Getting really close now, this weekend will be the final tuning and then we go for install the next week.

Here’s the latest

After many hours of geekery, we came up with a pretty good example of a jellyfish. Plenty of work to do still on shaders, adding mouth arms, textures, etc. But I think we’re getting really close with the fluid motion of the tentacles.

Check it out.

Do me a favor? Tell me which one you like better in the comments. That would totally help me.

Thanks!

I’d love to see this get made into a movie.

I left out a really important portion of the team that built the Touch Wall at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in my previous post about it: The guys who made the incredible hardware our cool app runs on: Ideum

Jim Spadaccini, who runs Ideum, was one of the founders of the Exploratorium up in San Francisco and has a four part blog post about how they manufactured this beast from scratch.  If you’re interested in multitouch on a large scale or are just a geek, you’ll find it pretty cool.

EDIT: The UnityPackage for all this madness is here. (If you aren’t familiar with what a .unitypackage is, don’t bother)

Next project has to do with Jellyfish for a client and we’ve bitten off quite a large chunk. Not a chunk that is un-biteable mind you, use a rather large bite.

This is what we’re trying to do in realtime:

In attempting to create a realistic movement in realtime that responds with the appropriate “feel” to visitor input, I started looking on line for examples of fluid motion in Unity 3D. The Skinned Cloth component is great for dresses and cloaks, but after several hours of messing with it, I couldn’t come up with a really nice fluid motion.

After then messing around with the Interactive Cloth component for a few hours, I realized that I was going to approach it from another direction.  A buddy of mine from the Atari days suggested I check out this video (around 0:40) from Unite 11, which actually got me on the track I’m on now.

Starting with some bone objects and attaching rigid body and hinge components, I’ve been able to create a super low-res jelly.  The problem I’m running into right now is that as I copy and then rotate the “arm” chain around, the physics start drifting after a minute or so which eventually causes the jelly to lock up.  It’s the “Sea of Dead Jellies” exhibit!  No.

What I’ve got so far (you’ll need the plugin):

Green Energy?  Check

Excellent Mustaches?  Check

I really love the two saluting ones.

This one makes me wonder: Who were the first couple to, um,.. couple in space?

I’m playing an uplifted Humpback Whale who’s been sleeved into a human bio-morph.  Woo!

My excellent friend Erik Schmidt (not that one) recently invited me in to a roll playing Role Playing (my geek shame knows no bounds) game called Eclipse Phase and I can’t remember when I’ve had more 12 year old kid type fun since I was, well, 12.  If you like old fashioned paper and pencil roll playing games, give this one a spin.  The folks at Posthuman Studios give this one away for free and it is really amazing.

Erik has made some really cool character sheets to download for free if you’re interested.