Re: [GSOC] Spicing up Cheese

[Yuvi Panda <yuvipanda gmail com>]

Note that this is still a work in progress - I'll be posting a draft
of my proposal soon, and I think will have changed parts of it thanks
to feedback.

On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 2:20 AM, Yuvi Panda <yuvipanda gmail com> wrote:
> Hi, my name is Yuvi and I'm a student from Chennai, India. I'm
> applying for this year's GSoC to work on GNOME - specifically on
> Cheese. I've been hanging out on IRC talking with @fargiolas and
> @kaserf - and though my proposal isn't ready yet I'm putting up my
> ideas in the mailing list informally.
>
> ==============
> Spicing up Cheese
> ==============
>
> Goals of the project
> ----------------------------
>
> The goal of the project is to make Cheese extremely slick and a lot
> more fun - and in the process (quoting jwz) increases the chances of
> me (or in general users of cheese) getting laid[1]. This involves:
>
> 1. Live Preview of Available Effects.
> 2. Background Changing/Manipulation
> 3. One Click Upload to Facebook/Myspace/etc.
>
> 1. Live Preview of Effects
> ------------------------------------
> See how each effect looks when applied to your face. Much more fun
> than looking at static yellow smileys.
>
> Implementation: Will be following the obvious method of downscaling
> the video, then splitting the pipeline into several parallel parts
> that each apply a different effect and output to a different area on
> the screen. Combinations of Effects can be shown by an extra element
> that appears only when more than one element is selected.
>
> 2. Background Changing/Manipulation
> -------------------------------------------------------
> 90% of all photo manipulation requests I get is for background changes
> (the rest is for removing zits). Completely ignoring the small sample
> space and extrapolating, I can boldly predict that the usage/fun
> factor of Cheese will increase by quite a bit if we had the ability to
> dynamically change the background in a picture/video (in a similar way
> to how Apple does it).
>
> Implementation: The user will be instructed on the backgrounds easiest
> to change (no moving objects, colors not in your clothing, etc) and
> then asked to step away from the webcam while the application takes
> sample pictures of the background. Then we 'diff' the source image
> (from the camera) with the background image to remove the background
> and substitute the user selected background.
>
> 3. One Click Uploads
> -------------------------------
> Most photographs/videos taken by cheese will end up on some form of
> Social Networking sites (5 of the 6 use cases at the Cheese Wiki point
> to Social Networking uses [2]). We should feature improved, 'one
> click' uploading to those sites - while making sure we don't step on
> F-Spot's shoes by trying to become a full fledged photo management
> app. Having a workflow where the user can go from nothing to
> photo-on-facebook in 2 clicks minimum (take snapshot + publish to
> facebook) is a wonderful thing, I'd say.
>
> Implementation: PLUGINS! Preferably of the no-compilation required variety.
>
> Technical Details
> -------------------------
> As suggested on the GSoC ideas page, I'll move the 'glue' code to
> Python (since I have more experience with python than Vala - though
> Vala would be pretty easy to pick up too since I've 2 years of C#
> experience). I'll also converts parts of the UI to libclutter as and
> when required (the camera 'viewfinder' area probably first, menus
> perhaps quite a bit later on, etc). Anything that will cause
> unacceptable performance on the user's computer will be disabled at
> runtime and a message displayed as to why they are grayed out.
>
> Note
> -------
> This is an informal post to the mailing list - and that is all. I'm
> still workin on my application. Feedback? Flames?
>
> [1]: http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html
> [2]: http://live.gnome.org/Cheese/ThreeZero
> --
> Yuvi Panda T
> http://yuvi.in/blog
>



-- 
Yuvi Panda T
http://yuvi.in/blog