Virtual Eyeglasses Try On – VTO – Software Development

Today I have removed “collapse_whitespace” from “ModPagespeedEnableFilters” because I have found that this setting breaks the top navigation view of Magento using Shopper theme.

With “collapse_whitespace” enabled for example

Home > Eyeglasses > Woman’s Eyeglasses

is shown as

Home Eyeglasses Woman’s Eyeglasses

The “>” is missed – but I have no idea why… strange…

Because there are a lot of questions related to the image file format used by VirtualMirror here is a short answer…

At least a *.jpg of the frontal view of the eyeglasses is needed. This *.jpg should have a clean white background.

at least needed

Overlay, transparency, size, scaling, rotation, positioning will be computed by VirtualMirror itself.

Optionally VirtualMirror can use the Collada file format. This requires a web cam in any case. Both of the formats can be used together. VirtualMirror will try to enable the video mode if a Collada file (*.dae) was passed. Detailed information about Collada can be found at the following site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COLLADA

…written using Adobe Action Script 3 is amazing… I’m almost confused a little because of this.

We have a lot of installations around the whole world now. The software was translated to English, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Hebrew – and of course there is still a German version.

And we have extensions and code snipplets to embed this VTO into Magento, HikaShop, Shopify, OpenCart, Drupal, Joomla and sCat.

Even I’m about the html5 version since months I’m not very satisfied with the result, using Dart. That’s really confusing

Last week I have updated bennewitz.com and I was able to fix a long time bug of Magento.  The problem appears when I change the language from German to English. The names of the catergories are different – that’s why I receive an 404 error. There was no translation of the category name, based by the category ID.

This is a very nasty error.

Looking into the code I found that I had removed the “?___from_store=xx”output in past for better SEO: Inside of /app/design/frontend/base/default/template/page/switch/languages.phtml “getCurrentUrl()” was set to “getCurrentUrl(false)”.

This was a bad idea because this avoids the translation of the category name. However setting this back to default the language switcher doesn’t work as expected. Even the category name is translated the store code is still missed.

In result I had to look some deeper inside the php… for Magento 1.7.0.2 I have found this fix:

/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Url/Rewrite.php

Starting from line 251 I have replaced the default assignment to $targetUrl

Mage::app()->getCookie()->set(Mage_Core_Model_Store::COOKIE_NAME, $currentStore->getCode(), true);

// endur 02-03-2013 fix for missed store code
// $targetUrl = $request->getBaseUrl(). '/' . $this->getRequestPath();

if (Mage::getStoreConfig('web/url/use_store') && $storeCode
    = Mage::app()->getStore()>getCode()) { 
    $targetUrl = $request->getBaseUrl(). '/'
     . $storeCode . '/' .$this->getRequestPath();
    } else {
      $targetUrl = $request->getBaseUrl(). '/' . $this->getRequestPath();
    }

// endur 02-03-2013 end

to get the store code added. It seem’s a bug of Magento 1.7.0.2.
Of course I havn’t change the core file itself, I have changed a copy instead:

/app/code/local/Mage/Core/Model/Url/Rewrite.php

…and the language switcher is working well from now

…this is my basic hardware / software setup for the current software development machine at present.

It’s not the latest available, however the Thinkpad is functional and fast as usual including a perfect working finger print reader (AuthenTec AES2550/AES2810) used to login into the Gnome Display Manager (gdm).

I have replaced the optical DVD drive inside of the Ultrabay by a classical magnetic hard disk: 320 GB Western Digital, Scorpio Black, running at 7200rpm, spinned down using hdparm -Y /dev/sd* most of the time.

I love the silence of the ssd drive because it is much better to listen – for example to this: Johannes Brahms wrote it for Clara Schumann

Since last week I was able to find a way to embed VirtualMirror into Shopify. I have “learned” Liquid for this… While the backend of VirtualMirror has to be run on an external server VirtualMirror itself can be called from cdn.shopify.com including the images to load.

However, I’ll prefer the “hard” way: A root server, running Linux + Magento.

…is here, of course this needs proof reading and many corrections.

It’s tricky really to have a right-to-left language using pure action script (AS3)

The kerning may be incorrect.

We have some more progress for the tablet html5 version even there are limitations, compared against as3.

…will be the next step. The development of the available AS3 version is continued.

Using HTML5 Virtual Mirror will have a reduced functionality compared against the AS3 version but at present this is an alternative way  for tablet computers on client-side.

…was released as version 0.6.6 on Sunday, December 02, 2012.
The version is here.

The total width of the frame in millimeters can be passed as an additional parameter. Check out the different frame size (Medium Sized, Large Metal, and Kids Glasses).

Friday, December 07, 2012: The Bugfix Day
Apart from some small enhancements of the user interface two other longtime bugs are fixed:

1.  If the webcam was closed the default frame is loaded instead of the last visited one.
2.  If the web cam was enabled / disabled multiple times without a reload of Virtual Mirror the detection of  face and pupils doesn’t work and the spinner is shown for ever.

The link on top was updated today,  it may needed that you have to clean up your browser cache if you had gone to this page before.