Johannes Luderschmidt’s Blog

For the website benjamin-bartels.com I have done all the frontend (xhtml, css, js) and the backend programming. One part of the website is Benjamin’s CV:

In another part Benjamin presents images and videos of portfolio projects that he has done so far. Those images and videos can be browsed easily with a paging navigation:

To be able to add and modify jobs, images and videos Benjamin wanted a backend in which he could easily upload pictures and videos of portfolio projects he has done so far. Thus, I have created a mini Portfolio CMS (written in PHP, using a MySQL database) in which Benjamin can edit his projects, can apply them to categories (e.g. advertising, editorial/print, illustration) and can finally upload images and videos with short descriptions:

Update: As benjamin-bartels.com has been intended to be used for his application tour Benjamin took most of the content offline after he has found himself a nice job. However, in this (very, very nice) gringografico job you can at least see how jobs have been intended to be used.

I’ve been awarded a travel award by the Association of Laboratory Automation as a representative for our 3D interactive visualisation project TimeTube. Here’s a link to the poster program PDF of that fair: Laboratory Automation 08 :: Poster Program

This report has been a coursework assessment for my classes in “People & Technology” at Royal Holloway Universiy of London.

Introduction:This report presents an overview of Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE) as a field of Computer Mediated Collaboration. CVE research activities will be introduced and their findings will be described. CVEs have been intensively researched since the mid 1990s. Second Life (SL) seems to be the first commercial Virtual Environment that has been adopted by a large community. As of September 2007 according to the company behind SL Linden Labs more than 9.5m users have registered for SL (Linden Labs, 2007 [1]). SL is a Virtual Environment respectively Virtual World where users interact with other users, objects or agents by means of a client called viewer on their computer that communicates with a central server grid. Second Life is a consumer VE that offers multiple possibilities for collaboration. This report applies findings of CVE research activities to Second Life and introduces some ideas how CMC activities like virtual meetings can be realised with Second Life. SL’s current monopoly on the field of Virtual Environments promises to be a salient platform to research and implement CMC activities on. In terms of successful CVE implementations it seems to be more likely that lacks in SL can be overcome to realise collaboration activities than that a VE environment solely for collaboration purposes will establish in the near future.

Complete report: CollaborationSL (pdf, 107 KB)

This report has been a coursework assessment for my classes in “Networked Services” at Royal Holloway Universiy of London.

Introduction:
Recently Second Life (SL) has been intensively discussed. SL is a virtual world where (geographically dispersed) users usually represented by an avatar interact with other users, objects or agents by means of a client called viewer on their PC that communicates with a central server grid. SL seems to be the first commercial virtual world that is used by a big community. As of March 2007 according to the company behind SL Linden Labs 9.5m users have registered for SL. Averagely 50k of them are concurrently active in 8k to 10k regions. These 50k users and 10k regions have to be served by a server grid. However, there is a forecast of 16 million regions, 2bn users and a concurrency of 50m users for virtual worlds in the future. To serve that amount of users and data sophisticated server concepts have to be employed.

This report will try to present and critically analyse the current technological background behind SL. However, for this topic only little information is available in papers and books because the SL server software is still a proprietary system. Alternatively the information provided in this report is mainly based on information given by Linden Labs themselves in their Knowledge Base, their blogs and their Wikis. As the viewer software’s source code is published under an Open Source licence plenty of documentation about it is available online. Despite efforts of Linden Labs to open their server protocols to the Open Source community as well documentation for the server software is currently hardly publicly available. Nevertheless, this report tries to interpolate the available online
information to give an overview of the current state of the art of SL’s technological foundations. This overview cannot be more than a snapshot of SL as it is developing quickly. In depth information is only presented if information was provided by LL. This report will present the most recent technological developments in SL even if they are still in a beta or Release Candidate phase at the time of this writing.

Download complete report: TechnolgySL (pdf, 435 KB)

For my master’s thesis I’m doing some research work in the field of multi-touch applications. I’m trying to find out when multi-touch actually makes sense and what you have to keep in my mind when you’re designing and implementing a multi-touch application.

In order to accomplish this work I need to design, test and evaluate multi-touch applications. Therefore I will be working on a few projects throughout my master’s thesis.

One of those projects is the Digital Volvelles project: when I was in England for a term as a visiting student at the Royal Holloway University I met quite a few interesting people. With one of those, Mel, I started to work on the Digital Volvelles project, which will be a Flash application for the multi-touch table I’m currently building. So check out our Digital Volvelles project blog if you’re interested!

Hi! This is the blog to my profession. I will use it to upload work related stuff.