This weeks Cool Stuff Collective future tech was a bit of a departure from the usual studio explanations to Sy. A few weeks ago I went off with the crew to Milton Keynes to Airkix to film a piece about indoor skydiving.
Arriving at 7:00 am ready to do my first ever solo pieces to camera of this type was a little nerve wracking but having watched the guys at the Toy Fair it was a little easier to understand and feel how this would pan out.
I was expecting to do a few little intros, hover a bit and then say goodbye. It got a little more complicated than that of course 🙂
The pro sky divers and coaches at Airkix had come in specially to perform for us and were brilliantly helpful for the whole shoot. They have amongst their ranks world sky diving champions indoors and out. It was quite a shock to see just how high up they went (about 30 feet almost instantly).
and then the precision with which they came hurtling down towards the camera again.
I got to do some links to the chamber full of the guys performing as my first piece, but before I knew it we were up some very tall ladders at the top of the very large building and through a few hatches into where the fans where.
So if I look a little scared on this I was. They have 250 bhp turbines at the top of the structure that push air down and then round and up into the chamber where it gets up to about 150mph.
We shot a piece in the control room too as it is a precision operation to keep the wind stable.
Of course eventually I was thrown into a flight suit and doing what I expected to be doing, just hanging around close to the floor.
It was not hard to look like I was enjoying it because I was it was amazingly exhilarating.
It is a strange experience that requires you to be relaxed and not fight the wind, but at the same time control it. The closest thing is Tai Chi, force and grace together. (Though not so much grace nor force in my case).
I am not sure if it was the look of surprise I saw vanishing into the distance, on the shows Creative Director’s face (John Marley) or the feeling of an utter adrenalin rush that hit me that I will remember the most, when the instructor decided to grab me by the arm and run in circles up the wall Matrix style until with were 30ft up in the air. Of course we ended up having to then do that a few times just so they could shoot the right angle. I think presenter torturing is all part of the gig 🙂
The stills of course do not do it justice. The edited up piece looks really good, along with Frankie’s Two Tribes as the soundtrack 🙂
It should be on the official site next week (UK only though still).
*update The full piece is now on the site here (UK only)
I think I got to feel another way of delivering information. It is strange the various mental models you have to engage when sharing things with people.
Talking to customers and giving small presentations about facts tend to be one flow of self expression. The bigger the conference the bigger the movements and stage pacing etc. Talking to Sy on the TV has tended to be like that but with the confusion of occasionally stopping and starting, hence maintaining and ad lib train of thought. This presenting required a different approach. Mainly that involved doing as I was told, as the director has the vision of the shots he needs and takes multiples of everything. Trying to focus the passion for the subject down the camera feels very different to a human reaction. Holding the for a period of time after you have finished talking to allow space for edits too is a more un-natural approach. I found I had to clear my brain more, not to think of the flow of the next few sentences but just to keep focussed on the one I had to deliver.
Before the studio record I also had to do a piece to camera pretending to be stuck in the screen of the SMART table, and the link back out of the VT was me sneaking up behind Sy and him asking me to help me get me out of where I was locked in 🙂
It was really enjoyable though, the experience and the filming slot we did straight after lunch too (more on that later) was great. The pulses of adrenalin needed to enthuse about the subject in tiny bite size pieces between lots of planning and walking/climbing/flying was probably more tiring than doing a single hours presentation on stage on a subject.
Not only did I get a levelling up in presenter skills, but I also got a certificate for flying 🙂
So thank you to the crew for being so patient and helpful whilst I get to grips with this sort of thing. There is still much to learn but now I have recorded four of them I feel I have some idea of what to do and how to do it 🙂
You can follow The Cool Stuff Collective on twitter @cstuffc and get an insight into whats going on at the office and what monkey is doing with all those gadgets.
Everybody is freelance? Saves the economy?
When I started my career in corporate life back in 1990 there seemed to be quite an obvious path to take. You got a job, with an employer, where there was a implied long term agreement. Not always suggesting a job for life, but it in general that seemed to be what people did.
During the following few years I watched as we increasingly hired in contractors, but generally on a relatively long term. Tech companies tended to need to do that with programmers to build a particularly large piece of software with a known end date. Those that “went contracting” seemed to have a very lucrative time, but traded off the apparent security of a permanent staff job. Very often the staff job was considered a role, not a mini contract.
I am not sure when it happened, but very soon it seemed that everyone became a freelancer insider the company structure, vying for work competing to be on the right customer contract. CV’s and bio’s and personal recommendations flying around all over the place.
In a corporate environment this labour market economy always seemed slightly at odds with what the purpose of belonging to a such an entity. Competing for work with colleagues but only in the bounds of the contracts that the company is trying to win or work seems counter productive.
Now that I am effectively freelance, though employed by my own company Feeding Edge I am getting to see and feel the proper potential of the individual vying for work, and the even more incredible power of self organising groups of people in similar positions. These affiliations can be transient, but they can also be incredible bonding experiences with mutual trust and support.
I have been observing and appreciating this from both my more regular tech company relationships and from being thrown into the media and TV industry.
People are not all M&M’s from the same packet, but in different colour clothes. There i smuch more variety in the example of a TV production.
When you arrive on set or at a VT shoot you are working under the banner of a show for a production company, but pretty much everyone involved is really a freelancer that has agreed to a short period of time of working together for a common goal. There are definite roles across the process, there is an agreed way of working and there is a spirit of teamwork yet it is all achieved through a combination of mutual trust and a willingess to lead or be led depending on the situation.
As with the tech projects you end up with a trusted body of people, your generally first port of call when you start a venture. People you know, who have proven themselves to you and vice versa. I wrote a little about that here with the Linkedin social graph
That clearly happens in a corporate structure to some degree, people gather their forces for a project, but could it be that the corporate internal freelancing is actually stifling trust and creativity, leading some people to slip into jobsworth, or protectionist modes?
Yesterday I was presenting about Kinect OpenSource hacking and as a follow on to some of the crowdsourcing of wikipedia. Interested parties with a loos affiliation, but a common goal self organizing and producing things for others seems like something recent. In communication and software terms open source is new, but in term of human activity it is not. It is only the more regimented structures of large businesses that have created the structures that open source seems an counter too.
In many ways the cultural changes of communication and sharing are being re-initiated with social media, which in turn leads to open source thinking and naturally then leads to more nimble, inventive, innovative and recovery generating organisations.
More TV – 1st Question Quiz Show in SL
I was honoured to be asked by Pooky Amsterdam to appear on her 1st Question quiz show filmed live in Second Life last Sunday. I was with some great panelists Zya Zavira and Avantgarde Frequency. Both of who are very well respected in their metaverse fields.
It was a late night as the show is recorded by Treet.TV with a live audience around midnight UK time. However we are such a multi national bunch from Australia to UK and mainland Europer to West coast US that it becomes part of the fun.
The show is a set of quick fire questions, some buzzer rounds and some intros and talking by the contestants.
It was brilliant fun, though being a competition and relatively techie I felt a certain amount of pressure. It all came out alright in the end.
My first question was on Watson ! I wont spoil the show but I still can’t believe I got the ones wrong that I did 🙂
The full show is on itunes or you can watch it here on Treet.Tv
It was great to have an invited audience too as they shout/type out answers and Pooky Amsterdam and Hydra Shaftoe do a great job wrangling us all.
It is run as a TV show would be an Petlove Petshop briefed us and sound checked us beforehand. It is then recorded by Texas from Treet.TV and edited up with various insets and visuals too as you can see
There are also live scoreboards and a portion of audience voting as we try and get our panel words we bring along to be the most popular.
There is an ad break too. Not your usual advert though as this one shows an incredibly important use of virtual worlds. Fearless Nation provide Post Traumatic Stress Disorder support in Second Life. The potential for anonymous counselling as well as directed role play to help people come to terms with real experiences is incredible powerful.
Anyway, thanks all you came along and thanks again Pooky, in particular for the plug for The Cool Stuff Collective in my intro, and I managed to get the link out there to my showreel in the post event mingle 🙂
As I am recording an Opensim virtual world piece for the show very soon it was great to be part of such a professional and fun operation for the show.
Tomorrow its back to the BBC for more “traditional” TV not that @Cstuffc is traditional !
The science of the Sun – Solar Flares
There was some slight confusion on Saturday for TV viewers when The Cool Stuff Collective moved from 9am Sat ITV1 to 8:10am so a few people think I have changed into Hannah Montana. Hopefully the various repeats the rest of the week will rectify the problem.
The show this week was space themed and so it was worth trying something a little more scientific in future tech. So I got to discuss Solar Flares and Coronal Mass Ejections.
Given the current activity of the Sun and the fact that the main news is covering such solar events it was a real honour to do big science. NASA provided some great footage too.
As usual there were several points I wanted to get across. The rationale for covering CME’s was the potential harm to all our gadgets. Large waves of energy bombarding the Earth could seem scary, in fact they are. I think we avoided any scaremongering in talking about how there were ways to shield devices. In order to demonstrate the power of this invisible wavescollection of particles I used a picture frame of iron filings lined up nicely in a row, then passed a magnet over the row and caused breakages in the visual of an electronic connection.
To show that all is not lost I then had a piece of wood covered in Aluminum foil to act as a shield. (I made it perfectly clear it was Monkey’s attempt and that wood and foil is not the ideal thing to blog a CME but it does block a small magnet. (The foil was of course for that home made science effect 🙂 )
The other part of the piece that I thought was important was that scientists need help investigating solar flares. The http://www.solarstormwatch.com/ is effectively a crowdsourcing science website. It has made an achievement driven game out of us all being able to look at solar observation footage and spot unsual activity. It is the gamification of science and very educational too. It is well worth a look.
It is always good when we are able to mention something that has some follow on activity, I love the fact that the viewers can go and try something, just as with the Wikipedia show.
There is much more of that to come the next few weeks mixed with some of the big gadget adventures we have filmed on the road.
Feeding Edge is 2 Years old
Another significant milestone today. Feeding Edge Ltd is now two years old. It is something I am extremely proud about and when I reflect back on this year it has been so varied, there have been some challenges but the worst of those have been resolved. For the most part it has been such an entertaining and stimulating year its hard to think of it all packed into 12 months.
(When I added the second flame from last years I used Photoshop CS5 puppet warp on the flames, its amazing, it puts a mesh over the part of the image and you edit it like a 3d mesh would)
A year ago I could not have imagined where I am at today. The diversity of which would not have really fitted into any other company. The ability to go with the flow, trust in serendipty and gut feeling has been incredibly useful. If companies let the creativity of their employees flow, rather than focus on control and crackdown then I am sure we would be be generating some fantastic innovations and growth in business. Though, selfishly, if everyone does that then it makes it much harder for me.
So this year I have a few sparklers (though some customer names and projects are not public)
The ultimate highlights though have to be.
The games company is a mix of having to architect design and direct some development and is very much hands on with the technology. The concept for our first product still amazes me and I am very proud of it. With a bit of luck we will get bigger very soon and we can deliver an even more amazing rendition of the concept, but to my partners in all this I say a huge thank you. I want to write more about what we are doing, but now is not the time or place. I still have a stack of code to write, but my coding partner out there is doing some awesome work making sense of the ideas we come up with for implementation.
The Cool Stuff Collective has been an amazing journey too from the first conversation about being a technical advisor to being thrown into the studio to present, and now mid way through series 2 yesterday I was out with the crew filming at the Pure Tech racing simulators then dashing down to Intech hands on science centre. Being able to inspire or interest the next generation of techies, and maybe reach some of their parents with tech that is already here but seems like science fiction has been an incredible honour.
Look at the list of things we have covered
3d Printing, Haptics, Ardrone, 3d scanning, MMO Lego, AR, Kinect, Mind control, SMARt tables, eReaders, 3D cameras and glasses, Unity3d/evolver games dev, Cloud Computing, Wikipedia, Photoshop, Laser Holographic projection….
To come is Solar Flares, Opensim and the outside video we have now done indoor skydiving, indoor snowboarding, Racing simulators, science gadgets and planetarium.
So I have ended up on wikipedia and have over 20 TV records under my belt now. I have a showreel of sorts with its own page here and my new business cards say amongst the blurb TV Presenter. (I think that’s valid now isn’t it?)
When people ask what it is I do and what Feeding Edge does, I think this does all some up in “Taking a bite out of technology so you don’t have to”.
I think that because pushing things forward, thinking of the whole not just design not just tech but the social implications of it, but mashing in the fact that things should entertain and engage us as humans is my mission.
So what does next year bring? Well for me more of the same is the answer.
I am asked how I have time to do all the things I do. The answer is I don’t. Sometimes things have to slide a bit. Whilst many things seem diverse they are linked. I play games, looking at them for review, to spot trends, to see how things might be used in other gamification contexts and for enjoyment. Then I write about them, present about them and even build them. It’s all part of the flow. The same goes for the other emerging tech. If you are interesting in 3d virtual worlds, then naturally how to create 3d content, how to experience 3d content and how to use 3d environment to reach an audience becomes part of everyday life.
Then there is the social media side of things. I tweet, blog, share photos on flicker, put game achievements up on facebook and raptr. It is both a personal sharing of whats goidn on to those who need to know or are curious, but it is also a social experiment in how it feels to do these things and the impact it has on my life. Having that personal experience lets me share it with others and with companies and get them to the good part of this communication revolution rather than stagnating.
People I know often say to me they only understand 1/3 of my tweets. That is great as probably the 1/3 was for their benefit the other 2/3 for others. Mixing busines, social, tech and existence on one channel in 140 characters is still fascinating. It is a microcosm of the whole of what I do with Feeding Edge.
So to all my customers, partners, competitors, friends, mentors and fellow virtual world evangelists I say a huge thank you for all your support.
Right, back to it, now what was I do again?
Holographic Laser Projection
We are up to S2Ep4 of The Cool Stuff Collective already ! Time certainly flies. This week I got to be @StephenFry, well not exactly but we had the wonderful Holographic Laser Projector from Cambridge based Light Blue Optics. In this explanation of how it all works the dulcet tones Stephen Fry explain how it all works so I wont have to type it all in here again. However this is pretty much what I explained to Sy in the studio. Diffraction patterns are created and the lasers are shone through those meaning the form of projection used is really radically different to a regular projector.
The device basically creates a very bright touch controlled screen on an surface from a free standing self contained box. It also uses less power than your average laptop screen to achieve that.
We had to have a couple of goes at the piece. This was in part because the very bright display works great in any normal situation but obviously with the bright lights and cameras of the TV studio we had to dim the lights to get the right effect. The first time the lights were dimmed a tad to much and whilst it was a great take I am sure it featured only our silhouettes and looked like some crimewatch confessions or similar. I think I am getting used to having multiple takes, though its difficult to ad lib exactly the same thing each time.
The format changed a little too as Sy ended up having to sit next to me as it made it easier to show the device working to camera. It’s nice to mix it up a bit.
The rest of the show was about monkey’s birthday, some mad and funny moments like monkey riding a scooter with sparks flying out across the BBC car park. Rich had spent ages making a very large horse shaped present and wrapped it in gold foil. This was part of the gag about all monkeys presents were banana shaped and turned out through the magic og TV to be something else when unwrapped. I ended up carrying the horse onto the end of show party though as Rich was in his full Lady Blah Blah with turntable, but I think we did it justice 🙂
More next week 9am Sat ITV 1 and now on twitter @cstuffc
He has done it again! Telepresence this time
This guy Johnny Chung Lee, now “rapid evaluator” at Google, is amazing and I love how he approaches things. Way back he did the wiimote hacks that made 3d motion control out of wearing the sensor bar and keeping the wiimotes steady. As Feeding Edge’s tag line is “Taking a bite out of technology so you don’t have to” you can see why I have an affinity for his work!
This time he has hacked together a $500 telepresence robot. These things seem to keep popping up so he is definitely “bang on trend”. They are a weird combination of a physical avatar used to navigate physical space and “be” somewhere. Like all new ideas they may seem daft, and I did have a “that’s stupid” fleeting momentary thought. However, as I have mentioned before, when I see something and think that I know I have to look further into the idea, especially when serendipity subconsciously shouts out about the subject
I bumped into this because I was looking at these more commercial telepresence robots from vgocom. This version though uses the IRobot Create (Roomba)
They had featured a telepresence ER/A&E robot on BBC Horizon and combined with a piece we filmed on wednesday for The Cool Stuff Collective where I was trapped in a video box it all started to link up. Further re-enforced by a conversation about driving robots from a virtual world that started the very same afternoon!
This has a nice circular element to it in that you will notice from the great Johnny Chung Lee’s blog featuring this quick build is called Procrastineering and the tag line, which is something I live by is “giving in to productive distractions”. It brilliantly sums up the flow of serendipity and the combination of tech and art and ideas mixed with human conversation that seems to lead in a positive direction. I know it is not for everyone and it is a seat of the pants existence but for me it feels right.
I never thought I would do a post about N-Dubz
The flexibility of Little Big Planet 2 and the creative potential has gone mainstream.
N-Dubz ( A popular beat combo m’lud) have created their latest video using LBP2. I have to say it is brilliant!
I was recently writing a post elsewhere (link to follow) about the creative freedom of Little Big Planet 2. This is a prim example done really well too.
This video too from shows a whole range of game styles built using the LBP2 live tools on a Ps3
Take note Second Life….
Diminished Reality – S2Ep3
The current Cool Stuff Collective running this week I got to show a few things. The main theme of the future tech was based on having seen this video about diminished reality (which we did not get to show on the show)
It struck me that the best way to show this in action, and to explain the complexity of it was to use Photoshop CS5. The full version of photoshop has an amazing content aware fill. This is used to automatically replace something in a picture by calculating what is likely to be behind that object. There have been ways to do this in photoshop manually but it is the simplicity of the process that I found interesting.
I took a photo of monkey by a patterned wall.
In photoshop (live in realtime) I magic wand selected the bright yellow banana and then did a content aware fill and this happened.
Now this was 3 clicks and almost instant. It is not perfect, there is still a little outline of the banana and the wall is a little wonky, but it is amazing!
For a joke I then highlighted monkey (I already had selected most of him but not precisely as this was a quick take 🙂 )
This again is not perfect but as a proof of what it does it is ideal. I also like the predator like image we generated.
Part of the piece I also got Sy to look at Wordlens on the iphone. This replaces words that it sees via the camera with other words. Translations, reversals, removals etc. It is a mix of augmented and diminished reality.
Yes I did do some other things in the show, yes I did put some sports kit on and play Mario Sports against monkey and yes he did beat me at basketball. (My gaming cred is now reset to zero but I will have my revenge Monkey!).
That will be going into the series 2 showreel I am sure 🙂 checkout showreel one though 🙂
My series 1 TV showreel
I got to hang out in the edit suites at MTV Camden today where the magic of TV gets crafted together from all our bits of film. John was making a showreel for the entire show to take to New York and the Kidscreen summit a version of that will get posted soon.
Afterwards though I got to suggest some pieces for my own personal showreel. This is all very exciting as much of the official website doesn’t work outside the UK. We stuck to pieces of series 1 (apart from the end as a taster of the current series). It keeps the comedy spirit and shows a range of things. My acting is getting better I promise over time 😉
See what you think.
Dont forget The Cool Stuff Collective ITV1 9:00am Saturdays