the CSI credit card to pay for our rooms. While Remy handled that myself and the team dealt with crazy blanket lady. She kept trying to tell us about a hotel down the street that only charged $25 a room and you could put as many people as you want in there. We managed to get away from her without much issue though :)

We drove over to Luke Macken's place and walked over to the Town Diner for breakfast. That place was great. I'd highly recommend it if you're in the Boston area. Then we took the bus and subway to OLPC Headquarters for the Python Hackfest. Our videos will be going up on our Youtube account.

Justin and Luke freakin pwned at the hack fest. They managed to get a feature running on our code to display the frame rate and then they tweaked the code to get the frame rate up to 14-15 FPS. So we've officially hit our major goal on this project. At this point we're going to finish packaging the activity this week and we're going to start making this run on other systems after that hopefully.

After the hackfest I jumped on a bus and rode back to Rochester for the Red Barn CCS rockclimbing competition at RIT. That was hella fun. 82 people came out to compete. I got 3rd :D It looks like I'm going to be in the Reporter this week or next. Link when it goes live.

Pre-Boston Prep

Pretty chill day today. Jlew and Fran cranked at the code while I handled some advertising and emailing. We're getting the asks out to the people that we need to so they know we're looking for help this weekend at the Boston Hackfest. I emailed Bill Clymer, the associate director of Pen International, with our youtube videos and facebook page. He seemed impressed. We also did some filming for our Boston Trip today. We're releasing a trailer tomorrow. I'll post it when I have it.

Rewind

Woah time flies! It's been a week since my last post. Busy busy week. We went to Interlock twice and the No Voice Zone Wednesday night. We've still been trying to figure out these darn telepathy and gstreamer libraries that have no documentation for python. Hopefully we can get something working by the end of this week because we're headed to BOSTON!!!!! We're headed to a hack fest where there should be guys that work on these other projects we rely on. If we can't figure this out ourselves I sure hope we can figure it out with telepathy, gstreamer, AND sugar/XO guys all in the same room. I'm headed home for a rock climbing competition friday night but the rest of the guys are staying for BarCamp Boston on Saturday. They're going to present our project, hopefully all roided out from the previous day's hack fest.

So No Voice Zone was a blast on Wednesday. NVZ is a weekly event hosted by the NTID (National Technical Institute for the Deaf) department here at RIT. We went there to practice our skills with ASL. I'm not sure about the other member of the team but I am really enjoying the ASL aspect of our project. I ran into a guy named Justin from my High School that I haven't seen in a couple years. I had only ever been able to talk to him through an interpreter or pen and paper before. This time I was able to have a decent, although slow, conversation with him. We just talked about majors and school and he asked me about how my rock climbing has been going. It was a really cool experience and I look forward to learning more so I can talk to him even more.

OVCRoulette

I'm excited to say that we have taken our project in a new direction. We've decided that the future of video conferencing lies in communicating to absolutely random strangers. The change in medium also proved to be much easier to code. We already have it fully functional on the XO 1.5.

Link to come...