Multimodal Media Madness - Winter Semester 2008/2009

Quartz composer is a great prototyping tool for developers. Besides testing interface ideas, it helps you to define new graphic filters for your application.
OpenGL pixel shaders and Core Image Kernels can easily be developed with Composer and then copied into your Objective C project.
Core Image Kernels define custom image filters, like the ones you have been using the last two weeks.

In this week's lab you are supposed to get an idea on how pixel shaders work and wrap your head around the GPU programming style.
If you need more information, have a look at

Core Image Programming Guide Core Image Kernel Language Reference
Also, there are various tutorials on OpenGL pixel shaders out there. Google is your friend.


This week's task will be to develop a kernel that highlights moving objects in a scene. This can be useful for projects suchs as DRAGON.
We will discuss the basic idea on how to do that in the lab session.
If you manage to create a really cool looking solution, we will incorporate it into DRAGON and show you next week.

As "certified" test data you get the following two images.

• frame1.png
• frame2.png

As always you can get extra credits by extending your patch in some useful way. Be creative!
Some ideas for extra credit in this assignment:

• Give the objects a nice pulsating glow
• Make sure only the fat man is tracked, not the marginal camera movement...
• State the title of the movie :-)

Email an archive of your assignment to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. before the due date. The subject of your email should be "M3 Submission 3"; be sure to use this exact subject line as it will be used to filter assignment submissions for grading.

Your assignment archive should include your QC patch file. Include a short plain text README file that contains:

• the names and email addresses of all group members
• a short description of what your patch does
• non-obvious things you did (if any)
• if you did any extra credit work, be sure to tell us what you did

Be prepared to discuss your solution in the next lab.


The assignment will be graded on the following rough scale:

• 1.0 - exceptional work that clearly went above and beyond what was given on the exercise
• 2.0 - exercise was completed satisfactorily as per the assignment specification
• 3.0 - exercise was completed, but has some problems
• 4.0 - incomplete exercise
• 5.0 - little or no effort was put into the exercise

Late assignments will be graded with a penalty of 0.5 per 24 hour period after the due date.