I was very inspired by the Red Interactive agency’s website which allowed the website visitors to talk to each other in realtime with an option to customize their avatars. So I wanted to use my skills and create something similar for my college website. The initial idea came up with was to model the entire college campus in 3D and allow the user to navigate around the campus along with them being able to go through the event details. I had also thought of having interactive elements in the 3D map which shows a miniaturized version of the cultural fest happening inside the 3D space. But as I was the only person who was working on it and also considering the average internet bandwidth available around that time in India, I decided not to plug in very heavy graphics onto the website. I started off by designing the main building of my college using Google sketch up and rendering it with a photorealistic plugin called vRay. The initial results were very impressive. With the crude rendering of the image, I started working on Flash CS3. Till then, I had only worked on Swishmax, which was a stripped down version of Flash. But Flash CS3 didnt prove too difficult given the fact that I never had to use much of drawing and keyframing tools present in flash and had to use only the actionscript features.
I started off testing the feasibiity with just a small ball as an avatar whose position can be moved through the keyboard arrows. The position of this ball was broadcasted using raw XML sockets to a PHP based server listening on port 8080. And every flash client connected to this PHP server received the coordinates of this ball. After doing a real run on NITK network, the concept proved successful. After this, I went on download some human characters for Poser 5 and exported frames which show the human characters to be walking. The simplicity of Poser in working with human models proved to be a blessing as I had the still frames oif the animation ready within a few days. Then these frames were imported onto Flash and separate swf files which showed the human model to be walking were kept separately and then imported onto the main flash movie and placed in front of the 3D background map.
After this, multiple human characters and multiple 3D background were done using the same method and all integrated into the main movie using some actionscript and the final movie was ready. A quick demo to some of my friends showed that the website would become an instant hit.
Along with the main flash site, I had to set up a way to add text content onto the website using a simple HTML admin page.
The final website was hosted on the local NITK student server and a WAN port 80 was mapped to LAN port 8080 on the local server so that no firewall can intrude in the communication between the client and the server. The final result was a major success and was one of the best websites made for a cultural fest in India.

Later on , some additional features were integrated into the site like :

Some interesting things in the backend : (which you probably wouldnt know even if you used the website)
The chat avatar character was assigned based on the IP. If the IP address was in the range for girls hostel , a female character was assigned, If it was from the boys hostel block, a male character was given. Otherwise it was totally random.
The ALICE chat bot was trained to answer hundreds of questions like “What is Incident”, “When is Incident” etc and would respond to commands like shut up, keep quiet etc. It would also detect when someone would try to use abusive words and then ask them to kindly restrain from repeating it.
Someone or the other person would always stay online to moderate the chat messages being broadcast and ban users who spread hatred on the group chat.
To aid in modelling the 3D maps, I had to go around the campus clicking photographs on my phone from different angles for different buildings and then model them on sketchup. There were plans to model every building , but the plan never worked out due to lack of time.

Some technical details :
The flash client in the browser connects to the PHP based socket server running on port 80 on the NITK student server and communicates using raw XML sockets. The PHP server separated the users into different rooms(based on the map chosen) and forwarded the messages in realtime.  Running it on port 80 ensured that firewall intrusion was minimal. A chat bot (based on ALICE chat bot) was integrated into the map. Moderators could see the activity of any room by adding a jabber user ([email protected]) to their google talk list. The text content on the website was managed using a simple CMS like page.

VN:F [1.9.22_1171] please wait... Rating: 8.8/10 (16 votes cast)

(to be done)

Incoming search terms:

• nitk surathkal (152)
• nitk (71)
• nitk BEACH (61)
• nit surathkal (51)
• nitk surathkal images (15)
• nitk surathkal beach (15)
• nitk surathkal campus (11)
• nitk surathkal pictures (10)
• flash avatar chat (8)
• national institute of technology karnataka (7)

Hey there, My Name is Kiran Kumar (so is the name of this site) and I am a 23 yr old web developer from Mangalore, India. This blog is a place for me to share my thoughts and my contributions to the open source community. Apart from that, this website is my face on the internet where I publish links to my work and a medium for you guys to reach me anytime. You have reached the about me page on my blog and I should say that this was one of the most difficult part of writing a blog, i.e, writing about thyself. So here it goes,

I am a Chemical engineer by degree, Oracle employee by the day and a freelance developer by the night

My interest in the web technologies started in late 2005 when I became a part of the web enthusiasts club at my college; NITK Surathkal. By then I had already decided that I would pursue chemical engineering as I had no clear cut idea on what specialisation to choose. But slowly my interests in web technologies started to captivate me and I started spending most of my time working on the web. In my college, I started becoming known for the websites I designed and the posters I created. In my free time I had learnt a lot of different technologies on my own. My first love was for SWiSH , an alternative to Macromedia Flash 5 at that time. I liked to create fancy text effects and make small flash movies using Swish. Slowly, I moved on to 3dsmax, to enter into the world of visual effects. But the hardware config of my desktop prevented me from getting too close to CGI. Simple 3d scenes took a lot of time to be rendered, and when the rendering time went to the magnitude of days coupled with the frequency of power cuts in India , it became an impossible feat to get anything out of it.

Then I found my new interest in PHP after one of my friends told me about it. And since then, I have been actively involved in PHP development. To me, the simplicity of the language combined with the power of the open source community always gave way to endless possibilities. Along with PHP came all its friends. Javascript, HTML, Flash, Photoshop, I loved them all !

I worked on a couple of different softwares/technologies and here is the list of things which I can recall right now :

1. Rating:  PHP 5
2. Rating:  ExtJS framework
3. Rating:  Flash CS3 & Actionscript 3 -
4. Rating:  HTML & CSS :
5. Rating:  Javascript
6. Rating:  Joomla 1.5 component, plugin creation
7. Rating:  Selenium & QTP UI automation
8. Rating:  Titanium framework for iPhone & android app development
9. Rating:  Photoshop
10. Rating:  VBscript & VB app design -
11. Rating:  Google sketchup 3d modelling & rendering
12. Rating:  Facebook API & Twitter API
13. Rating:  Poser animation
14. Rating:  3dsmax
15. Rating:  Matlab coding & GUI
16. Rating:  Autocad (2d only)
17. Rating:  HP Quality center OTA API

I worked on a small content management system of my own which , in the final year of my college this helped me get a job in Oracle and be a part of Content Management (ECM) team in Oracle. At Oracle, I am a part of Middleware suite globalization team where I work with people from Beijing, Tokyo and San Francisco on Oracle’s acquired as well as in-house ERP applications. The toughest part of the job is learning to understand the accents used by different people.[Update: I now work as a mobile developer at an e-commerce startup flipkart.com]

Until recently, I was only involved in web based projects, but the day I can across Appecelerator’s Titanium framework, I said ‘this is definitely my cup of tea’.For the last 6 months, I have been busy  developing native applications for iPhone & Android using the Titanium framework and I absolutely love it.[Update: I have started hating it now. Its very difficult to manage titanium projects when they become big]

I am passionate about my work and I always love to learn new things. I hate limiting myself to a single domain and always push myself hard to explore new interests which can keep me occupied all the time. People may call it ‘lack of focus’ , hyper-wandering-mind or a Jackass of all trades ! But its just the way I am designed. There hasnt been a day where I dont get a tingly feeling about learning or doing something new. But most of my work have been in varied domain, and are unorganized.

I think that much text should be good enough for you to give a glimpse into my life, if you like to get in touch with me send me a mail, or chat with me, or follow me on twitter or drop in a comment.

Incoming search terms:

• 160by2 (4)
• kiran kumar cgi (3)
• www the kiran kumar com (3)
• www matlab kirankumar com (1)
• web design (1)
• THE KIRANKUMAR COM (1)
• www thekiran (1)
• show my current location (1)
• My current location (1)
• mullagiri kiran blog (1)