Originally published in April 2022, access restored April 2024.
This essay shall not be taken as a direct address to any particular individuals with whom I interfaced at this weekend’s unnamed national-level physics competition event, where I have served as a judge for quite some time now.
2022 has also been the first year I have grown wise enough to remove the “High School Honours and Achievements” section from my own CV. From a perspective not so far removed from that change, I hope I can explain why I both feel bad about the event in its current format, and will be like extending my participation through the rest of my residency in Auckland.
In Series … THE APERIODICALS Local (personal, potentially shallow, and subject to change) outlooks on science, technology, growth, and occasionally culture and history. The goal is to write something every week, but whether it can make its way to FWPhys is random. Hence the series title.
This post is to serve as a companion booklet to my bizarre release “Curiosity – Select Piano Compositions”. It is available on 15 Apr 2022 on streaming platforms and digital marketplaces around the world.
Like how the people in the Star Wars universe take for granted, I want to bring hologram video calling into reality (albeit mono-directionally for the time being), using the current video conferencing infrastructure, and keeping the finished product as open-source as possible.
Executively speaking, this project makes use of a typical pyramidal hologram projector and real-time video stream synthesis using OpenCV and Python. It will be broken down into three (four) distinct tasks.
A. Design and manufacturing of projectors for various devices.
B0. Deployment of a custom iOS app that on each device
collects video feed,
syncs time,
performs necessary image corrections like perspective change, and
compresses and transmits video streams over wired connections.
B1. Evaluation of lighting and camera mounting positions.
C. Real-time video synthesis fed into virtual camera software.
(Code and design blueprints will be available on GitHub after the design phase ends)
Progress
A.
Trivial.
B 0.
Not yet implemented.
B 1.
Not yet implemented. I have 4 idevices that can at least capture at 1080p.
C.
6 Feb 2022
I used OpenCV to stitch four feeds together and broadcast the result into Zoom as a virtual camera. Before further optimization efforts, I currently make use of a transparent PNG of a right-isosceles triangle.
Using this picture, pixels in the video feeds whose coordinates match the mask is transparent are discarded, and the resulting four triangles are combined using Numpy magic.
The inner shadow effects may be able to be multiplied back into the video stream and provide a vignette effect, but that is not implemented in the current pipeline.
In all, the system can output 1080 × 1080 images like this at slightly over 50 frames per second.
And here’s the synthesized feed on a receiving Internet terminal, static but refreshing at 30 FPS.
A summary of papers I keep in a special Mendeley folder: stuff that I consider big news and major developments in the field of cosmology and nearby areas.
I will do one every year from now on. This is aimed at a general physics audience, and the stories are not presented in any particular order.
Yourong Frank Wang 