This weeks Cool Stuff Collective is now airing, also rather usefully it is now in full on the ITV player here so you can see the entire show (and a few recent ones) in their full glory. All those mad links that Sy Thomas does too 🙂 and that there is a storyline and plot for each show.
Monkey has turned into a pop impresario this week and is busy auditioning new acts, dressed with a white tshirt and high trousers…. Hmmmm I wonder who that is.
As part of the madness I have to audition for monkey singing Hello by Lionel Ritchie, it did not go well 🙂 We also had a rather tiring game of music gaming chairs. I must remember to lose more quickly!
The future tech section was rather exciting as it was a brand new type of 3D display from a Uk inventor. I actually found out about it during an impromptu conversation in Best Buy when I was getting our 3D TV, introductions were made producer Matt kicked into action and booked the tech on the show. As you know I like to let serendipity take its course and so we ended up with this screen on the show.
This screen is from Applied 3D technologies. It was a proof of concept prototype so had that wonderful mad inventor quality to it that I can totally relate to.
The screen had a circuit board doing some processing from an ordinary DVD player as the video source. The video on the DVD had been post processed for the screen format. The screen was not shutter or LCD glasses based, and it was also not the stereoscopic lenticular lens that we see on things like the 3DS. It was a different effect that I think is best compared to the sort of illusion of presence you get with the trick effects of a coin in a convex mirror bowl. The real coin appears to floating, you can reach out to grab it but really its at the bottom of the bowl out of the way.
The objects on the screen appeared to be in front of the plane of the screen not “in” the screen. Moving side to side the image would shift, still floating like on the inside of a sphere rather than with a lenticular where a shift to the right or left gives you a flat image.
We only had single objects rendered on a black background, but they were real filmed objects not just CGI. So there was motion. This made it seem a lot less plane related than many 3D films do.
Being an optical projection is also means it scales small and theoretically very large.
It was actually secret how it worked so I can’t actually say much more than form this observation, but it was intriguing to see and I look forward to seeing it go further. It was great to see the Cool Stuff Crew gathered around off air. As these people work with images all day, for them to be so interesting in something that felt and looked a little different proved to me there was something in this too.
All the contact details are on A3DT website if you are interested in finding out more.
3d
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 🙂 )
3d Gadgetfest for Cool Stuff Collective Xmas show
We are all here recording the final 3 shows of The Cool Stuff Collective for this season. Episode 13 features christmas and I will be, tech willing, covering some other ways to deal with 3D in the home.
I have some Vuzix 3d wrap glasses, where the screens are in the glasses and give the impression of a 67″ screen floating in front of you.
A fuji 3d stills and video camera with a lenticular lens screen on it to allow you to see 3d without any glasses.
Finally there is a Toshiba laptop with an Nvidia 3d/glasses combination video card.
It is a good chance for me to experiment with all these before they get sent back and see what works with what, how it feels to use these.
So far I am very impressed all round.