Check it out:
http://techblog.rga.com/internet-of-things-iot

Tuesday 6th and Wednesday 7th 2011 were quite special here at R/GA. It was R/GA Make Day (#RGAMakeDay). We basically were given 2 days by the company to work on anything we wanted using whatever technology we wished to use.

Myself and three of my colleagues decided to work on an application which allowed people who work for R/GA to know where there colleagues were in the different buildings. Since R/GA opened it’s second office we had this problem of not being able to locate people. So this was an answer at trying to solve this problem.

The system we’ve put together is the following.

I worked on the face recognition software which checked in and out people automatically when it found a match by sending a request to a server. The application uses OpenFrameworks and OpenCV. The face recognition was done thanks to OpenCV and it uses the Eigenface algorithm which is one of many face algorithms. An explanation of this algorithm can be found here . As said previously everytime a match was found the software sent a request with the user name of this person and the location they needed to be logged in. I also hooked Arduino to this so when a user was being matched a green light was being turned on. This light could easily be replaced with a lock activation for a door. Essentially the door would unlock when a match would be found. And just for fun at the end of the day I added welcome messages through the MAC OSX terminal command ‘say’.

Danny Lee made (two applications - superman) a Silverlight 4 application pulling the server for updates. As soon as someone new was being logged in the application was displaying who he was and where he was. The second application Danny made was a Windows Mobile 7 application which also was also communicating with the server. it was listing people in the company and stating their current location.

Anthony Baker put together the back-end (database and rest services) that all the applications comsume and also made a Windows 8 tablet application which was realised in only one day. Its functionality was kind of similar to the Windows Phone 7 application. It was able to provide a summary of all employees with their current location within R/GA premises. Anthony also posted about Make Day on his blog here.

Jiri worked on the ID and design and made the slides for the presentation which by the way were awesome.

Most of these application are based around Microsoft products but since the server deliver REST services it could be consumed by any platform i.e. Android, iPhone, Flash…

We did not win but came second. However the feedback we got were really positive so regardless of the outcome we felt really proud of what we achieved in such small period of time.

Russel Davis who is R/GA’s Planning Director was the one who has initiated the idea of this make day. I think the drive behind this was to show clients, the talents and innovation R/GA has behing its walls. It is also a good way for R/GA to see what their developers are capable of and if there’s any idea that can be taken to market.

tools for developing wireframe and ui elements
http://code.google.com/p/android-ui-utils/

http://lab.kapit.fr/display/kaplabhome/home

http://kb.mediatemple.net/questions/247/Common+SSH+Commands

http://www.zeropointnine.com/blog/a-3d-framework-for-android-min3d/

Ginny effect (MAC OSX minimise animation)
http://wonderfl.net/c/qnTR/

Magnifier glass effect done with pixelbender
http://swingpants.com/category/code-snippet/