Lovely video from design and research consultancy MAYA on the difference between information and the form we give it.
I came across this on David Sherwin’s ChangeOrder blog in a post about moving beyond words for better brainstorming, which is also and interesting article. He asks why it is so hard to break people out of their regular ideation habits. Words are one problem, but it is also an issue of corporate and company culture, even within design agencies.
The rules of brainstorming are pretty much the opposite of what a usual business culture is. Working in a company that has a traditional hierarchy encourages sniping, competitive, uncooperative, pressured and role-based behaviour. It’s the way people “fight to the top”, create “creative competition” and so on.
It’s very hard to convince people to take suspending those habits seriously if they’re not taken seriously at a company culture level and we have come to consider that the normal way of working. Companies like IDEO or Pixar spend a lot of time and effort on not working this way. It’s no surprise that they are successful in this area and why so many other companies fail to bring ‘innovation’ into their culture, despite bringing in consultants who specialise in ‘innovation training’ or whatever the latest business buzzword is. The consultants, of course, are temporary blips, outside the main culture of the company, so easily dismissed after they have gone.
Much like MAYA’s video, you have to re-think what it is and means to work together, what the purpose and idea of a company is to really change its culture. A company is the form given to a group of people working together, but it is by no means the only, nor the best, form.
You have to admire the Swedish ability to indoctrinate their students with brilliant design skills.
The above Little Red Riding Hood piece by Toma Nilsson was for a college project, inspired by the Röyskopp videos and got tweeted all over the place in the last couple of weeks.
I know plenty of experienced professional designers who would love to have made that (including me), damn the man! If any of my students are reading this – that’s what I’ll be expecting at the end of the semester, okay?
The Holodeck remains a fantasy for Trekkies and we’re still not yet jacked into The Matrix (or are we? Oooh.). Guys going to enormous lengths to build stuff for their girlfriends, on the other hand, has long been part of the human condition.
World Builder by Bruce Branit is about a guy who builds a holographic world for the woman he loves. There’s a reason it is holographic, which you find out when you get to the ending, so I won’t spoil it here. The film was shot in a day, but then took two years of post-production to finish off. Who says computers make things quicker?
The main reason for blogging it is because of some of the gestural interface elements in it. The overlay buttons and keypads are the usual fare and I remain unconvinced that jabbing at a floating holographic keypad button would be a useful UI approach, although it always looks good on screen. There are also some controls like spreading the fingers to enlarge and object and using the fingertips to rotate a virtual control knob that are already in use in gestural interfaces.
I’m not sure I have seen the idea of being able to pick up things like colours and textures on your fingertips and apply them to objects yet though in an existing multitouch interface. A few desktop applications use that kind of sticky mouse idea and 3D and 2D applications kind of use it with tools and colour/texture chips, but I still haven’t seen it all that smoothly done. Adobe seem to screw this up further and further with every release rather than making it easier. (Does CS really stand for ‘crappy shit’ rather than ‘creative suite’?)
The main issue with a gestural or multitouch interface would be keeping track of the identity of a particular finger tip once it has left the touch panel, it seems to me. But maybe someone has already solved this and it is in use – let me know if you know more.
(Thanks to one of my ex-students, Nico Marzian for mailing me the link).
I have noticed I have been posting a lot of videos recently – I’m not sure if that’s me being lazy or that some things are simply a lot easier to explain when you see them in action (or interact with them).
One interface area that has not really changed a great deal over the years is in video editing and compositing. The two choices are timeline (such as you see in Final Cut, After Effects, etc.) or the kind of patch module used in Shake and other compositing tools. Both of these borrow heavily from their analogue roots (A-Roll/B-Roll film and video editing and optical printers).
If you have ever had to motion track a piece of video in order to glue a layer to a moving object in the video, you’ll know it’s pretty time consuming, even with the best of tools. This demonstration by Dan B Goldman from Adobe Systems shows how much easier this could be with a much more direct interface. I expect we can hope for it to be integrated into Adobe products at some point.
This technology from Pravin Bhat over at the University of Washington is pretty impressive. It uses high resolution still images to enhance video footage. It also enables dynamic masking and all sorts of other goodness. The interactive cutout video is interesting too – unlike most compositing ways of thinking, which are pretty much working in 2D on a frame-by-frame basis, their system looks through the pixels temporally and allows you to select through them by time in a kind of time smear fashion.
It should make a big impact in post-production, but I can imagine it might come into all sorts of use for both devious manipulation of video, fixing up crappy YouTube clips as well as crime-scene investigation. And “Spacetime Fusion” is such a great name.
Rather than use RFID tags to do the scanning of all the stuff in your shopping trolley (that’s ‘cart’ to you folks over the Atlantic), they’ve gone for a mobile phone solution. Basically you take photos of all the bar codes and their phone software generates one master bar code that you scan back in (very meta-media that) at the end in order to pay.
They do use RFID tags for their ’smart freezers’, which know what meat has been taken out and sold. But the best feature, which requires very little in the way of tech, is the self-service wine-tasting. That’s a really smart idea.
My supermarket here in Germany doesn’t take credit cards, only EC Cards and Germany is a very paper and cash oriented culture I’ve found. I wonder how this will pan out… Personally I’ve really been enjoying the whole Richard Scarry small town experience with a baker and a butcher, etc., all of whom know me.
It uses the same kind of multi-angle video technique that the other versions use, though this one is simpler. It has some nice quick-cut segments as you switch between each bedroom to contrast the hectic lives of those we are observing with the relaxing bedroom zone.
In terms of interactivity it’s very simple and the charm is really down to the filming and music, which is what ad guys are good at. But I think it’s a good blend of digital and traditional approaches.
I’ve played with Processing a fair bit over the years, but never really got stuck into anything solid – most of my time has been spent fixing up my students’ projects!
Over the break I’ve been playing with some other ideas, working through the very good book by Casey Reas and Ben Fry, Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists. It’s probably one of the best books I’ve ever read in terms of introducing and explaining how to code for people without a computer science background.
Inspired by Robert Hodgin’s wonderful Processing work I thought I’d have another crack at particles as they seem to be all the rage at the moment. The particle creation part is easy, but getting them to interact with decent physics was getting too much for my mathematically challenged brain. Thankfully I came across the Traer Physics Engine by Jeffrey Traer Bernstein, which handles a lot of that maths for you.
My “Hello World!” code for any platform tends to be a bouncing ball (or an array of them) because it covers most of the structures – if…then, variables, arrays, etc.
So I started building and engine that has a bunch of particles that are all attracted to each other, but more attracted to a single one which is following a target invisible bouncing ball around the screen. (It would make more sense to collapse the particles into the ball code, but at the moment I’m just plugging stuff together.)
It’s very simple at the moment – just an ellipse as the graphic with some trails going on. The above is a version that rendered out in non-realtime with 20,000 particles. I like the way they seem to rope together and struggle to break free. Sometimes there’s a kind of breakaway flare.
There’s also a bit of gravity going on, which drags everything down. Any particles that go off the bottom of the screen are simply recycled up the top (you’ll see this in the initial explosion). A interesting upshot of this is that sometimes the tail of the flare/rope falls off the bottom and those particles make a break for it from the top.
Interesting video search beta over at Reuters Labs that allows you to search for people in videos by just entering their name as a text query (obvious that part really eh?). The beta has scanned 609 hours so far for the test.
It’s powered by a technology by Viewdie that apparently does it in real-time. It’s not clear how the database is initially populated, presumably at some point someone has to at least import tagged images of celebs. There’s a slightly vague flow chart of how it works which amusingly ends with a big arrow pointing to $$$.
The interface is quite nice and simple though with the search results triggering video playback from the moment the person appears, showing a timecode list and other people in the same clip.
I imagine Reuters & Viewdie see big bucks in a database that news outlets can link to and scour (including people wanting to advertise based on video context). But it’s hard to imagine those in big government not wanting to try and use it to catch all those baddies out there.
