Anyway. I’ve managed to create something – currently extremely unimaginatively titled BtAnim. As with a lot of my work it is really just a framework for something else to happen. How it works is this;

To begin with BtAnim just displays the starting image on the screen. Anyone who sees it can add their own frame to the animation, by taking a photo on their mobile phone and bluetoothing it to the computer. If you watch the video example here, you will see that as time goes on, more frames are added (although the video is just from my own testing) just as they will be when people are contributing their own images.  That’s it.

I thought it would work really well in a public place like a shop window or something.

Technically it is my usual mish-mash of hacking together some code in Processing, using BlueSoleil for the bluetooth component and PHP to monitor incoming files. Watch this space.

Today’s procrastinative displacement activity is giving some much needed attention to this blog.

Photobombing has attracted some comments from various people on the internet and is still smouldering away by itself, which is really encouraging. I really want to get it properly sorted, so its a more cohesive system and accessible to anyone (which unfortunately it is not at the moment). I think that is going to involve quite a lot of re-learning how to program – but should be fun in its own right.

I was particularly pleased yesterday when I stumbled across Imran Ali’s blog and his post about photobombing. Its so good to see/hear/know that people other than myself are attracted to the concept. Imran summated photobombing with this, it isn’t quite correct (I don’t think) but this is probably how photobombing should operate:

I guess it’s basically the inverse of geotagging, rather than tagging a digital map with digital photos, you tag a physical place with real photos :)

A (cool) twist of fate is that he discovered the concept of photobombing via geotagging which is something I’ve been extremely interested with lately.

Speaking of geotagging, I’ve finally got my mobile phone/bluetooth GPS and camera combination to work smoothly, so in future I can ensure all my photographs will be geotagging automatically. But I’ve also discovered the phenomenon of geocaching. What am amazing thing this is. A network of “cachers” maintain thousands of caches throughout the globe. A cache can be any sort of container, and will contain a log book and official geocaching.com paperwork. Sometimes there are gifts inside, or puzzles, riddles, clues to find another geocache – anything! Anyhow, all the cache’s and their GPS co-ordinates are available on the website and anyone who so wishes can go in search of them. Its great fun, I recommend it to all.

I am certainly going to combine my photobombing escapades with geocaching.

Sometimes I wish time went twice as slow, or me twice as fast.

I already have a page for my photobombing project to include geo-tagged photographs – using the website loc.alize.us.

Anyway, I’ve had some success, its taken a few days but I’ve finally managed to create a Google Earth file containing correctly geo-tagged photographs from a trip I took yesterday. Fantastic! See here…..

If you’re interested in doing this yourself, I suggest reading this page; http://hikesandbikes.blogspot.com/2006/10/life-of-geolocated-blog-post.html – its a very thorough walk through of how to set all this up.

Also, many thanks to Ed, of blogEd.co.uk and Tommi Laukkanen. Ed wrote a blog entry about Carling beer taps, which I landed on very randomly. Then I read his article about GPS tagging photos, using a Java enabled phone and Tommi Laukkanen’s “Trail Explorer” application – a very useful program that logs your geo location as you go and exports to a .GPX file.

Also this is fun opportunity to send another trackback :o)