Technology

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.

Evolution of Proteins Animated

I've previously mentioned William Latham's mutator work. Bruce Sterling alerted me to a recent short animation by Latham that will scour your eyeballs. 

 

The film shows the evolution of a protein structure mapped into the FormGrow space traversing 20 nodes in an extrapolated phylogenetic tree covering about 50 million years (back and forth in time). The film shows a highly original representation of DNA on its journey from the human liver to the eye lens, initially backtracking towards their common ancestor and then moving forward to today’s time. The animated form interpolates between each node on the tree. DNA is used both to generate the forms and produce the soundtrack. The work is an extension of Latham and Todd’s ideas of the late 1980’s to the early 1990’s, where, this time, FormGrow is connected to modern genomics and proteomics. The film represents an attempt to cross the divide between scientific visualisation of DNA and aesthetically pleasing art.

Governing Sovereign Wealth Flows

You'll be hearing more about sovereign wealth funds and flows in the future.

A sovereign wealth fund is a huge heap of money that is controlled by a nation -- say Singapore or Saudi Arabia -- rather than by a private transnational company. The latter is called private equity funds and their investments have been prime movers in global finance for decades. Some of the largest banks and finance companies that are in the current news cycle, like Bear Stearns, or UBS, are good examples of private money. They buy and sell business across national borders.

But as large as these financial behemoths are they are small compared to the largest sovereign funds. The total amount of private funds sloshing around the world is in the hundreds of billions, whereas sovereign funds -- the money controlled by nations looking for investments -- is $2.5 trillion. Sovereign funds are common in countries where the division between state and capitalism is thin and blurred. According to the New York Times in their article The Leveraged Planet, the amount of sovereign controlled wealth is expected to rise to $12 trillion by 2015.  These funds also buy and sell businesses across borders but since their owners are other nations, or nation-state organizations, the implications of their scale and intent are proving enormous.

A wonderful New York Times graphic showing the global flows of sovereign wealth.

Sovereign wealth is not new. It is simply more visible now, and because of $100/barrel oil, the  funds flowing into nationalized funds are in the trillion dollar range.

There is a second reason why sovereign wealth is getting a lot of attention. For many years these funds have been the ones buying US debt. As Americans consume, foreign countries lend us the money. But now for a number of reasons, they are no longer so keen on the US. Protectionist elements in the US object to sovereign funds owning key US companies, and the dizzy devaluation of the dollar has driven many sovereign investors to the Euro. Some chiefs of these private equity funds in the Mid-East can buy US assets but have trouble getting a visa to visit the States. So why bother with the US?

At the same time the flows of these funds, pumped up by petro-dollars and export purchases, are getting huger, weirder, and more uncertain. Most importantly, they are basically unregulated.

There are calls for some kind of minimal rules for this global marketplace. George Soros, a big player in the private equity arm of this game, says, "The financial system needs a global sherif."

In the past, calls for global sherifs have not amounted to anything. Americans, like other nationals, have a keen aversion to anyone telling them what to do as a nation.  National rights, like national security, is considered sacred. There's been a long history which claims that nothing should trump sovereignty.  In the near future that may be regarded as a quaint sentiment.

Markets need a minimum set of enforceable rules. The amazing robust market of strangers that we call Ebay works with very few rules because in the last resort those few rules are upheld by the national sherif -- the US sovereign state.

There is one planetary-scale marketplace, hinted at by Thomas Friedman's "The World Is Flat" which contains the flow of goods and jobs around the world. Work migrates to where it can find the best financing; workers migrate to where they can find the best jobs; consumers migrate to where they get the best deals.

Behind this is another planetary-scale marketplace which moves the investment funds made by high-priced energy, or successful cheap labor. Here flows the 2.5 trillion dollars. The scale of these money flows overwhelm any other global finance dynamic. One might predict that in the near future these quasi-national flows will dictate your economic environment more than your local, regional, or even national policies will.

This unregulated marketplace is scary, even for the players. Since minimally regulated markets make everyone more money by reducing some of the risk, there is a HUGE incentive among the players to install some basic minimal rules. Rules that can be enforced. By someone with clout.

The key question now before these moneyed players (mostly the nation states themselves) is whether these minimal rules can be cobbled together in a decentralized pan-national way, with a few super-nations playing cop (sort of like it has been, only now with China in the lead). Or will the new global game require an actual supra-national power, some kind of global financial sherif?

The political US is balking at either scenario -- China leading, or a super transnational entity -- and it doesn't like the idea of unregulated large ownership investments by other "foreign" nations either, so the rise of sovereign wealth flows is causing alarm. On the other hand, money, the real money is seeking opportunities in the new order.

Nothing about the current arrangement is stable. The mortgage crisis is merely a symptom of a much large disruption: the emergence of a global flow of money in need of some global level  regulation. The greedy bankers themselves want it. They need some minimal global enforceable rules.

Something is happening here, but we don't know what it is, do we Mr. Jones?

The Future Doesn't Matter

The future is less fashionable than it was only 10 years ago. It is no where as romantic as it was in the final decades of the last century. You could make an argument that the popularity of the future peaked in the 1950s, and has been on a steady decline since then. My feeling is that since the dot.com bust of 2001, the future is far less cool.  It doesn't seem to matter as much.

Serious interest in the future is historically very recent. It did not begin until significant change occurred within a lifetime. Before then the world you were born into was the same one you grew old in. There was no need to contemplate the "future." It was just more of the same.

But once the pace of change became visible to an individual, interest and concern about what was next became almost a survival need. Science fiction began as a literary genre at the same time that serious change outpaced one's life. During the industrial and digital revolutions, you needed to discern the future because that was were you were going to spend the rest of your life.

But then something weird happened in the first few years of this decade. The pace of change became so fast that it outpaced contemplation. The future became harder to predict, and exhausting to keep track of. With a long, colorful history of failed predictions, it occurred to almost everyone at once that very little of what we imagined our own futures to be would really happen. So why bother?

A few science fiction authors seemed to given up on the future. Neal Stephenson now writes historical fiction, and William Gibson set his latest book (Spook Country) in the present. He says the current times are much weirder than he could ever make up. The late Philip K. Dick, legendary outsider science fiction author, is currently Hollywood's fountainhead, inspiring one feature film after another (Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, Scanner Darkly). Dick has a post-future view that is explored in a recent, fantastic profile in the New Yorker.  Here's the pertinent bit:

Although "Blade Runner," with its rainy, ruined Los Angeles, got Dick's antic tone wrong, making it too noirish and romantic, it got the central idea right: the future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on. Dick's future worlds are rarely evil and oppressive, exactly; they are banal and a little sordid, run by a demoralized élite at the expense of a deluded population. No matter how mad life gets, it will first of all be life.

And this:

In "Ubik" (1969), in turn, the first premise is that the ancient human dream of communication with the dead has been achieved at last-but, when you go to speak with them, there is static and missed connections and interference, and then you argue over your bill. ....

The typical Dick novel is at once fantastically original in its ideas and dutifully realistic in charting their consequences. No matter what things may come, they will be exploited, merchandised, and routinized by the force of human weakness. And the interesting corollary: it won't matter; the world of speaking ghosts will work about as well as this one. A society of paranoids can work as well as Nixon's America did and, perhaps, in similar ways.

As Yogi Berra should have said, It's possible that in the future, no one will go there anymore.

How Not to Do a Time Capsule

A buried time capsule is a popular way to mark an anniversary for a school or community. Hundreds of thousands of capsules have been buried in the last 50 years. Every now and then one is remembered and resurrected. In 1957 the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma entombed a brand new 1957 Plymouth Belvedere, stuffed with momentos, as a time capsule to celebrate the state's centennial.

A few days before the time capsule was opened, Robert Lauer, a local reporter set the scene:

The Plymouth was sprayed with cosmoline, wrapped in plastic, and buried in a concrete tomb, placed on a steel plate so the wheels were off the ground. Stuffed in the trunk were five gallons of gasoline in glass jugs, oil, a case of beer, and other artifacts. Placed inside the glove compartment at the last minute were the contents of a woman’s purse containing fourteen bobby pins, a ladies compact, plastic rain cap, combs, a tube of lipstick, pack of gum, facial tissues, $2.73 in money, and a pack of cigarettes. Also placed in were unpaid parking tickets and a bottle of tranquilizers which the winner of the car may need. During the party in 1957, residents were asked to guess the population of Tulsa in 2007; the guesses were sealed in a steel container and placed in the car. The winner or their heir will receive the Plymouth and a $100 trust fund which was accruing interest since 1957, (reportedly now containing $400). The car was buried in downtown Tulsa with traffic cruising nearby; some were concerned that vibrations may have cracked the concrete tomb allowing moisture to enter. Will the 1957 Plymouth be in mint condition or will it require itself to come back to life like its sister car Christine? I will be there for the unveiling on 15 June 2007 for either a pristine 1957 Plymouth with 7 miles on her or a pile of rust with four dried out rubber tires!

It will be the event of a lifetime!

When the capsule was opened, the prize was not what everyone wanted.

I kind of like the gunk covering the car. It's unique and transforms it into an art piece. One could see it in an museum gallery. As this page make clear, the same car was better preserved outside the capsule by ordinary buffs.

One conclusion from this mishap is that time capsules should attempt to preserve not popular items, but things that have no fans, no enthusiasts, no one to care for them. You should stuff them with artifacts that people currently find dumb, stupid, worthless, and insignificant. That's the stuff that won't be saved, and will therefore be of prime interest in 100 years.

If you are making a time capsule today don't put in an iPod, a copy of Lost, a Prada bag, or a Nike sneaker. And for goodness sake, waterproof it.

Addiction Vaccines

Newsweek call them Anti-Drug Drugs: "A new generation of vaccines may enable doctors to inoculate people against addictive substances like cocaine and nicotine. A vaccine that would teach the immune system to attack and destroy cocaine before the drug reached the brain is poised to enter its first large-scale clinical trial in humans."

In brief here is how the vaccines work, according to Newsweek.

Because the addictive drug molecules are small enough to evade the body's immune system, they can slip undetected from the respiratory and circulatory tracts that absorb them and make their way into the central nervous system, where they work their dark magic. But when attached to a larger molecule—like an inactivated protein from a cholera-causing bacterium—the addictive substances can't hide. The immune system develops antibodies that can latch on to the drugs when they are next ingested by themselves. Once attached to an antibody, a given drug cannot access its targets in the brain and is instead broken down by certain enzymes.

So although ingested, the addictive drugs won't work. Thomas Kosten, at Baylor College of Medicine is working on a vaccine for cocaine. According to Baylor College, he says

"Blood vessels are distributed all over the brain, but the cocaine does not get into the brain because when it is bound to the antibodies, which are fairly large proteins, it cannot get through the blood-brain barrier (a natural formation that prevents foreign substances from going into the brain)," said Thomas Kosten. "It's just like a big sponge for cocaine in the bloodstream."

The idea is to "soak up" enough cocaine that addicts cannot get their "high." If this goes on long enough, the researchers hope the addicts will quit the drug. A common tenet in psychology is if there is no reward, the behavior will ultimately stop.

Obviously the effectivity of the vaccine will vary by person, by drug, and perhaps by usage over time. Baylor College says:

During early studies in humans, researchers vaccinated subjects repeatedly over a period of three months. During this time, the subjects made large amounts of cocaine-specific antibodies. While the antibody levels drop within a year, they remain significantly high during the first few months. In that early period, if a vaccinated subject used cocaine, the antibodies prevented it from entering the brain and giving the person the cocaine "rush" that is attractive to addicts.

The abstract of Kosten's 2005 paper (and full text if you want to pay) can be found here: "Vaccine pharmacotherapy for the treatment of cocaine dependence"

According to the Wall Street Journal there are two companies closest to releasing commercial products.

The two companies furthest along in the research are Nabi Biopharmaceuticals in Boca Raton, Fla., and Xenova Group PLC of Slough, England. Xenova Group is working on a cocaine vaccine and reports that the vaccine has reduced relapse in a small group of cocaine users.

Nabi Biopharmaceuticals is working on a nicotine vaccine. The company has completed a trial involving 68 smokers to test safety and measure the levels of antibodies produced by the vaccine. The vaccine has also resulted in smoking cessation among a group of participants.

The nicotine vaccine works like this, according to the American Psychiatric Foundation.

NicVAX is proposed as a therapy that could enhance current treatments for nicotine addiction by helping smokers who are trying to kick the habit resist the urge to light up. The hypothesis, said Leshner, is that the vaccine may inhibit nicotine’s "priming effect"—the phenomenon in which a formerly addicted individual experiences an increased desire to use a drug after a single exposure, which contributes significantly to relapse. A treatment program involving NicVAX might also include elements of cognitive-behavioral therapy and medication, such as bupropion, to help reduce withdrawal symptoms.

The Future is Not Vending Machines

For at least 30 years the Japanese have sold almost everything you can imagine in vending machines. I seen batteries, books, and beer for sale in street-side vending machines. I always thought it would be a phenom that would spread to the rest of the world, but it never has. There's still a weird and wild selection of vending machine themes in Japan (see Quirky Japan for some examples), but sadly this future has never taken hold elsewhere (that I am aware of). The moral of this story is that while the future is unevenly distributed, so are deadends.

Live lobsters! You have to catch one with the crane. 

Fresh eggs.

Historicity

James Gleick has a swell piece in the New York Times Magazine on the intangible quality of "historicity" that makes certain artifacts extremely valuable even when their nearly indistinguishable copies are free. 

All these artifacts share the quality that Philip K. Dick, in his 1962 novel "The Man in the High Castle," calls historicity, which is "when a thing has history in it." In the book, a dealer in antiquities holds up two identical Zippo lighters, one of which supposedly belonged to Franklin D. Roosevelt, and says: "One has historicity, a hell of a lot of it. As much as any object has ever had. And one has nothing. Can you feel it? ... You can’t. You can’t tell which is which. There’s no ‘mystical plasmic presence,’ no ‘aura’ around it."  Back in the real world, in 1996, Sotheby’s sold a humidor that had belonged to John F. Kennedy for $574,500. It had historicity.

The Bridge Between Atoms and Bits: 2D Code

If you live in Japan or Korea, this kind of symbol will be familar.

It's so ubiquitous in Asia you can find it on McDonald's packaging. The patch is a 2d barcode, or QR code, that can be read by a cell phone camera. You point your phone towards the symbol which could be on a billboard, or a building, or hamburger packaging, and your phone will then provide a decipherment of the data. The following McDonalds commercial in Japanese show how to use the codes.

As mobile phone life takes root in the US, we'll see more of these, particularly for location-based services. It is a cheap way to signal some simple information to the mobile web.  Indeed, a good way to think of QR and 2D codes is a bridge between atoms and bits, between the real world and the digital world.  You want something physical to meet something virtual? Print up a simple sticker.

The problem so far is that there are more then 40 competing designs for 2d coding. Most are variations on black and white patterns, but a few even use color. QR is one popular codex in Japan, but there are others, like Shotcode.

My guess is that the huge pool of contenders for this standard means that there is little consensus on what kind of information we expect to convey with the phone codes. Will it be very simple latitude/longitude information? Or mostly product SKUs and website URLs? Or more complex data?

To keep up on this volitle frontier, there's the blog 2d code, which avidly follows all manner of 2d and QR code.

What Laptops Should Be

If I were designing computer interfaces, I'd be paying attention to visual anthropology coming from the kids such as these mockups from a series created by the Laptop Club. Kids in a Montessori school, ages 7 to 9, who did not have computers in their classroom started to make their own "laptops" out of construction paper. Many of the kids were girls (all the samples shown in the link are by girls.) 

Blogger Amy Tiemann, who knew the kids from an after-school program discovered the Club and collected the constructions. She also interviewed the creators, and reported the results on CNET.

A group of kids from one of our local elementary schools has formed a "mini-laptop club." They don't use electronic machines. Instead, these first-, second- and third-graders draw their own laptops on construction paper and pretend to e-mail each other. They dedicate a surprising amount of time to this activity. I once had a chance to examine one of their "keyboards." I was fascinated to learn which Internet functions had sunk into the minds of these kids, who are just getting their first exposure to computers from watching their parents work, and from using kid-friendly sites.

She reports some of the keyboard buttons on the "laptops" are

...assigned to “Barbie.com,” “best friends” next to “friends,” “HP [Harry Potter] trivia,” and “werd games” as well as “rily werd games.”   

The kids have seen and used computer keyboards. Their designs are partly their own memory of what computer keys they've seen, party keys they would like to see, and partly keys they feel ought to be.  It is this aspirational aspect of design that I think is most telling. Why shouldn't our keyboard have a button that evokes "best friend"?  Tiemann writes:

Knowing who your friends are, and either committing to a best friend or figuring out how to remain friends with everyone, are very important. That’s what fascinated me about their laptops. It was a way to demonstrate their knowledge of pop culture and social networks. Having your name on your friend’s keyboard is a little like being in someone’s “Top 8 friends” on MySpace. And yet these kids most likely don’t even know about MySpace yet.

They reveal an easy confusion between what buttons on a screen and buttons on a keyboard do. But when you think about it, it's sort of an illogical difference. Tiemann offered another important observation:

The inevitability of it all drew me to the paper laptops. Parents may want to delay their children’s computer use, but here they are drawing their own designs. It reminded me of taking away toy guns and seeing the kids make guns out of sticks instead.Kids are intensely social creatures and you can really see what is important to them by looking at their designs. I love all the keys dedicated to pets. Where my friends and I used to have imaginary horses, now these girls have imaginary pets with an online identity.

Extreme Pumpkin Carving Art

It's not a vegetable, it's an art media. Some great candidates and my favorites this year: 

Death Star from Noel's Pumpkin Carving Archive

"Brain E. Aaak" from Masterpiece Pumpkins

Chomper from Ze Frank show

Retail Dynamic Contextual Pricing in The New Economy

Jan Chipchase, Nokia's peripatetic investigator of cultural technology, spotted this electronic price tag in a Tokyo shop. He notes it is a "Small sign. Big implications." 

 

Long expected, dynamic contextual retail pricing is now apparently in prototype. An LED mini-tag displaying the price of an item offers many benefits -- to sellers primarily. The price of a can of soup can change depending on the weather, the price of the competition down the street, the amount of stock in the back room, the price of corn futures, or even the pattern of traffic in the store. Quants will have a field day coming up with gonzo algorithms maximizing all these variables. "Get the perfect pickle code!" says the spam to grocery store owners. The optimization inherent in this price display would optimize retail profits first, but eventually, like all the other "zero friction" transactions in the network economy, this dynamic pricing (think eBay) benefits the consumer. 

However to repeat an earlier prediction of mine: some consumers will head to stores that boast "NO DYNAMIC PRICING!" just as many eBay buyers (I am often one of them) choose to pay the immediate "Buy it Now" fixed price rather than haggle over a fluctuating auction price. Uncertainty has its costs.

Not Happy With Crappy

Wonderful article by James Fallow on Chinese factories. It runs long, but it stays juicy the whole time, because he's giving you the details you want to hear. Anyone who has been to China is awed by the scale of production. How do they do it?    And more importantly what will they do next?

 

Best insights in the piece: 

The Chinese factories can respond more quickly, and not simply because of 12-hour workdays. “Anyplace else, you’d have to import different raw materials and components,” Casey told me. “Here, you’ve got nine different suppliers within a mile, and they can bring a sample over that afternoon. People think China is cheap, but really, it’s fast.” Moreover, the Chinese factories use more human labor, and fewer expensive robots or assembly machines, than their counterparts in rich countries. “People are the most adaptable machines,” an American industrial designer who works in China told me. “Machines need to be reprogrammed. You can have people doing something entirely different next week.” 

At the moment, most jobs I’ve seen the young women in the factories perform have not been “taken” from America, because in America these assembly-type tasks would be done by machines.

But the Chinese goal is, of course, to build toward something more lucrative.  Many people I have spoken with say that the climb will be slow for Chinese industries, because they have so far to go in bringing their design, management, and branding efforts up to world standards. “Think about it—global companies are full of CEOs and executives from India, but very few Chinese,” Dominic Barton, the chairman of Mc­Kinsey’s Asia Pacific practice, told me. The main reason, he said, is China’s limited pool of executives with adequate foreign-language skills and experience working abroad. Andy Switky, the managing director–Asia Pacific for the famed California design firm IDEO, described a frequent Chinese outlook toward quality control as “happy with crappy.” This makes it hard for them to move beyond the local, low-value market. “Even now in China, most people don’t have an iPod or a notebook computer,” the manager of a Taiwanese-owned audio-device factory told me. “So it’s harder for them to think up improvements, or even tell a good one from a bad one.” These and other factors may slow China’s progress. But that’s a feeble basis for American hopes.