I know from my previous work at Wimbledon that when you put a URL on the TV you get a massive influx of activity to a website. It shows how intertwined computer use and TV watching actually is and something that has grown with the use of commentating channels like Twitter. It is not internet connected TVs just zooming you off to the URL but people bothering to type into their device that they have with them whilst they watch TV.
Yesterday we started airing a piece on The Cool Stuff Collective’s wikipedia page and mine and Wikipedia in general.
Almost instantly we had updates getting made on the page. we did not even publish the URL on screen. I should have mentioned in the TV piece that whilst anyone can edit, not saying you are when you do edit records your IP address on the log. Clean up bots put back any hacking or vandalism. We got lots of IP addresses logged!
It is an interesting feeling of letting things get on with it. Just as my page went through a noteworthy/not noteworthy discussion and passed. Watching the Cool stuff page get blanked and some offensive remarks added, having some nice, but not factual, comments added to it and even a bit of blatant self promotion from one of the schools featured. All in the matter of a few hours.
This morning though it looked like the bots had got a bit lost, or maybe just given up and the page was half there so I reverted it, under my ID, to one of the more regular ones. I restrained myself from removing any of the odd extra additions such as the school reference because I wanted to stay true to the Wikipedia ideal.
**Update – One of the more experienced editors spotted the “attacks” and took some action “(Protected The Cool Stuff Collective: Persistent vandalism ([edit=autoconfirmed] (expires 17:23, 7 February 2011 (UTC)) [move=autoconfirmed] (expires 17:23, 7 February 2011 (UTC))))” which was interesting. Due to the number of edits, the page also ended up at number 6 for the day on Wikirage which counts and tracks wikipedia activity
This is definitely one of those experiences you have to feel and watch unfold. You have to relinquish control and ego and let it self organise. It is a very different feeling to the one you get publishing to a blog, posting to twitter, making a tv show, delivering software to a customer. They all have a something about them, and they all create a different emotional response in the creator and in the receivers of that content.
Wikipedia is an amazing social and technical experiment that over the past 10 years has flourished through the diligence of all its contributors and editors.
Wikipedia S2Ep2 – Banana, Beret and Toilet
The Cool Stuff Collective show 2 just started airing this week (also now on twitter as @cstuffc). The plot features lots of comic special effects as Monkey has a magic genie in a phone and keeps wishing for bananas.
Sy asks the Genie, “how many wishes does Monkey have?” the reply “9 wishes”, “a bit of an odd number?”, the genie then replies “that’s the right number of wishes for all the jokes in the script” 🙂
In keeping with the madness of the show in general I had a few extra pieces to do over and above future tech. Monkey had too many bananas so we had to find good uses, mine was a screw driver for fixing a PS3.
We also had a piece on the Wii tablet and pictionary so Monkey and I were busy drawing bananas on note pads.
Sy then sparked up a game of pictionary and drew the clue he was given (which was not fixed just serendipity at work). Monkey keeps guessing bananas and I finally get to guess and have the dubious honour of having shouted out “Toilet” on national television sat next to a beret wearing monkey with a beret of my own. Not something I ever thought I would type.
The main Future Tech piece this week was on wikipedia. Yes it has been around for 10 years but I thought it was important to talk about the principles of the wiki. With all the wikileaks news stories too it was good to get across the difference and the positive benefits of wikis. One of the gags was that every time I said Wikipedia, Sy would stop me and it pans out to Lady Blah Blah scratching a record whilst Sy said Wiki Wiki Wah Wah. As we try and do these a a flowed single take it was both funny and annoying to do but worked 🙂
As part of the explanation we put the Cool Stuff Collective wikipedia page up, and it was interesting to see an instant flurry of sensible edits, hacks, bizarre paragraphs and some self promotion appear on it shortly afterwards. The important edit was the currency of the new series. We shall see how it survives the rest of the week. This though shows the power of the process. Anti spam bots were protecting us as were some individuals.
My page also made it up on screen so no idea what is going to go on there now.
Part of this was to point out Sy Thomas did not have his page and to show the empty edit page so I hope someone takes up the challenge on the biographies needed page and writes him one.
It would be an interesting school project for some enterprising teachers to get their kids involved in the contributory web to have a go at this.
More journeys into 3D
Wednesday was another studio record day for The Cool Stuff Collective. I will talk about what we did when the shows air in a few weeks. These were shows 3 and 4. Show 2 starts its run this Saturday.
This show there were a few more lines to do, only short ones for atmosphere but that is very different from having the control of my tech slot where its pretty much down to me doing an adlib riff on the tech. Sy and I have had more time to prep as it is good to explain what the point of a piece is. Though for one of them it was a piece of kit that I had not had in the run up to the show, luckily it all worked out after a slight power hitch.
What was even more interesting though was another camera crew from the BBC turned up. They were given permission to try out their camera kit whilst we were filming. This was a live production 3D camera, as you looked down the lens even from the set you could see the two giant lenses capturing the separated images.
There was a monitor stack (above) set up with some very expensive sony monitors and very light passive glasses. So they panned around us whilst we did the future tech piece and afterwards I got to see some of the other shots live. The baubles and surfaces of our set makes for great 3D. This was not for broadcast it was the production services at the BBC testing and we are an ITV show anyway 🙂
I was tempted to see if we could just do a feature on the camera and kit as a behind the scenes piece but that was all a bit short notice I think. It was great though to have such a cool set of gadgets used to show us talk about such a cool set of gadgets. Very meta!
This week the floor cleared event quicker than last time as people start to get into a routine. The set is broken up in hardly any time at all.
It was a always going to a challenging shoot as Producer Matt was not there this week. Losing one person from the production team makes a massive difference, but huge congratulations to him and his wife on the birth of their baby boy. Yes its a Cool Stuff Collective Baby.
The videos clips from last weeks show including the cloud computing and gaming piece we did is up on the official website, it is probably still UK only, and is topped and tailed with the Nerf sponsorship idents. It is of course slightly odd out of context as there are stories for each show and this one was the one we had all forgotten who Sy was, hence calling him Sid and being slightly dismissive. You can still catch the full show on CITV tonight at 5:30pm before the new show runs on Saturday at 9am.
Roll on the next shoot some even more exciting things to come (though probably less picture of the set 🙂 )
Where the magic happens – Behinds the scenes
Last week I shot a quick behind the scenes view of The Cool Stuff Collective studio before the madness of filming started. I think it gives a good impression of the size of the studio and they are fascinating places.
It’s an early return to the studio this week, as we now are filming on a Wednesday not a Friday as we did with the first two.
I am not sure whether we will end up having a massive Nerf fight in here given our sponsors, but that would be a laugh to see!
Cool Stuff Collective returns – S2Ep1 Cloud
The second series of The Cool Stuff Collective hit the screens today, sponsored by Nerf (from Hasbro) which in itself is cool. It’s this Nerf N-Strike Barricade RV-10
The Cool Stuff Collective is now filmed at BBC television centre in Studio 2 which is a much bigger studio than we had for series 1 at MTV Camden.
There are Blue Peter signs everywhere which is quite awe inspiring.
The production gallery is up above us as opposed to the side where @marleyman007 directs us from.
Monkey has been reborn too, and has some wonderful googly eyes too.
Another new character on set is Lady Blah Blah complete with beard
Here is Lady Blah Blah with Sy Thomas and the Popcrach grannies, though I realize this looks odd as Janice has lent back to talk to Victoria.
This is the view we have sat on set (though there are usually more people staring at us 🙂
This week the gag was that we had all forgotten Sy and call him Sid as its been a few weeks since the last series. Predlet 2.0 was a bit confused watching the “acting” he asked me if I really had forgotten Sy’s Name 🙂
So the show opened Sy introducing it all and then I come on measuring the TV and feign ignorance.
My tech part of the show is more back to normal though in a attempt to define cloud computing and cloud gaming in 3 minutes.
I used the basic principle that cloud is really about the break up of the PC and of computer components and moving them away to other places.
I took an old computer and pulled a card out and handed it to Sy by way of a prop to try and explain the distribution of compute resource, storage etc. It was a simplistic explanation but when you boil it down that is what is happening.
I then explained how Onlive works and is coming to the UK with BT very soon and that it is actually good for gaming in that we can play any game on any console, and will not really have to replace any of our old kit as all we need is a screen, network and input controller.
The final extrapolation is a planet wide grid of compute resouurce. I was going to throw in IPv6 but that got too tongue twisty. Any resource anywhere local or remote and combined into massive computing power and storage.
This first show (and next weeks) was great fun to record and the coming shows look awesome too. The team at Archie Productions and Sy Thomas have done a great job and I love being part of that.
I guess that wikipedia article needs updating now for the show? to reflect series 2 and the new record location.
See you all next week same time same place 🙂 (Or any of the many repeats all week)
Having a go with Kinect Hacks
For reasons that will become apparent in a few weeks time I needed to see if I could get my Mac to talk to the Kinect using the brilliant open source OpenKinect.org. I don’t do too much in the command shell on my Mac so the realms of Homebrew and MacPorts mentioned in the instructions, whilst I knew what the point of them is, meant that my machine was in a bit of a state.
I had used something call Fink a while back, but could not remember why so I tried the Homebrew instructions but failed and had too many paths and bits not very happy to take what is a ready made package. So instead I went to the MacPorts compile it yourself path.
http://openkinect.org/wiki/Getting_Started.
The glview application then ran nicely and told me I had 0 kinects attached to my Mac 🙂
A prerequisite for this is to have the kinect with a power supply as opposed to bundled newer xbox and kinects where the power is built in. I simply took the Mac to the xbox, unplugged the USB from there and popped it into the Mac, ran glview again as a test. Bingo!
At its very basic mode you can see the colouring for depth being rendered as the predlets are nearer or further from the device.
Next step is to hook into the libraries and make sense of the data 🙂
Knowing who you know
Very often the naysayers of social media will point to the vacuous nature of connections online. Friend does not mean an actual friend etc. We are also restricted as human in how many people we can successfully know and stay in touch with. We are though in a position where we are able to share who we are and what we do, and make it available to anyone who finds it useful. We may all have a mental model of our relationships and who matters, who influences us and who we mentor in life. Social media has brought us the ability to visualise and data mine those relationships. (It has also allowed others/businesses etc to look at those and use them commercially).
Linkedin has started a project to show your professional links to people and it produces very organic looking social media graphs, this is my one from my profile connections
When you create it you also get to label the coloured groupings which are roughly people in certain types of network. I have lots of virtual world and tech people in my network both from my corporate career colleagues and from other places and a little spin out cloud of media people and one directly related to WImbledon.
Visualizing data like this and being able to navigate around it does start to inform and provide a check and balance for your mental model.
The application is available here
London Toy Fair 2011
Yesterday i got to go along to the Toyfair 2011 at Olympia with a press badge with Archie Productions and with my Cool Stuff Collective g33k t-shirt on.
I was not there to film but to do a bit more research, meet some people and see how roving reporters and crews get things done.
I have been to a fair few trade shows, including lots of standing around on a stand talking about virtual worlds but I was not sure what to expect from a trade toy show. It was good to be able to head onto a stand and do a bit of promoting back on the TV show. It was also interesting the sheer number of PR people manning the stands. The ones I have been to tend to be the actual people from the actual company, close to the product. That was in evidence at the show but the huge corporate machines were in full PR mode. There were secret rooms, closed invite only stands and classification of how much of a prospect you might be worth talking too.
Some stands had character guards
many others had actual suited and booted bouncers. If your names not down you are not coming in. However a TV crew tends to alter that a little. A few places it was a hindrance as some pre-release toys and film footage was not ready for the press yet, only for the corporate buyers. An old trick about feeling exclusive, being let in (as we do with web betas). One particular secret door kept opening and closing so much that each time the motion caught my eye, I glanced across only to be scowled at by the bouncer. Very different the the playfulness of the toys around, but it is big business.
It was great to see such a big Moshi Monster presence though
I was thinking back to 2007 when Roo and I went to see the very early stages of Moshi, and the various virtual world trade shows we had stands near one another. It is of course now huge, Roo wrote about it back then
One thing about the toy industry, like the game or virtual world industry is that no matter how straight laced the pitch is nearly everyone had that outlet to press a button and play with something. You can sit a look at a massive zhuzhu pet stand, analyse your profit margins etc but if you pick one up and press a button a scurrying hamster will raise a smile.
On the Bandai stand I saw a corporate tour but whilst they were quite serious they got involved testing the car that you shout at make it go.
There were some great character costumes wandering around as you can see
On a very small stand there was a suitably wavering Captain Jack Sparrow, with a big sign saying no photos. However he obviously needed a break at some point, stayed in character and wandered around the show, where he placed himself on the edge of the Gelli Baff (Bath goo toy) as it was filmed. This was one of the most bizarre and amusing sights.
It would have been really amusing if it actually was Johnny Depp of course 🙂
I was also amazed to see Grape Escape reborn as Smashed Potatoes.
Was it really back in 2007 I blogged about that ! and posted this video of Grape Escape in action.
My favourite things of the whole show though. Firstly was from Revell, it was the Leonardo da Vinci plans made into wooden kits. They have a great look about them and are very cool models. They are wooden but with the edges coloured it makes the 3d model look like the sepia toned sketches from the original gadget guru and inventor.
Secondly lots of great toys and games, but very little in the way of video games/consoles or handhelds which was a surprise. The toyfair is a very physical product event in London at least. There were inklings of crossover products, obviously Moshi is an online environment but I saw a very interesting approach on the Meccano stand.
Mechatars is a range of robot radio controlled battling bots, that level up as you play with the physical toy. They can then be connected into a unity3d based environment where the levelled up stats are transferred. Playing online levels up too and transfers back to the bot. I loved the fact the world is called the Mechaverse too 🙂 As a cross world principle this has so many ways to build up on the actual implementation and I look forward to seeing how this pans out.
Toyfair is on the next few days, worth a trip across
BTW if you end up on the Lego stand let me know what its like, we would have been allowed in but could not film anything.
Don’t forget to watch The Cool Stuff Collective as of this Saturday 9am ITV
Saturday morning – Look whats on ;)
If you check your TV schedules you may notice The Cool Stuff Collective appearing. This Saturday morning 29th January 9am ITV1. There are numerous repeats during the week to catch up with too.
I don’t want to spoil any surprises or break any TV style embargoes, but tune in or record it and see a second series arrive on your screens.
***Update the schedule is as follows Saturday ITV1 9:00am , CITV 4:30pm Sunday ITV1 7:55am , CITV 11:30am, Mon CITV 5pm, Fri CITV 5:30pm !
It is moments away – AR extreme
I had to repost this video as I think it is brilliant in its extreme view of Augmented Reality. The extremes of a use of tech and how it impact life are were we start to find the new ideas. The diving into the social web mid tea making and then the final part of user preference is really great.
Of course this is lots of virtual information placed onto a single physical world, but AR is also virtual environment augmentation. Where do we draw the line though?
Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.
It was posted on IT World and from a tweet by @mmpow