The Last Year

5 October 2011

The last year's been my first full year of working 100% of the time on Pur3's Software and Consultancy (previously I have been working part time as a contractor), and it's been seriously busy. I'm now allowed to say why too.

I've been working with Shahmoon, developing their new advertising platform. If you live or work around London you may have seen some of their screens spring up in shop windows. There are now around 80 of them, and they're growing rapidly. They run a customized version of Ubuntu with the Morphyre Engine on it. They render 1080p HD animated adverts in real-time, using the graphics hardware in the screens.

Because of this, we can do a few things that are pretty interesting:

• An online advert designer where you can design your animated advert from a Webpage (using HTML5, not flash) and can get a Video Preview of it shown to you.
• Integration of Twitter or RSS feeds, as text, images, or even as QR codes
• Live updates to all of Shahmoon's screens - because we're not re-rendering and sending videos, we send so little data we can even do it all over 3G if we need to.
• Animating ads together with slides and fades. No more sudden changes like you get with the ads in the Tube.
• Interactive ads - a camera on the screen picks up movement and allows you to vote or wipe off parts of some adverts in order to reveal a code.
• Using the Webcam to count people who pass by the screen while adverts are showing.

In addition to this I've been doing some other stuff, but as usual a lot of that is under NDA. Morphyre Personal, and Pro are now out with many users, and we're about to release a cheap bit of Morphyre Pro hardware for bars that allows them to produce branded sound-reactive graphics quickly and easily.

Morphyre Pro

21 November 2010

From July, among other things, we've been working on Morphyre and Morphyre Pro. There are a few demo videos out at the moment, and in the coming weeks we'll have got a demo version of Morphyre Pro out.

These are a Music Visualisations, which display animated 3D graphics which change according to the Music. Morphyre Pro runs as a stand-alone application, and will take sound from Line In, or from any application currently playing music. It has a few really neat features over R4 (our previous software) though... It has a new user interface, which is specifically designed for touchscreens, and which makes creating your own scenes with Images, Video, or even live Video feeds in them really easy... It's also got Stereo 3D output, which really has to be seen to be believed. We have a demo video of this, however you'll have to cross your eyes to view it so some of the effect is lost...

This software isn't limited to normal music visualisation though... We've been developing a website where you can create animated adverts (which run in Morphyre, or can be rendered to videos) - while we were still in beta this got seen by another company, and we've been working hard to adapt it to their needs for a few months now. As soon as I hear back from them about whether it's ok to make more details public I'll add a post about it - there's some really exciting stuff here, with adverts not only HD, but automatically updating from RSS feeds such as Twitter, and also interactive via a webcam...

First Post

21 November 2010

As some of you may know, in July I finished my last full-time contract and started working full-time - on both Consultancy work and on improving our Morphyre sound visualisation software.

Since then a lot of interesting stuff has happened - and is due to happen - and it seemed like it would be a great time to start a blog to keep everyone informed of what's going on.

I've just very quickly made a blog system, so there's no RSS feed or room for comments... However if you want to say something you're more than welcome on the Morphyre Forums...