VR Bubbles

A new way to shoot a film:

Use digital still cameras to take a full 360 degree panorama of a location, then stitch them together to form a VR "Bubble" which is used as a set for the action. Film action in green screen mode (not unusual by now). The movement of the camera filming the actors in the green space is coordinated with movement of the virtual camera within the bubble, so any action looks convincing. The technical term for bubbles is "spherically constructed location photography."

Since the bubbles are created beforehand, the director (but not actors) can see the action taking place in the virtual location on the green space monitor as the action is being filmed. This creates a more realistic shooting atmosphere. Spherical lighting domes confer exact lighting for the green space for any location/lighting situation.

Bubbles can be grafted and glued together to form extended locations.

There are several advantages of this way, one of them is that one can film in places where a movie crew would not be allowed to film, or manage to film. The movie Speed Race used 10,000 bubbles shot around the world -- covering far more locations than a movie crew could have afforded to go.

There's a pretty technical interview in VRMag with Dennis Martin who created the virtual locations for Speed Racer, and one with John Gaeta, special effects supervisor. He says:

We realized that we would need to create a department that had never existed inside a standard film production before, and we called this department "the world unit": its job was to basically capture thousands of these bubbles around the world. So...we set this up.

Eventually I can see a market for location bubbles developing. You want the inside of the Sistine Chapel ready to shooting? How about a location at sunset atop Machu Picchu. Either one is yours for $1,000, or $100 even - cheaper than any visit could be. Someday there'll be an istockbubbles.com.

Poptimistic

In a recent Boing Boing interview special effects guru John Gaeta dropped a fantastic new word: Poptomistic.

Poptimistic is not his coinage; it seems to be circulating in the design and style world, but I think it perfectly captures the upbeat, day-glo brightness of a technicolor future. It manages to contain many of the optimistic strands of the digiterati, and the pop masses.  It says: technology that works!

The new pace-setting film Speed Racer (which Gaeta worked on) is poptomistic.

It is the opposite of the distopian Blade Runner, even though both are visually outrageous and seminal. The overlook sci-fi cult favorite Fifth Element was slightly poptimistic.

The book of Japanese street fashions called Fruits is poptimistic.

So were many of the early issues of Wired magazine.

And as far as I am concerned the entire instant city of Burning Man is poptimistic.

Poptimistic is super-saturated richness, hyper-realism, brightly lit in even the furthest corners, up tempo, and generally positive.

What else is poptimistic?

Ghost Bikes

Ghost Bikes appear in the spot where a cyclist is killed or struck.

The ghost bike above is reputed to be a photo of the first one made by Patrick Van Der Tuin, in St. Louis in October, 2003. A stripped down skeletal junk bike is painted white, chained to a post, and marked with sign, flowers and other memorial tributes. Now the ritual has spread to other cities in the US and Europe. They are sadly gaining in numbers as more cyclists are hurt or killed, usually by the body of an automobile.

Tour of World Cities at Night

Astronauts have accumulated a database of 400 photos of the world's cities at night taken from the space station. A small gallery and account of this effort reveals some interesting views. The pictures were shot from a make-shift adjustable camera holder that compensates for the rapid movement of the space station to produce sharp, clear portraits. These new images are a magnitude clearer than the oft-seen mosaic picture of the world at night. The camera tracker was cobbled from extra parts "found" in the space station. Cities on different continents have distinctive identifying signatures at night due to the local type of lighting, and the cities' cultural origins.  The brightest spot on our planet at night today is the strip at Las Vegas.

Las Vegas strip, Feb. 4, 2008 with a 400 mm lens.

The cities of Jiddah and Mecca, Saudi Arabia, are connected by a well-lit pilgrim road.

This wonderful tour of world cities at night is well worth watching.

McLuhan, Web 2.0 Master

Marshal McLuhan was a remarkable soothsayer. He could spout off the most amazing proverbs, riddles, one-liners and contemporary koans. In a moment of zanity, I designated McLuhan as Wired's Patron Saint on the masthead of the first issue, and the moniker stuck. The nickname is somewhat an inside joke because McLuhan was very Catholic. And he worked much like an anointed oracle. He'd lay on a couch and recite ideas while his disciples recorded what he said. 

I recently came across a perceptive McLuhan quote via Andrew Keen's Cult of the Amateur: 

In the 1950's Marshall McLuhan proposed a reality television show in which corporations would present their major problems to a mass audience. "For every expert idea that arises inside an organization," McLuhan advised executives, "the public has a thousand better ideas than you ever heard of." 

This eerily parallels the current dogma of Web 2.0. In fact, McLuhan's statement is almost the canonical definition of crowdsourcing. The key difference, is that in McLuhan's day, the thousand of better ideas from people you never heard of were unattainable in practice. They were out there, but there was not efficient way to harness them.

As Clay Shirky explains in his brilliant book new "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations", published 50 years after McLuhan, this is what the new social media of Web 2.0 changes. It lowers the costs of finding, matching and exploiting those McLuhan-ish loose ideas out in the marketplace, and makes them actionable. Shirky writes:

Because of transaction costs, organizations cannot afford to hire employees who only make one important contribution -- they need to hire people who have good ideas [for them] day after day. Yet as we know, most people are not so prolific, and in any given field many people have only one or a few good ideas, just as most contributors [on Flickr] documenting the Mermaid Parade or Hurricane Katrina contribute only one photo each. .. As a result, many good ideas (or good photos or good music) are simply inaccessible in an institutional framework...As Bill Joy, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, once put it, "No matter who you are, most of the smart people work for someone else." What the open source model does is to allow those people to work together.

Shirky's book is filled with more succinctly argued points like this. I recommend it. And there's always more McLuhan. He's usually right and wrong at the same time. This is from a 1965 New York article by Tom Wolfe called "What If He is Right?"

For that matter-the drop-out generations will even get rid of the cars, says McLuhan. They will work at home, connected to the corporation, the boss, not by roads or railroads, but by television. They will relay information by closed-circuit two-way TV and by computer systems. The great massive American rush-hour flow over all that asphalt surface, going to and from work every day, will be over. The hell with all that driving. Even shopping will be done via TV. All those grinding work-a-daddy cars will disappear. The only cars left will be playthings, sports cars. They'll be just like horses are today, a sport. Somebody over at General Motors is saying -- What if he is right?

Self-Generating Money vs. Productive Wealth

Steve Talbot, a wise neo-Amish philosopher and author of Netfuture, asks a very insightful question in his latest issue:

Why does a certain obvious distinction not figure more centrally in economic theorizing - namely, the distinction between the application of capital in order to increase that capital itself, and its application in order to achieve something worthwhile in the world? Or, more simply: why do we not distinguish between using money to make money, or using it to do meaningful work?

Yes, it requires a little subtlety to sustain the distinction between the pursuit of monetary gain and a striving to accomplish something worthwhile. But economists are nothing if not subtle, and the task is hardly beyond them. And in this matter the underlying difference at issue, however subtle its playing out in particular circumstances, is in principle as dramatic as it could possibly be. Everyone can immediately recognize the incompatibility of the two stances.



Moreover, money chasing its own tail sounds rather like the very definition of an economic bubble. Untethered to reality, such money will follow any scheme that is, for the time being, profitable. It matters little whether the scheme involves subprime mortgages or an investment plan based on the monthly, weekly, or even daily upslopes and downslopes of a stock market graph. When the immediate connection between money and useful work is in this way severed, we lose the means to distinguish a sound enterprise from a bubble - as in fact virtually all economists failed to foresee the current crisis. This is not so much a failure of foresight as acquiescence in economic realities that make foresight impossible. No matter how assiduously regulators seek to address previous excesses by strapping safeguards around the economic balloon of our economy, the money-seeking investor will be driven to invent ever new strategies and the balloon will simply bulge outward in new and novel places.

Somehow the fiction that profit automatically translates into real accomplishment, into real value for society, prevails no matter how evident its fallacy - no matter how evident the truth that, for example, one can make at least as much money selling cocaine as selling penicillin. Moreover, bubbles, which economists have never found any agreed-upon way to explain, continue to occur, and they always involve the disastrous absence of real value in favor of vacuous, mathematical profit (to which investors easily become addicted). It's about time we faced this fact squarely, and explored the significance of the inevitable disconnect between the mere drive for return on investment and the effort to accomplish something substantial in the world. And then we will need to ask ourselves further: how can we as a society discourage this disconnect rather than strive to maximize it as we have now been doing for many years.

Talbot is doing more than asking a rhetorical question about making a distinction between these two modes of money making. He would like ways to diminish, if not eliminate, the cycles of wealth by wealth, or what we might call derivative wealth, vs. productive wealth.

I don't know enough economics to know whether there are technical terms for this distinction, or whether anyone else has thought about it. Pointers welcomed.

Your Eternal Webpage

Who will care for your data when you are gone?  I received this note from reader Ed Sona:

I've been thinking for quite a while about how much data I will have when I die.  I'm 38 now and have about 1TB.  I can only image how much I will have in, say, 40 years.  How much of this data will be preserved and how will it be preserved?  Who will have access to it?  Those in the limelight will have plans made, but what about your average person in rural Indiana?  Certainly every lifetime has value.

It's a good question. (That's an ancient Philippinio burial urn above; perfect for your digital coffin.)

Since I just finished digitizing my small stock of home movies (on analog tape), I filled up a 1 terabyte disc in a matter of one week. I have another 2 TBs of storage and backup of my Mac running on spinning discs in my studio. They are filled with photos and music and email and InDesign files. I have another set of backups in DVD format sitting on shelves somewhere else, in case my studio blows up.

In our home we have long rows of DVD movies and a whole archive of movies on VHS tape. Imagine if all of them were on my computer, in at least under my name in a data storage center. All this storage could easily reach a petabyte at the end of one's life.

But I am guessing that in the long run, few of us will store commercial works, such as movies, TV, music on our own machines. I mean who is storing YouTube videos on their hard discs? We don't because it's always there, so why bother? Eventually we'll subscribe (pay modestly) to the Jukebox in Sky, which will have EVERY movie made, all music of the world, and any video we'd want to see. We dip into it whenever we want, for as long as we want. Making your own copies will seem as senseless as making copies of YouTube (with some very few exceptions).

So how much data can one person GENERATE in a life?

If you are lifelogging -- recording everything you do -- quite a lot. Still, it is a finite amount. I guess it will settle out to some pocketable size. Then what?

Do you bury a copy  with your body? Or burn both? Or do you leave it to your descendents to manage and keep online?

I have never thought about it before -- do I want this website to outlast me? Should my webpage keep shining in the Machine, down through the ages?

Why not?

I'd love to hear what others' plans are. (kk at kk dot org)

BTW, when Google et al cross the point of offering free life-time storage, there may be a market then for paid beyond-this-life-time storage.

The Anti-Portfolio of Investments Not Made

The other day I listed some of the things I got wrong. I'm not the only one to have made some bad calls. A friend who works for  the VC investment firm Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) pointed me to their very honest and amusing disclosure of opportunities they missed. The site says directly:

Bessemer Venture Partners is perhaps the nation's oldest venture capital firm, carrying on an unbroken practice of venture capital investing that stretches back to 1911. This long and storied history has afforded our firm an unparalleled number of opportunities to completely screw up.

A few examples:

Cowan’s [one of the partners] college friend rented her garage to Sergey and Larry for their first year. In 1999 and 2000 she tried to introduce Cowan to “these two really smart Stanford students writing a search engine”. Students? A new search engine? In the most important moment ever for Bessemer’s anti-portfolio, Cowan asked her, “How can I get out of this house without going anywhere near your garage?”


"Stamps? Coins? Comic books? You've GOT to be kidding," thought Cowan. "No-brainer pass."


BVP had the opportunity to invest in pre-IPO secondary stock in Apple at a $60M valuation. BVP's Neill Brownstein called it "outrageously expensive."

Incredibly, BVP passed on Federal Express seven times.


David Cowan passed on the Series A round. Rookie team, regulatory nightmare. 4 years later, a $1.5 billion acquisition by eBay.

If you think about it, most VC firms must have equally long and entertaining lists, even if they don't publish them. Turning down startups is what VCs do -- most of the time.

Control Rooms: From Temples to Thrones

I thought control rooms had gone away with mainframes, but apparently not. This page of control room images is a reminder of their variety.  There are tons more via Google.

I'd love to see someone do a semiotic parsing of the architecture of control rooms.

The very name! Then there's all that switchology. And blinkies! Lots of little windows into hidden worlds. Thrones to view them from. It could keep sociologists and semoticians busy for decades.

I found one paper on the subject: The Semiotics of Control Room Situation Awareness, but it was very empty. After staging a formal vocabulary for discussing the subject, it said nothing about it.

But the more I've looked at modern control rooms, the more I want one. In modern versions, all the lights and screens are replaced by essentially a single huge wall screen which can be divided up into as many smaller screens and blinking lights as desired. In this fashion, the control room begins to resemble the ideal work place cubicle. One blogger who has collected some cool modern examples call them "super offices."

This one is the control room for the Athens Water Supply and Sewage Company.

In the Czech Republic, the MERO Middle European Raw Oil control center.

At the rate at which flat screens are expanding while dropping in price, one could put together one of these modern super offices in a few years.

Digital Things I've Been Wrong About

Shortly after Will Wright released yet another version of his SimCity in the mid 1990s, I was visiting Maxis' studios and chatting with Will about evolutionary system and self-generating software. SimCity was a city that built itself according to a few rules -- which the player tweaked and tried to maximize. It was the ultimate nerd god-game, the nerd playing god. Will offered to give me a peek preview of his next project. SimCity was so cool, I was expecting something even more generative, more ambitious, more god-like -- something like Spore. Will steered me to a monitor and clicked up a oblique view of a house. It was a cut-away house and you could look into the house from that same oblique angle. Inside were blocky figures of people. These virtual people moved about and said things in dialog balloons.

"What does it do? " I asked.

"The sims, that's what we call them, interact with each other according to the rules you set," Will said. "You assign their traits, and skills, and interests, and they interact with each other. You try to get them to do things together." He showed me how the girl sim got the guy sim to go to a party with her.

"They're sort of like dolls?"

"Yeah."

I was incredibly disappointed. Dolls? What kid is going to buy a video game playhouse? I didn't get it. Since this was just a prototype maybe it was just a sketch and the real thing would come later. But when the Sims were released, that's what it was. An electronic autonomous doll house. I hoped Will would make his money back, because I didn't see a big hit there.

Boy was I wrong. Electronic Arts (which bought Maxis years ago) just announced yesterday that they shipped the 100 millionth copy of the Sims.

I've been wrong about a bunch of other things too. When I saw the first version of Photoshop in 1990 I thought it was a joke. All that money for a program that allows you to paint over your pixelated photo? Everything is jaggedy. Printed out with dot matrix or even laser ink, it degraded a fine photograph. Why would I want to do that? What I could not imagine was that scanners, storage, and processing power would rapidly improve to make the pixels invisible, and that the magic of the darkroom would be completely transported to this piece of software.

For that matter I was wrong about ink jets. As dot matrix printers they were low-class serfs compared to laser printers. I had written them off as worth tracking in the future. Wrong again.

Quicken? Balancing your checkbook on a computer?  That was for people with too much time on their hands, and only a step up from typing recipes into the computer. Wrong: Quicken has sold a million copies.

My impression of eBay for its first year was that it was WAY marginal, useful only for the those obsessives who drove to 10 garage sales each weekend. I mean auctions were for fanatics. I was so wrong about this it is not even funny.

In the other direction, I thought push technologies like Pointcast were going to spread fast, and that we'd all be working in Second Life by now. Wrong, wrong.  There was also a music software package (called MusicJam?) released about 1987 or so that allowed you to play improvisational music without hitting a "wrong" note. This is it! Everyone can be musicians now. I felt sure it would improve and be installed in every electronic instrument made. So wrong.

Sadly I can detect no pattern to my mis-predictions. In some cases, I did not anticipate improvements and advances that would remake a pathetic first version into a truly cool tool. In others I anticipated advances that never came.

If I could actually tell which inventions were going to succeed, I'd be a billionaire. You would too.

I believe no one can always be right about what will work because the number of variables determining success are too high. The details of execution for each idea matter greatly. The Sims  by a different genius, different company, different platform, different ecosystem may well have flopped. Photoshop by a different team may have crashed. Likewise, MusicJam or Second Life is a different setting may have flown.

This inherent uncertainty about success is what makes life so interesting.

I'll add more to this list as I think of them. Everyone has their own roster of things they were wrong about.