Zeptoliner 1.50 Available!

Hello there,
Zeptoliner was upgraded to ver. 1.50.
It’s not major system upgrade but some minor bugs were fixed!

Oh, also, in old versions, blue lines showed up when you selected a line. But in current version, black line will appear to indicate the line you selected.

Thanks so much for using Zeptoliner.

The Second AR tag in Akihabara

On 17th October, Akihabara, we played experimented in AR tag again. Only 2 people were in the first, most of us were new players in this second time.

Makoto (UEI) developed an AR camera app for this tag game and we used it experimentally.  

As you can see, players and It are shown as blue circle and the building of Yodobashi-camera is shown as red one. The lengths to them are also indicated.  The app was better than expected and we could find the place and direction to It easily.

A camera pass-through AR makes invisible information visible like this app indicates the places of the players, so it has a similar effect to the application of optical camouflage innovated by Mr Inami.

Also we played the game in much narrower area, Kanda-izumichou.  The area is narrow and complicated. So we utilized such uniqueness of the map and made a strategy. We pretended to gather in the same place by pushing repeatedly “search” button.  When it came near, we run away at the same time to different directions.

 

However, team of It also made their strategy. They shut out our ways and attached us from bot sides!

The man in leather jacket and the girl were It…! 

Though our strategy was failed unfortunately, but it was really thrilling time as that was the first intellectual play in these AR tag games! 

The server for AR tag app (the same one as before) seemed to be enhanced and fixed so we could use it more smoothly.

Interesting time passed really quickly and our iPhones’ batteries were also consumed so we stopped playing after 4 games has been done. This time was really enjoyable as the first.

Thanks so much everyone for coming! 

Oh! I should not forget to tell a great contribution by Mr Itoh. His live camera recorded how we play the game.  Check it out from here!

Technological Modern Tag in Tokyo – AR experiments-

I suppose that Akihabara is well known as digital city in Tokyo. But do you know that on 12th October, some “adults” gathered there to play tag!!

Of course, it is unusual tag, it’s a “digital” tag using iPhone app for the play (currently available only in Japanese).

iPhone app for tag by Kunihiro Takedomi

The map monitored by tag radar

Your current location is shown at the centre of the map. Players caught by app’s radar are shown as green points, though it is unsure they are It or not. The player can know the direction to the green points on the upper left of the screen.

When a player is trapped by virtual bomb of It

It can leave a virtual bomb at its current place. If other players pass there, the location of the player is informed to It for 5 minutes. So the 5 minutes becomes hellish time for the player!

After got the app, shi3z became to try it really and 12 hours before the play, shi3z called for people to play with in Akihabara. On the day of tag, 2 pm, 18 free curious people gathered in front of Yodobashi-Akiba.

AR tag players

The players wore blue tape on their right arms so that players can distinguish the players from other people.

The followings are the rule of the tag.

• Don’t trouble other people. (It was national holiday and many people were there!)
• Don’t run.
• When It catches a player, both It and the caught player will be It.
• Don’t enter buildings. But passing under piloti is OK.
• Follow the traffic rules as usual.
• Time limit: 30 minutes.
• It starts to play 5 minutes after others.

Thought the server of the app seemed to be not good and we couldn’t access to the map or use chat system at the beginning, we played tag 3 times.  From the second, It could remove their blue tapes to disguise them as usual passengers.

It looks for prey...

found preys!

Oh, no, caught!

Radar in the tag

We could use the radar sometimes during the plays.  We found that the radar is a kind of sonar to roughly know the places of targets. The app doesn’t  distinguish It and other players. Though the system make the game more thrilling in a sense, we need another one to distinguish them.

We have done exciting 3 tag plays peacefully.  The official event will be taken place on 24th October. We hope the server will be fixed and system will work properly. But anyway, it was really nice time to play such a technological tag. Thank you players for coming!! When shall we meet up for the next?

A Tale of Home Electronics and Games’ Happy Marriage

We, UEI, develop a variety of products from games to server systems.
Strictly speaking, originally Ryo Shimizu is in a line of game development, and Takuhiro Mizuno is in system development. They can effectively share their work by utilizing their specialities. However, we cannot divide our work completely as we are not a big and systematized company. For the most part, we share our specialities and do our work together.

Ryo’s team programs not only for games but also for something which users directly use, such as mobile applications.
We do this work for a variety of companies, from a theme park to a mobile career and an electronics maker, to help making their products more attractive.

The bigger a company is, the more strict its quality standard becomes.
Truly sensitive test will be done especially for a game whose data should be burned into a ROM. Once the data was burned, it is difficult to fix something.

Especially, for some products, such as telephone devices, tests becomes really strict because they contains user’s privacy data  or the law restrict its functions and demand such strict test.
The work for a big company whose products should be done such a strict test, it quite often happens that its test period for quality control is far longer than actual period of development, to avoid something disastrous happen.

It was when we talked about a new products with a big maker the other day.
They said to us, “How do you control products’ quality?”

Usually they asked us to apply their standard of quality control to our test.
The company is famous for its most strict quality control in Japan, so we thought they would talk about their (probably large) materials or plans for the test.

Contrary to our expectation, actually, they said to us that they would apply our standard to the test because they would like to create a product something innovative.
It was the first experience for Ryo in his 7 years career in UEI. The company’s behaviour was really flexible.

Therefore, Ryo explained our usual way of test. Then, they were surprised at that. supposedly, it was the last way for them.

The testing method by a cautious maker: Waterfall method

For Japanese makers’ products, failure is never allowed. 
To avoid the failure, all specifications should be expected at the planning stage. All mistakes or errors should be checked in specifications or plans.

Testing plan is written at this early stage and all testing contents are assumed.
Meeting for this assuming take quite long time. What talked at over 10 hours meeting is precisely recorded on the minutes. The specifications will be fixed after all plans are agreed. To fix specification means that no more specification will be added to the product.

Next, at the implementing stage, each part is tested and report of it will be written.
Finally, as an unit test, all modules are connected and tested whether it correctly work or not.

All the tests are done to check whether all the specifications work correctly.
Even if a problem is found at this stage, it would be pass the test if only the specifications are correct. If not, it should be restarted from the first stage, making specification.

The obvious merit of the developing style, called “waterfall” method, is that products can be created without any mistake by checking all mistakes at all stages of development. Contrary to it, its demerit is that it takes so long time until all processes are done. But this method is necessary for big development as it is originally based on the construction work.

However, in reality, private companies cannot have enough time to do such developing as they should compete with other companies and time is the crucial key. As a result, priority to it is solidity or completeness, and functions or user interface is cut because it is most complained and difficult to be realized.

User interface priority in games or Web

Have you ever thought that products by big maker work dull though they are beautifully made? Handling of the products, such as  response of remote controller or menu button, sounds something difficult or not smart.

Contrary to that, in games and Web development, user experience is the first thing to be considered. When user experience is not wholly completed, features or functions of it will be cut. Therefore, it’s rare case that a game with difficult handling. Handling impression will directly affect selling of the product. Games with bad user experience will be dismissed soon. So makers manage not to be done that.

Also, in games, a little bug, if not crucial, can be allowed as it can makes the game funny. Games in these days do not have so many bugs, but when Nintendo was popular, many players enjoyed the play with bugs as special techniques.

Of course some crucial bugs may freeze the game or delete data (I remember there were a few games with such bugs), but non-crucial bugs could be granted as one of features of the game.

Rather, specifications for games will change easily one after another.
In game development, it seems to be difficult to keep a specification fixed.

In the comic featured game development, Tokyo Toy Box,Taiyo Amakawa, the protagonist game director, often says as his favourite saying, “Change the specification.” Actually the same situation would never happen in other development.

The waterfall method wouldn’t allow any bug by following their fixed specifications as their bible. That is completely opposite to game development, isn’t it?

The way of debugging by experience and feeling: Monte Carlo

To debug games, testing plan cannot be prepared based on specifications because the specifications changes day by day. Testing plan is written at first according to the early specifications, but usually the final version of specifications is different from the early version.

Also specifications are changing during the test if the game is boring. So debugging is generally depend on the experience and feeling of the people in charge of the test, called debugger.

Debuggers know well the peculiarity of game programs.
So they persistently test a certain point which seems to have bugs.
They will try unexpected handling as well as expected ones according to the specifications. “Player will handle this scenario by certain way, but what will happen if handled in unexpected way?” “If the same thing is repeated by a hundred times, is it ok?” They test such unexpected handling.

Will they find a bug by repeating the same thing a hundred times?

The answer is yes. Actually some handling test that seem nonsense can find crucial bugs.

For example, a bug was actually found that cause hung-up game machine 10 minutes after the repetition of plug and unplug the controller by twice in a second. Though people doubts the relevance of the handling at first, a crucial bug was actually found when they examined inside of the OS that leaked memory and that might cause a crush of saved memory.

We call this debugging method “Monte Carlo.” Such a way based on one’s experience and feeling will be seen irrelevant by technical developer, but it is suitable for game development.

High-tech products like Game

Recently, developers became to pay attention to user experience.
We are often consulted with user experience after iPhone’s sensational release.
So it is certain that developers or makers pay attention to the topic.

Japanese makers have not paid so much attention to beautifulness or comfortableness of products that is difficult to be quantified. However, in game development, such difficult topic, enjoyableness, comfortableness, beautifulness or high-tech, has been effortely tackled.

So we think people consulted us, as we are the company in the middle between games and high-technology development.

Recently such ways of thinking as game developer is called Gamenics and people try to argue it as a theory.
However, solidity of home electronics which will be “never broken” or will “never work mistakenly” is very difficult goal for gaming.

In these days, many companies take both ways, waterfall for never broken parts and the game way for user experience.

Japanese game development is advanced, but only solid development or system cannot compete with developers in other countries any more. To win international competition, we think it become necessary the game development as home electronics from early stages.

Final Alty Party and Some Luxury Cowboy Items

“All work and no play makes a computer cowboys a dull boy.”

Like the last 2 Cowboy Championships, after the 3rd Cowboy Championship, “alty party THE FINAL” took place!

Alty party is famous for not only its contents, but also its luxuriousness and quality of food, lottery, and maybe, probably or certainly, its souvenir. All computer cowboys who attended the WCCC can join it for free!

The prizes of lottery were OLYMPUS PEN, MacBook Pro, and Pioneer KURO!! I wanted…but mine was blank… X(

Alty gave talk session with Shinichi Nakamoto

Also, Cyberspace Cowboys gave mini-live concert!

The guests received sovenirs at the end of the party. Last year, I remember, it was … amazing, incredible, or appetite lose disgusting looking blue curry…!! (But the taste was good. I guarantee.) So, I expected this year, the souvenir would be other color curry, but I was wrong. The souvenir was …

Blue Beer!!! X(X(X(X( oh… I haven’t opened the cap actually. In addition, an original comic featuring Shi3z was distributed as its souvenir!! I cannot help being surprised by such unexpected items!

Luxury items we also found in the hall of WCCC.

These are not jellies. They are the trophies for 180 Rodeos. In the crystal, an image of the microprocessor, Z80, is inscribed!

It is a laxury lacqured HG JAPAN model keyboard. Costs over 500,000 yen!!

Incredible, strange, and surprising. The party and items provide us with entertainment. It is so sad that alty party was the final. But we’ll do best to provide more entertainment instead of alty!!

Enjoy your blue beer

The World Computer Cowboy Championship the 3rd, Day 2

This is a continuation of the post about the World Computer Cowboy Championship day 1. The excitement of the previous day still remained among cowboys, and another excitement, day 2, came.

Day 2

The keynote for day 2 was given by Shinji Higuchi. 
He is a famous animation and SFX director in Japan and let us hear about the “Tokusatsu,” the special effects used for animation and films. Based on his experience as the director of Japan Sinks, Evangelion, Gamera series, and so forth.

He said that  the way to create attractive  and amazing visual effects is to add spice of something new to current technology. So he expects that better technology and better programming will make his film more attractive.

What he said important is that both artificial and natural elements are necessary to keep his SFX real. Excess of the digital defeats the real and excess of the real also defeats the digital. The balance of two is a key.

 

180 Rodeos: General

As Day 1, after the keynote, 180 Rodeos were given. That time was for general people. Thanks many challengers for joining the Rodeo! I would like to introduce all, but sorry, it is too many to do it. So,  I will introduce the three who won the prizes.

Kaisei Hamamoto
His BlogPolis is the search engine which visualize the popularity of blogs. This engine will possibly be applied to other systems, not only blog. He won the 1st prize in the whole 180 rodeos! congratulations!

Sunao Hashimoto
Picopon, the abbreviation of “Pico projector and Wii remote controller,” which project an image by the same way as normal Wii controller. This was the first prize in General section.

Takashi Ogura
He won the second prize in General section. His humanoid robot has iPhone 3G on his face.
The speaker, microphone, and camera became a mouth, ears, and eyes respectively. The robot wakes you up by tapping you physically!

 

Cowboy Rodeos

Takuma Iwasa(the president of Cerevo and known as “Waren-osyo”)
Cerevo is a maker of home electronics. His topic was about the projects to change the consumer electronics. The topic’s interesting point was the camera connect to network and share the photos on the internet. such as Cerevo Cam or DevCam project.

Kinya Tagawa (design engineer and the founder of takram)
takram is the company whose developing approaches is based on both design and engineering. The company developed many interesting products such as Phasma, i-Widget and Afterglow. In addition to that, he emphasized the importance of demonstration as well as  specification. To confirm the relevance of abstract planning, he always does concrete proof.

Naoko Tosa (a professor of Kyoto University and a media artist)
Her rodeo topic is about cultural computing and a software which connect culture, unconsciousness, and imagination.  Noticing the importance of own culture, she tries to add it to computers which tried to globalize to excluded the local uniqueness. In Zenetic Computer, which featured Japanese Culture and Sansui-zen, her unique project are fully expressed.

Shiroh Kawai (the developer of Gauche and an actor)
An expert of LISP talked about, of course, LISP. LISP can cheat and change the limitation of program. He also questions the rules of physics that we naturally take for granted and suggested the possibility to change it.

Isamu Kaneko
He talked about a new humanoid model. Based on real neuroanatomy, he analyzed the study model and pattern of reword gaining learning process. His goal is to equip the artificial human brain with computer!

Toshiyuki Masui (the developer of POBox and a professor of Keio University)
He suggested the smooth information communication in the future without “redundant” processes, such as registration, password, naming the files, and so forth. The samples systems are such as gyazz and Gyazo. His wide range of user interface research is aimed at realization of ubiquitous computing and smooth information communication.

 

His rodeo was the end of Day 2. All programs of Cowboy Championship has done. It was so exciting and impressive experience for us. Tokuriki said on his blog that the Cowboy Championship was an event like TED. He also pointed out that people with the same interests tend to gather in the same topic on the internet, but the Cowboy Championship added the elements of entertainment and design to it so that something new would be created as a chemical reaction. (translation mine)  

Ito said on his article in Ascii, that if I say in commonplace words, it gave me an energy. In other words, it showed me the bright future certainly waiting for us by smart brain and surprisingly wide knowledge. (translation mine) 

We believe that people who came to the event certainly got something in theirselves. Also we are really happy if people enjoy the event and the event showed you something helpful or hopeful.

To win the championship, developers should polish their skills, and their polished skills will develop more useful, helpful or creative things.  We hope such merit cycle would be happened by this Championship where from students to specialists involve.

Also, for ubiquitous computing, technology or idea should not always be exclusive. It would be better to be shared with a variety of people and to be understandable for non-experts too. 

Hoping that these events could provide some merit cycle, we think about the next WCCC.

WCCC operation team

ZeptoPad 3.0.5 Released

Hi, how you doing?

I posted about ZeptoPad 3.0.5 the other day. It is now available on the AppStore!

Some bugs were fixed. It would be more useful.  

Lets upgrade ZeptoPad on the AppStore!

Our Crazy? Experiments

I really appreciate CrunchGear’s and other articles introducing our ARider project! They are both famous media in US so I’m really excited by that!!

One of Zeptotools member, shi3z (follow him “shi3z” on twitter!), uses the ARider devices everyday to move anywhere in the centre of Tokyo. Downtown of Tokyo is  not so big geographically, but it has over 10 millions  population in just about 10 miles diameter. Its population rate is less than half of NewYork’s, but the number of population in the cnter of Tokyo is 5 times of NY.

So, to move around the downtown by bicycle is easier than expected. Bicycles take us to all the places of business partners. 

Some people worry about using the device when it rains, that is also our fear. To avoid getting iPhone wet, we usually bring it in our pockets.

Furthermore, using an originally “renovated” connector for iPhone, iPhone and a HMD can be directly connected.

This solves the problem of getting cables entangled

At first, we tried to see the map on the HMD, but seeing it during the ride is dangerous. So, we made just arrows to a goal and time displayed on the HMD. Currently blue arrow points the direction to Roppongi, green one does the direction to Akihabara, and red ponts the north. In addition to that, each length from current location is shown too. Such a simple display is much easier and safer to see during the ride.

However, using GPS long time needs much energy and the battery of iPhone becomes empty faster. We cannot solve tha problem up to now…

Furthermore, white screen of iPhone is difficult to see when it’s dark. But the problem is easy to solve. Just change the setting of the screen into black one at “setting” > “general” > “accessibility” on your iPhone! 

Our another play… no, “experiment” with HMD is as follows. The image captured by the superior digital SLR camera, EOS 5D MarkⅡ, is output on HMD like this.

If someone takes images from your back with the camera and you see it on the HMD, you may feel as if you were a FPS player! The imae on the HMD is truly “real”, isn’t it?

You can do it without your friends too if you have the camera attached to a tripod and bringing it on your back.

 

 Do you think we are crazy?

Maybe, you are right.

However, we believe such craziness is necessary for innovation!

Believeing such thing, we continue to play… explore the possibility of iPhone and HMD!

The World Computer Cowboy Championship the 3rd, Day 1

The World Computer Cowboy Championship (WCCC) the 3rd was successfully finished. It was held on August 29th and 30th 2009. Last 2 Championship were both held only for a day, but the 3rd was for 2 days! So that the contents of it were really variety, informative and exciting for all people!!

The theme of the 3rd Championship was “Code is Love.” Falling love with code, cowboys always thinks only one thing, code, code, and code! 

The Championship includes keynotes, Cowboy Rodeos and 180 Rodeos. In Cowboy Rodeos, computer cowboys gave presentations on their specialties. 180 Rodeos is the time for general persons and students to show their research or development to the public in 180 seconds.

After the Competition, Alty Party, the party “famous” to cowboys, was held.

For next a few posts, I will write about it. People both couldn’t and did go must check it! 

 

Day 1

The day 1 started with the opening ceremony by Shi3z and S-Ishimaru. 

Keynote 1

After that, a keynote was given by Furukawa Susumu (a professor of Keio University). The title was ‘Messages by an old cowboy, for those who continue the soul.’ (translation is mine.) It was truly informative keynote.

He spoke about his career and, based on it, talked about the movement and the prospective of technology recently used popularly or start to be used. On broadcasting devices, smartphones,  electronic paper market, problem of IP-TV, leadership, and so forth, his speech topics were various.

After working for Ascii publisher, he became the first president of Microsoft Japan.
Also, he emphasized the importance of clear vision statement to accomplish something. Some aspects of current computer were already mentioned by him thirty years ago in the postscript on Ascii magazine! 

 

180 Rodeos: Students

After such a big water fall information, it was exciting time for young and fresh cowboys,or “those who continue the soul” which Mr Furukawa just told. Takashi Aoki won the 1st prize and 2nd was won by Yasuhiro Takeda. The following is the brief introduction of their names and rodeo topics. You have to check these diamonds before they were caught!?    

Kiyohiro Yamaguchi (The University of Tokyo)
An application of hit ranking on Tumblr.

Kimihiro Mizutani  (NAIST)
An program for all PCs which construct exclusive network such as only for management staffs.

Yuki Ikuta (Kyushu University)
Question and suggestion for Thunderbird; lack of showing the threads and narrowness of edit space.

Yasuhiro Takeda (Chuo University)
A solution for muscle training. “Muscaras” sends the training date to Twitter and cheering message will automatically twitted on Twitter.

Takashi Aoki (The University of Tokyo)
Virtual Time Machine that transform 2D photos into 3D one.

Makoto Kondo (Keio University)
“iPhone Hack” uses the iPhone’s Voice Over feature and composes voices. The composed voice can “read”and “sing.”

 

Cowboy Rodeos

After break time, the Rodeos were given. Those were, of course, all interesting and  we were all impressed!  

Toru Nishikawa (the president of Preferred Infrastructure)
He talked about searching systems. Because he spoke not with jargon but with plain words, his speech was easy to understand for non-expert. Also, what surprised the audience was the SSD type Sebue with 100,000 yen (1,100 US $) server. It searches the whole information in Wikipedia all over the world in 0.03 second!!

Eiji Kamiya (the president of Ibis)                                                                                          His rodeo was about self-moving robotics. He researches and develops an original self-moving robot, Aibi, as his “hobby!” But well studied and based on the popular ways of robot development, his robotics skill is worth to be called an “expert.”

Tatsushi Yamada (known as Hacker Dude-san, “Kami-sama”)
He is the one who made the Palm popular in Japan. In addition to the reason why the Palm became not so popular, he talked about the project of ”free office.”  He emphasized that it is important to construct comfortable working environment as well as the abolition of own desks.

Katashi Nagao (a professor of Nagoya University)
His presentation was about the system to raise the productivity and effectively of meetings. The system transforms real meetings into contents. Also certain gestures by audience make it easy to judge the topic is new or succeeded one. The one of interesting points of his speech is that he used the interface which is hacked Wii controller!

Kazuki Ota (the CTO of Preferred Infrastructure)                                                                        He just finished the internship of development IBM’s super computer, Blue Gene, so his topic about the future of computers was hot not only for us, but also for him! He introduced the trend of super computer and importance of developing anti-brakedown for the future super computer possibly with million cores.  He predicts that super computer in 2025 can emulate with human brain.

 

Eichi Furukawa (the technical director of Ubiquitous Entertainment Inc.)
He was the final rodeo presenter of day 1, and talked with Shi3z and Shin Ishimaru. He has already focused on the Java application before it was supported by Japanese mobile phone systems. In addition to about Java application for mobile phone, he has already written 19 (!!) books about programming for Microsoft Robotics Studio, Adobe Air, Arduino, XNA, Android, and so forth since 2000.
“To prevail the technology.” For such a simple reason, he writes about complicated programming and makes it understandable for us.

 

The day 1 was closed with talking session by Satoshi Endo (Ascii Media Works) and Shi3z. 

As you have seen, the above all are the contents of only day 1! How variety and rich program! But I will write about day 2 (also about Alty Party!!) too not to be overcome by such a big programs.

MONTBLANC Pen 1.0.2

Hello, how are you?

MONTBLANC Pen 1.0.2 is now available. This is a little, but a big change. The app’s name itself does not change, but will be shown as ”MONTBLANC” on the menu screen. For those who don’t like the current font, let’s upgrade!

See you soon.