WinterRoot

Vision Tech for Counter Tech

WinterRoot LLC is very excited to announce, after nearly a year of work, the initial release of ‘Wild Edibles’ - our master foraging app created in collaboration with foraging expert ‘Wildman’ Steve Brill.  The full version of the app contains 165 major edibles plus 52 minor plants, all of the identification and poisonous lookalike information you need to forage safely, and a recipe for every plant in the guide.  It’s an exhaustive field guide synthesizing a lifetime of bringing foraging to the layman, with an easy to use interactive interface for portability and search-ability on your handheld device. iOS 4.2 is currently supported at the links below, with an iOS 3.2 compatible version awaiting approval from the app store and android version currently under development.

Wild Edibles Full:  http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wild-edibles-full/id431504588?mt=8&ls=1#

Wild Edibles Lite (free!) : http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wild-edibles-lite/id431504179?mt=8

Other Versions and Apps by WinterRoot: http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/winterroot-llc/id427385326

Perhaps one of WinterRoot’s least ‘fun’ projects, but an excellent experience in real world implementation.  Detroit area media company NTVB needed a large suite of custom subscription management tools to support a new effort in their business.  We leveraged object oriented programming strategies to support a wide variety of business logic, business information flows, and ever expanding needs of this new startup effort.  Responsibilities have included the creation and training of a development team, design of complex testing strategies for application logic, distillation of company needs, and implementation of tailored tools.  WinterRoot Technology Services, a sub-project of WinterRoot, has supported the growth of this business to 200,000+ customers in little over a year and maintains on ongoing retainer with NTVB.  The application’s extensive tools are built on top of Kohana and our open source MoPCMS libraries.

The first public version of the open source CMS I work on as part of Made of People is almost ready to be released. Our goals of supplying object oriented data architecture to the average user/developer on standard platforms is nearing a first round of maturity, and we are very pleased with the results. I will be updating this post in a short time more details, including the git hub for download and future development plan. The open source kit is dividing into a javascript ajax framework and a php/kohana based MVC framework for dealing with data. One design goal has been to make these 2 areas of work interoperable with other implementations.

The United Nations Project on Extrajudicial Executions needed to improve their media dissemination and dynamic content capabilities through their website, as it is the main point of contact from their international efforts to reporters and lawyers working in the field.  We expanded their capabilities with our MoPCMS framework and an in depth analysis of their data architecture needs.  What has resulted is a much smoother and more cleanly organized site, making documents, reports, and images more fully accessible to interested parties.

One of my long standing clients, I have been heavily involved in the online side of this organization since the very beginning, and continue on a maintenance and consulting retainer to this day.  The MPHTC started around 2001 with the goal of making high quality, continuing education courses more available to the public.  The website thus began as a content portal for reaching the public audience.  Later, MPHTC would combine forces with MiCPHP (Michigan Center for Public Health Preparedness) where we heavily extended the site to support online learning management.  As the organization has evolved WinterRoot’s challenge has been to create systems with the flexibility to change over time.  Notable work on this project has included full online certificate generation and management, increased portal usability, and ongoing management of the support team for a 3 site system including MPHTC, MiCPHP, and OPHP.  The site has currently about 7000 users.

The solar panel workshop was a success.  We were able to construct a functioning array out of discarded fragments, generating the correct voltage to charge our battery.  Each fragment was wired separately, giving participants the opportunity for some hands on work with solar cells, and then after inserting the wires through holes in a board they were connected in series into two long circuits.  Measuring the wattage output of the panel is a little more difficult and we haven’t gotten a reliable measure yet, but the battery does collect charge and we hypothesize that the panel collects enough energy to at least run a small light.  The construction of this first effort is pretty experimental - we’ve identifier several issues that would be resolved differently on a next version.  Perf board is definately the way to go for wiring the panels through wood, not the drilled out ply used here.  Bits of broken panel also could be wired better by lining up the the large lines and connecting them in lines the same way commercial panels are - obviously since they are broken this will still yeild a jagged, oddly shaped strip, but it doesn’t necessitate as many holds in the board and is generally more manageable.  Of course, for a art/reuse look the random arrange we executed is quite beautiful.   We hope to do another workshop and continue to explode feasibility of this kind of  reuse.  Thanks to all who participated!

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.