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Tomek Augustyn

Tomek Augustyn

Bio

It all started because of Commodore, indeed. When I was around 7, my uncle Jasiek (RIP) bought Commodore C16, equipped with datasette (of course!) I instantly fell in love with that toy, but because I couldn't have it, I've nicked all his Bajtek magazines (polish equivalent of Byte Magazine) instead – I could hardly read but somehow code seem to look nice to me. Few years later my dad brought my very own Commodore C64 breadbox from Germany (actually, I still need to ask where did he get it from) – I've had played games for a few months but I quickly got bored with them. I felt it deeply in my gut – I needed to code.

I begged my father for weeks till he got me 1541-II disk drive; it costed something about 1,990,000 zł those days (yes, it was nearly 2 million polish zlotys!) I was in heaven – started swapping 5,25" disks with stangers on pirates' local markets, getting more stuff. It occasionally happened that a disk would contain a demo. Woah! Certainly that was far more interesting than some lousy shoot 'em ups. Also, I've bought absolutely every issue of C&A (Commodore & Amiga – hi Jetboy) and Kebab magazine (hi and thanks to Polonus and Silver Dream) – these were the best titles on the market – and I've learnt how to program in Basic 2.0.

Few years later (I was about 13 then) I started exploring MOS 6502 and the whole world of assembler. I found about demoscene, called myself Digger and founded my own group called Atlantic and went to some crazy booze copy/demo parties to win/lose some demo competitions. I was also shown how to use tracker and write SID 6581 music (thanks Ivanhoe) for the first time. Exciting times they were, we've hardly slept for 3 days!

Session

Riding The Hislope!

After warm welcome of HiSlope during FOTB 2010, it's time for the follow up.

Technologies change so ridiculously fast there's no time to become an expert anymore. So many opensource libs and API cloud services around, so little time to explore them.

Time to forget about digging through megabytes of docs and spending countless hours on tweaking to get stuff working. HiSlope is there to help examine and utilise emerging video processing techniques. Add couple lines of code and pull your creativity out to the world.

Be prepared for more motion and blob detection; face tracking, recognition and manipulation; real-time video processing and enhancement -- with a magic touch of PixelBender and some help from rising up AS3 AR frameworks.

Work