WinterRoot

Vision Tech for Counter Tech

Together with the Omnicorp Detroit Hackerspace and Alley Culture’s Seed Exchange in Detroit, WinterRoot is excited to announce our first ever kickstarter project!  A community technology project to explore and catalog wild plants growing in Detroit’s open spaces.  Full Description follows, or link to Kickstarter and consider backing our project!  We have some great rewards planned for backers, so check it out!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/winterroot/wildflowers-of-detroi

ABOUT THIS PROJECT

Wildflowers of Detroit ??

One pervasive vision of Detroit is it’s ruins - the monolithic hulks of an industrial era gone by, documented in striking photographs and tales of urban exploration. What has gone missing in this narrative is the other side of the coin. In the open spaces left behind, a monumental resurgence of wild-ness is occurring: plots filled with wildflowers and wildlife. After knowing Detroit’s secret gardens and hidden blooms, we feel this is a story that needs to be told - appreciating this resource is crucial, otherwise it may merely be swept away. Wildflowers of Detroit is a community technology project for cataloging wild plants growing in Detroit, an effort which can enable people’s appreciation of Detroit’s reawakened ecology.  Our technologies collaborative WinterRoot is teaming up with Detroit’s Omnicorp Hackerspace and Alley Culture’s Seed Exchange to bring this vision into being.

An iPhone App?

And even more, we hope! We aim to create iPhone, Android, MMS, and email interfaces (all free) for posting geo-tagged photos of wildflowers, and logging their location and salient details for future study and appreciation. When you spot a great specimen or view of one of Detroit’s varied wild plants, you’ll be able to whip out your mobile device, snap a picture, and instantly upload to our website along with automatic longitude and latitude coordinates, adding your find to an interactive map. Sometimes it’s called “citizen science”, we call it community ecology - residents participating in the study of their own area. There is great value to be found in a community understanding it’s own natural process. An incredible phenomenon is afoot in Detroit, lets come together and begin its study!

Want to see it in action??

We already have an alpha version online demonstrating a proof of concept, but we need your help for the full build out. In order for this project to reach it’s full potential, we need to integrate all mobile devices, provide an interactive map showing the locations of the flowers, solve some technical details like caching of photos in areas of bad 3G reception for later upload, allow comments on each photo for identification and discussion, improve the site layout, integrate with social media, acquire substantial hosting, and get going on some advanced features like searching by species or habitat or providing a good interface for crowdsourced identifications.  It’s a big list, and it just keeps getting bigger, but we think that this project can help us transform our impressions of grand old Detroit’s wild spaces. After backing this project, hop over to http://www.wildflowersofdetroit.org/ and start getting involved!!

If overfunded…

We plan to construct a small community herbarium in Detroit, creating a physical record of what grew where and when. Linking this with the website and database will create a dynamic and growing resource for children, students, and researchers interested in the incredible urban flora of Detroit. The ultimate tool for understanding the history and fate of the spaces these organisms occupy. We are still working out the details of where and how this will manifest, so check back here or our facebook page for updates!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/winterroot/wildflowers-of-detroi

AMP is a still incubating project for Java Eclipse which I’ve been construction simple agent based models in.  By far the easiest platform for doing so, AMP generalizes a lot of the transition rules and value setting that normally are the grunt work of constructing models, and allows a researcher to quickly spin up a simple (or complex) model.  Java is by nature resource intensive, so this is probably not the best platform for very complex climate models or other types of very large scale systems.  However, for delving into unexpected outcomes of simple processes and rule sets, AMP is a very useful.   It’s also interesting as a developed example of model driven architecture, programming systems where the code itself is generated at compile time.  In this type of system, the programmer is responsible for creating appropriate architectures and specifying them using graphical representation, but not writing source code.  One of the goals in MDA is full portability.  Unfortunately I’ve had some trouble with the code generation in AMP, so I’m not fully convinced.  However this is a useful toolkit which I have been using to explore some simple ideas about energy cycling and pathway discovery.  Hopefully I’ll be posting more on that later, or perhaps some of the models themselves.

Git is a powerful version control tool, so powerful, even more so than with subversion, you yourself define the strategy that you use to employ it’s features.  There are myraid ways of doing things and what’s best really depends on what you are doing.  In my opinion two of the most important features of git are the ability to easily track incremental commits during development without breaking the entire build for all users and it’s support for sharing commits between branches.  Both of these features solve major problems with subversion, in which there is no way to commit changes that aren’t ready for primetime while still retaining a readable revision history in the repository.

Beyond these features though, I have found a few capabilities within git that are ideally suited to web programming.  One is the use of the rebase option to update live sites while keeping those sites on version control.  Often, once a site is live either the installation environment or extensive use will uncover latent bugs in the build.  Sometimes it’s quickest to just fix these on the live site, and move them back into the repository trunk from there.  If the site is not on version control, copying of files is the only option, thereby losing detailed commit history.  On the other hand, a live site has different database and server settings, sometimes intermixed in settings file that have configurations that are global to both development and live installations.   Git rebase can be used to solve this in a slick way.

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My old collaborator Josh Band and myself wrote an openGL application to experiment with methods of non-photorealistic rendering. Our application loads a model file and then renders it in 4 experimental styles: impressionism, pointilism, fan brush, and ‘3D pointilism.’ This application was written in OpenGL and made extensive use of the feedback buffer to get these effects. The key to technique is to do a first, behind the scenes rendering step where lighting and color data is calculated, then to read these values out of the buffer and use them to render the non-photorealistic polygons or shapes.  The impressionism, pointilism, and fan brush effects amount to placing texture mapped polygons on the surface of the model in a fixed average distribution, with random locations. One of the most interesting aspects of the 3D pointilism mode is the ability to change what 3D object model the renderer is using as a ‘brush stroke.’ Our images show spheres and cubes, but anything is possible. Two of our images from this project were accepted as technical slides to Siggraph 2001, a significant achievement for an early effort in graphics research.

From 2001-2004 I held one of my more interesting contract jobs, doing medical visualization for 3d views of the human heart.  The project began as part of the University of Michigan Nuclear Medicine department, and was later spun off into a self-sufficient company named Invia.  All 3d visualization was handled in OpenGL, rendering data from DICOM medical information files.  The main challenges were mapping data correctly onto the heart from 2d slices, rewriting much of the 3d graphics library, providing a 3d cutaway feature, and assisting with rendering the coronary arteries.  Visualization is one of the more socially useful applications of 3d graphics and I am proud to have been part of this project.  Other responsibilities included debugging DICOM loading routines and building the application on MacOSX.