Last night at 9pm a very innovative ad aired for the new Gadget Show. It relied on an iOS application installed and running ready to go. At 9pm the tv promo started, the jingle ditty at the start cued the application to life to run the same promo advert. The TV was of course a fixed camera, but the app was a full 360 video. Moving the iPad around looking up down left right and behind you could follow the action, and it was perfectly synchronised to the TV advert. So as Jason dashed around the studio you could follow him.
The video was of course preloaded in the app, but it was a very impressive experience. It was a polished example of innovation using both the TV screen and the ever increasingly common iPad.
The video is available on the web here, in the same sort of way the old quicktime VR’s were back in 1998 🙂 It was the linking of the fixed TV showing what you would have seen combined with the physical activity of moving the iPad around whilst held up that made this more engaging than just a 360 video on the web.
Of course this would have been even better taken to the next level. If we were all in the studio too and were aware of one another. Think a virtual world synched to the TV broadcast. Where we have the same sort of control on out view of the system.
The second screen as it is being called is becoming very influential. It has been great being able to watch the Sky coverage of F1 both on the TV and with the app on the iPad letting me look at stats, track positions and in car driver feeds. It is an extension of us sitting here with our wireless enabled laptops, or having moved the desktop PC into the main living area (the previous wave) to be able to look things up, to follow links to add to our enjoyment of a previously passive experience.
It is all a part of blending realities with all the new forms of visualisation and and interaction hardware that we now have available to us. Why restrict us to one screen?
future
Gadget Show Live 2012 – Press day
Last week I popped along to Gadget Show Live Professional. Which is otherwise known as the press day. It seemed much more spaced out in layout this year compared to last year, yet it also seemed to not have quite so much in despite being across more halls. Being a pro day there is less barracking from people on the booths as really its a rehearsal warm up day. Also the flagship live show is doesn’t run as the team are still putting it together and doing dress rehearsals.
There was nothing that leapt out at me this year, but it may be that I spend so much time with new technology it takes something pretty amazon got get the attention.
What I was pleased to see was the team represented who do all the Gadget show builds and I got to talk to them. very jealous at the Gadget Show TV budget but equally seems the guys were always up against it. Can you just… by tomorrow 🙂
Things like the electric “jet” bike and Jason’s robot martial arts training dummy were on show.
It was also great too see at least one 3d printing company there. Bits from Bytes. So we had a bit of chat about printers and building your own.
It used to be the case, probably before I started to get to go to such things, that freebies and interesting merchandising ruled the day but all I came back with from the show was a t-shirt for the new Spec Ops game
I got to play on a few games, the best was the new Dirt game. Which is a bit of a favourite at home. This new game which is called Dirt Showdown. Apparently not Dirt 4. This game is about demolition derby and trashing cars whilst Dirt 4 will be a more serious rally game. Anyway it looked and played great and it’s got cars in it 🙂
The computer museum had a stand, as last year. It is great to see old tech. It is ironic that that was probably a bigger stand than most of the big players. Retro is still in
Of course I could have stayed at home for a touch of retro as I found opening a few old boxes.
A logic 5 and some Dreamcast controllers, and a copy of OS/2 Warp ! Still in its shrink-wrap.
Anyway at the show I managed to finally pull Scotty away from this uber gaming desk
The screen rise out of the desk like Ozzy Osbourne’s TV used raise out of the foot of his bed. It was part of a massive gaming rig with more graphics cards than Dreamworks office!
We headed off our separate ways and I bumped into Jason Bradbury and got to say hi, just after we had been talking 3d printers and haptic tattoos on Twitter. I was in full g33k tshirt from Cool Stuff Collective but it was not a showbiz luvvie moment 🙂
Anyway, it was a good show, but it was showing the recession was in effect I think. You might aswell look at the bustling film I made from last years. This year just didn’t really warrant the vid.
Teaching Programming and Tech at School – Can I?
We are seeing more and more good articles and the beginning of some motion towards us being able to teach kids programming and related technical skills in school. Things such as this article from the guardian. We see role model comments and I was also doing my bit by introducing all sorts of accessible future tech on kids TV.
However I thought I would look at me doing a bit more, I have already signed up as a STEMnet ambassador and I do a lot of talks for people. People have often suggested and commented I would make a good teacher. So I thought with all this need for experience, technical awareness, future thinking I would see what options there might be for me to move into teaching.
Surely, all this talk of closer links to industry, bringing experience into the classroom etc would be there on the home page of the Department for Education Teaching Agency?
But no 🙁 Good encouragement to be a Maths teacher, A physics teacher, chemistry or Modern Foreign Languages (MFL). All good subjects. Also active encouragement to convert to teaching from the armed forces.
Nothing about the business of powering and using technology.
Now most subjects do need to use tech so it could be excused as all this will be part of the entirety. However the specifics of computer science are not represented well or at all.
So which teachers are going to be the ones showing kids about open source projects, online etiquette, contributing to projects, building hardware with arduino, rasperry Pi, creating virtual worlds with OpenSim, games design, virtual good markets, social implications of computing etc…. Who are the teachers who are helping the next generation of makers with 3d printers?
I am sure it will come, but right now it is not there in any official capacity. Should I try and create it ? or wait until called? Maybe I need to send someone a Fax to ask?
6 years in Second Life – Rez Day again – Constant change
Another year passes! Certain milestones in life act as reflective placeholders. When I started work full time in 1990 it would be unlikely to be celebrating, or even mentioning that you had been with an online service for any period of time. Computer systems were tools, things that you happened to use. You did not commemorate 2 years since your first email. However that was before we started to interact and have very deep experiences online. Interacting directly with other people, with personas, with environments. So it is now 6 years on I am able to happily shout that its my 6th birthday there.
A lot has also changed out there too. For instance, this birthday snap was taken in Second Life, but then posted to the Second Life personal web profiles, then curated (the new word for shared bookmarking 🙂 ) on Pinterest. Where it is then disseminated to both twitter and Facebook. Our virtual worlds were never really supposed to be isolated islands in the digital landscape, despite the use of islands to represent server space in this particular metaverse. It was always about integration. The integration of our thoughts and ideas with one another, mediated by rich digital channels.
Source: my.secondlife.com via Ian on Pinterest
Oh it is fun too despite that elaborate description 🙂
These environments, and the ones they evolve into and the new ones that get created are offering us richer and richer ways to meld our minds. Of course in the meantime we have to let everyone evolve their own digital persona through twitter, Facebook and now curation. Some forms of interaction become fire and forget, whilst others rely on conversation and personality. The great thing is we have lots of options, not one tool to communicate. Long may confusion reign. Not least so I can help people make sense of it as I find out for myself where this all goes. Constant change continues.
Spot the connection – 3d printing and toys
The last few weeks an interesting set of 3d designs appeared that have certainly got people thinking about the potential of modding and changing, mashing and merging elements together. It is the Universal Construcion Kit.
The Free Universal Construction Kit from Adapterz on Vimeo.
It does have an unusual acronym as the Free edition but all the pieces are there to download as open source designs
Being able to print just the right piece you need to mix Lego and Kinex is really intriguing. (not to self get soldering on the control board of your reprap !)
The great thing about the physical world is that it is starting to alter how people may see terms and conditions on software and other designs. Is this a breach of your Lego EULA to connect it to a competing plastic toy? Will the companies welcome this interoperability or seek to stop it through legal approaches? It has a correlation with what we see on other devices and software, that you must not modify or use in a way it has not been intended. However this clearly cannot be policed or enforced on kids toys as kids play with what they want in ways that suit them, not ways that suit the toy or toys.
So we could all learn a lot about modding and making from kids and be inspired by this particular development
Could this be the next Kinect?
I just ran into this video in several places, but props to Torrid Luna on google+ it shows a scatter approach to being able to reconstruct images of things that are hidden from view. I.e. see around corners.
It is a much more complicated and precise piece of equipment than the Kinect, but it shows an interesting future of being able to see and detect things close up that we could not detect before. We have come a long way from radar just a out detecting incoming planes during the second world war to being able to reconstruct things that are obscured from view. It is an interesting animation and presentation style too.
Outsourcing your brain
Last night on BBC Horizon there was an fascinating programme on the role of the unconscious mind. One of the most stunning pieces was at the end when Prof Paul Sadja of Columbia university showed how they are researching opening up the power of the parts of the brain we don’t know we are using.
As I am interested in how we communicate digitally at distance, and in person, and how we get ideas from one brain to another by transforming them this was bang on target for me, as in my very often used presentation slide 🙂
It was explained as something that is simple to do, and in principle it may well be, but it is still fascinating. A cortically coupled computer vision!
The principle was that a large hi res image needs to be analysed for anomalies. Scanning across the image consciously is tedious, difficult and inefficient.
So instead the professor wore an ECG headset, not unlike an Emotiv headset. He got a reading from the headset of the aha moment when he saw the sort of thing he would need to see in the image.
Then, and here is the clever bit, they broke the image into hundreds of individual and random chunks. The images were then blipped in front of the professor. His brain would spot the anomalies by generating the same aha spike as the control image without him even knowing. So relaxing and letting the images flow over him allowed the entire target image to be evaluated.
This was then put back together and the hot spot areas of interest highlighted.
It was stunningly accurate.
Many of us know that the best ideas come from the sub conscious when we are not forcing them to arrive. This brain outsourcing proved even more power sat there to be discovered.
There is an article here in case the iplayer link doesn’t work to see the actual thing.
Adaptive camouflage – Hiding in plain sight
This is a great piece of inventive marketing combined with a use of technology that has been talked about in labs and a few high end demos.
It is basically taking what is behind an object and bringing it forward onto the screens. Giving a form of invisibility.
Earlier this year BAE unveiled its shapeshifting adaptive camouflage,primarily for infra red spectrum that re-emit a different signature for a military asset. Making a tank look like a car, but putting large pixels on the side of the tank.
So you can’t always believe everything you see. It is a kind of live photoshopping!
Thinking out of the music box – Physical/Digital blur
A rather brilliant use of Quadrocopters has been doing the rounds this week with this James Bond theme. It is a very physical creation of music, powered by robotics but with the jeopardy of free flying and the physics of the real physical world thrown in.
It is mesmerising and obviously very geeky!
This expansion of the old fashioned music box principle, with mechanical parts playing notes based on their physical spacing in a roll of punched paper, or as pins in a metal drum out is always being expanded. Many people are thinking out of the very literal music box.
Along these lines is the wonderful car driving video from OK Go, exponents of the unusual video.
Notice this even starts as a music box principle on the front of the car before becoming stunningly huge in its layout and concept.
Many of the games that have any sort of sound capability and user created content or modding often end up with layout builds of music machines too, as we see in Minecraft
This gets taken to an even further extreme with games like FRACT osc which is shaping up to be a stunning game set in a musical synthesiser world.
This is looking really interesting. This level of creative interaction is all part of the waves of Maker Culture in an unusual form.
Kickstarting the virtual world – busking for change
There is a very large community of people out there who are looking at various virtual world projects. Many of these people were part of the 2006/2007 (and before) Second Life explosion that I feel a particular affinity too. If it was not for all that I would not be doing what I do now in quite the same way.
So I take a keen interest in any interesting projects in the space. So it is interesting when people ask if Second Life is dead, meaning are virtual worlds dead on the basis that they don’t hear wild and wacky stories about them in the press quite so much as its all Facebook and Twitter.
However, the industry is gathering itself and the movers and shakers, new and old are creating interesting things.
One such project is a new mirror world project. This one is from Jon Brouchard of ArchVirtual He has been around a while and is a name many will recognise from his architectural approach to virtual environments. I noticed on the Kickstarter a project by him called Main Street MMO cities in Realtime 3D and so I backed it.
Mirror worlds, replications of real places, have a specific set of challenges in gathering and recreating the physical world, however it was not that problem space that interested me. It was that this one is to be built in Unity3d and hence has the chance of being a very accessible platform.
With such a keen interest in Kickstarter at the moment it seems wrong to not invest in a virtual world project on a platform I have a lot of time for by someone whose work we know is of great quality?
In many ways Kickstarter is an entrepreneurial busking on the street corner, getting small change for your talents but hoping to get enough to make something bigger happen. The fact this project is actually making street corners has a wonderful symmetry to it.