figured I'd jump in on HN since I've been lurking for a while (and loving this site), and mention that I wrote the software for this, which is tracking the four colors on the car.

It's using openframeworks (openframeworks.cc) an open source, cross platform c++ toolkit (which I am helping develop). the source code for the car tracking software is here:

http://www.openframeworks.cc/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=...

and you can check out openframeworks at

http://openframeworks.cc

http://openframeworks.cc/download

It was quite fun to work on this -- the driver and type designers blew me away with how good they were.

how did you end up working on this project?

are you a freelance software engineer? do you generally work on creative projects like these?

Sorry if this is a long answer ;)

I work primarily as a software artist and teacher, and we (as in the folks who work on openframeworks) sometimes we do commercial projects / freelance work. Because of the nature of what we do (computer vision, interaction design, realtime software) we get invited to work on very diverse projects.

For this particular project, Theo, who is part of the OF team, had already been working on something IQ related with the advertising company Happiness Brussels, which was postponed because of the economy. When they thought of this project, they contacted Theo, who put them in touch with me as I happened to be in Brussels teaching a workshop and thought this would be fun to help with. Everything clicked from there.

If it's helpful, here are some links to other projects (so you can see what kind of stuff I work on):

http://vimeo.com/4706049 / http://vimeo.com/4732884 / http://vimeo.com/2892576 / http://vimeo.com/2375069

and I'm currently working on a project covered a few days ago on hacker news ;)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=720146

are you trained as an artist or as a software engineer? hmm, maybe what i want to ask is, from which "side" did you get into being a software artist?

I was trained as an artist and got into computers / programming accidentally... now I teach artists how to code (and sometimes CS students more artistic potentials of software / programming).

I think the fun you all had working on it is visible in the end product, well done!

I don't really care for the font, but the marketing stunt was executed beautifully and reading about the process was fascinating. This is a very cool idea to get techies talking about your product.

Definitely agree. The font itself looks out of focus and starts giving me a headache if I stare at it too long but the idea itself was genius.

Very clever idea. I'm not sure how readable it will be in practice... but definitely cool.

Cool idea! I guess iQ would not be available in US?

EVIL MARKETING. But I love it!

Q looks too much like 0. otherwise cool.

Q doesn't look like 0 at all in this font; Q is large and has a line across it and 0 is small and has no line across it.