passim in passing

Ok, so I might have taken some time to catch my breath after the massive annual outreach event that is Science Uncovered , the Natural History Museum London's contribution to the EU-wide Researcher's Night event. About 6,000 people wandered around the museum on a Friday night, enjoying (I think that's the word I want) the bars, virtual autopsy tables, live animals, satellite links to antarctica, and our researchers dragged up from their basements and behind-the-scenes labs to talk Science (and redeem our free drink tokens). The Human Origins Group decided to go pretty big -- we had several volunteers as well as the usual suspects manning the tables. There was a lot of discussion about human evolution by C. Stringer, M. Skinner, L. Buck and L. Humphrey. Heck, I even acted out Taung child being carried off by an eagle a few times (with sound effects, natch). L. Humphrey and L. Buck here demonstrate human evolution for the crowd... But it wasn't all fossils...

I've finally branched out and tried a bit more sophisticated augmented reality tools. Yes, you,  ARToolkit . This particular project was in honour of Science Uncoverd, our mahoooosive annual public outreach event. At the end of the day, the rather painstaking efforts to tweak little bits of script hither and thither were a bit more intense than I had anticipated; if I hadn't wanted to do a multiple object app I would have probably just retreated back to my standard free-and-easy pipeline using ARMedia plugin for Google SketchUp (see my earlier post for the how-to). But it came off all right in the end, and I have a sneaking suspicion that most of my issues were down to the sharp learning curve in using Xcode, which I was new to. However, I did manage to get the whole shebang off the ground eventually, and that's probably primarily due to these lovely instructional videos made by Gimpneek on  how to install the OpenVRML  libraries you'll nee...