Increasingly, we’re seeing cooler and cooler apps built on Titanium. And, every once-in-a-while we see an app that just makes us the whole Appcelerator office go “WOW!”
Below is a video of an iPad controlled video blimp that you just have to watch to get the idea. The app-part of the setup uses sockets to stream video to an iPad application that doubles as a controller for the blimp using left/right accelerometer. Check it out:
More info on the whole experience is here: http://breakfastny.com/2010/05/ipad-controlled-video-blimp/
Developer Mattias Gunneras sent us the following additional detail on how it was built and what Titanium features were used:
The whole thing started with a Design Week event for an exhibition of 23 custom designed KidRobot Munny sculptures. 23 of the top industrial designers in the New York area was given a blank munny figure to customize for the show. At the event there was a silent auction where people could bid for the sculptures.
Our job was to figure out a fun and cool way to show off the munnys to the guests. Since the munnys were small and the guest list was large, our first ideas circulated around large projections. We kept on refining that idea and ultimately decided to put a camera on a blimp and fly it over the crowd. Rather than just project the blimp’s video feed, we used openframeworks and opencv to do basic facial detection, and then swapped people’s faces for those of the exhibited munnys. So we had a projection in another room with the view from the cockpit with some guests sporting the munny heads. We also wanted a fun and simple interface to control the blimp so that everyone could participate and interact with it more – an iPad control was the perfect fit.
We built the iPad app using Titanium mobile SDK 1.2. Mostly what we used were some basic UI components such as buttons and textfields. But the TCPSocket API together with the accelerometer for basic right and left navigation is what makes the core functionality with the app. We’re communicating from the iPad app to the blimp via a laptop running a tcp-to-serial bridge and the laptop speaks to the blimp via an xbee chip (serial).
For the video we actually used a webcontrol in which we’re drawing the video (motion jpeg) using server push. We found that using this technique over quicktime stream had a considerable benefit in terms of lag. Our quicktime stream using Darwin streaming server had a lag of up to 10 seconds at times, completely unusable. Using server push we got it down to a reasonably acceptable 100-200 milliseconds.
This project was done on short notice, everything from concept to finished event launch was only a few weeks. I’d say active development time with Titanium was only about 2-3 days for one person.
Read more about the exhibition here: http://munnyexhibit.com/
Nice job, Mattias!
As featured on Wired: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/05/ipad-blimp/
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