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Welcome back to the ValorosoIT channel, the channel dedicated to retro computers and vintage electronics. Today we don't just talk about retro things, but also about modern topics. We are at Varese Retrocomputing 2023, and with me are Luca Baldi and Matteo Baldi from the Ctrl+Alt Museum in Pavia. They will give us slightly more modern presentations, but they will talk about it directly. I'll pass the word along right away.
Ok, I'm Luca and we come from Pavia. In Pavia there is comPVter. It is an association that is dedicated to many things. We take care of giving courses, free and otherwise, in different fields, such as programming, drones, laser cutting, 3D printing and many other things, everything. I've been there once and it's great. That is, you come in, open your mouth... and only close it when you're out. Thank you. We also have, obviously... let's say that the whole association is surrounded by the museum, a retrocomputing museum. We really have a lot of pieces, from the most famous ones like the Commodore 64 to more particular gems and even vintage consoles, the most famous. And beyond that, we also deal with the newest part, the new technologies. That part of the association is here today in Tradate. Among other things, I made a mini video on the Ctrl+Alt Museum of Pavia, I'll put the link in the description.
Good morning, I'm Matteo Baldi, also from the Ctrl+Alt Museum. And here on this machine we have a Depth Camera, the Xbox Kinect, which was created for video games but then turned out not to be very suitable for that area. But with the subsequent version, the Azure Kinect, they moved to the more professional sphere. And what is this Depth Camera for? It is used to map a person's movements. In fact, with this software we can see that it is mapping my movements onto a skeleton, we can call it a skeleton, and then we can record these movements and go and use these movements in Blender to create an animation in a much more immediate way than animating manually. Well, then this animation can be used in simulations, video games or anything. So you move in front of the camera, it records the movements you make and replicates them on this skeleton, exactly. And then you can color it, you can put this skeleton around it... Around this skeleton I can put, for example, an ogre, and therefore the movement that I made, in my house, in front of the camera, will then be replicated on an ogre in my video game. And you do this with Blender, which is this program. And I do this with Blender and Kinect.
So the goal is to create this character and his movements, if I understand correctly, and then what happens to this character? Well, this character that moves the way we want can be implemented in, perhaps, small films within a video game, a simulation, where we find this character interacting with the player.
Here instead, this is another application that we have developed, using Unreal Engine 5. This was done for our museum, it is an installation that will be placed in our museum and also uses Leap Motion, a sensor that allows you to identify the position of the hands and can be implemented with Unreal Engine 5. In this case, we have the sensor that reads the movement of the right hand to go back and forth along the machine and the left hand to rotate the machine in question. And when I close my hand, I can switch from one machine to another, and this allows you to have, for example, an installation in a museum, or even get to have every piece of the museum digitally and be able to view it in detail, even if you are not actually in the museum building.
Well, but what is Unreal Engine 5? It is a program, first released by Epic Games, which is used in part to make video games. The most famous is Fortnite, but it is also used to make many installations of this type, or professional simulations. We have another example here, and this, for example, is the editor you program using this Blueprint system, or in C++, and Unreal Engine 5 allows you to do many things, from banal video games, like this one, which uses simple Low Poly tanks, to applications like a car configurator that you can find on the BMW website, on the Porsche website, when you want to customize your new car.
I hope you also enjoyed this modern application, not exactly vintage as you are used to seeing on my channel. Also look at the other videos relating to Varese Retrocomputing 2023, because there are some interesting things, a little more vintage, not always so modern. Thanks for everything and see you in the next video. HI!