Glassific is online!

Glassific, our augmented reality video conferencing tool, has finally been deployed as a beta version, just on the last working day of 2011. The first application based on this system is a simple Paint-like utility that allows users to draw a picture in the air, record a video of the creation and upload it directly to YouTube. All this stuff, without even touching your computer!

Pushing the concept of social web app

In 2005 I had an idea for a mobile application that couldn’t be implemented for 3 reasons: mobile web connections were not popular enough yet, they were expensive at the time and the application in its core isn’t supposed to bring money.

A step forward with the CalaBoard project

The enthusiasm caused by the first place at the TechCrunch Summer Pitch Battle (see previous post) gave us a boost in confidence and allowed us to heavily improve the CalaBoard project prototype. Here is the list of what we achieved up to now:

Swinging London

A few months ago we got news of TechHub, a new co-working space aiming at putting together technology companies from all over Europe in the heart of London and we thought this could have been a good chance for us to get better involved in the European  startup scene. Eventually on Monday the 12th July TechHub opened and we finally started working in Bleaky.

Augmented Reality Business Conference

On Friday 23rd April we took part with a presentation to the first European Augmented Reality Business Conference in Berlin. The conference confirmed the high interest around the Augmented Reality field as representatives from both technology companies and investors held presentations or actively participated.

ARDevCamp in Amsterdam

On Sat 17th April 2010 we took part to the Augmented Reality DevCamp in Amsterdam and we were positively impressed by the whole event. The atmosphere was really relaxed and appealing at the same time and the venue was a peculiar hall, the Mediamatic Bank, hosting some artistic exhibition.

How CalaBoard requirements lead us to a pure Java codec

Starting up a company can be hard sometimes but luckily there are some aspects of this effort that can be really rewarding. One of this is expressing one’s self into the art of programming and this is what we actually did with the communication mechanism in CalaBoard, our video-conferencing tool based on Augmented Reality.

Video-conferencing requires a point-to-point connection between the parties involved in the conference.
At the coding level, our architecture of the system rotates around the concepts of Publishers and Readers. A Publisher is some entity that can publish data on some media (a network, a file, etc.) while the Reader is another entity capable of reading that data (and therefore capable of reading from a network connection, reading a file and so on).

Color detection using SRM algorithm

Runtime color detection is a difficult task, especially using low cost cameras like most people do on their computers. Brightness variability is one of the biggest problems to solve: it affects colors in the reality making them look very different from their “original” aspects.

Agile Acceptance Testing Days in Ghent

On Thursday 25th March we had a presentation at ATTD in Ghent, Belgium, about “Acceptance Testing with an agile remote team”, describing a test case resulting from the last project we developed. The event has proven to be really interesting as it has provided many different views on the concept of Acceptance Testing and at the same time it has given a lot of good hints about software tools like Cucumber and JBehave.

The Christmas milestone

It’s Christmas time at last and we are happy to wish you all the best for this holiday. This is actually our first Christmas and we took the chance to review our plans and see how we have been proceeding since we started.

Our customers are providing us precious feedback in fine tuning the CalAgile approach as we are keen to have it always shaped on real needs and not only on theories. On the other side, our first product is starting to be properly defined after an interesting phase of studies in the augmented reality field.