Talk about pioneering! What Radiohead is doing with their new album Rainbows is crazy, revolutionary and ridiculously inspiring. Eliminating the record label and self releasing/selling via the internet (for now anyways)?! Letting the fan/downloader decide how much to pay?!! Woahhhh! I'm sure the record labels must be hating it, same with i tunes. I wouldn't be surprised if they made more money distributing the album this way than they would have with a traditional release. What this could mean for the way music is distributed and sold.....
Yeah! A wickedly unique and unconventional idea! Although I believe I do smell some crafty guerilla advertising at work, unintentional or not....
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Friday, October 12, 2007
A fascinating gesture...
Today we had a presentation from Vincent of Gesture Tek. I was immediately fascinated that this groundbreaking technology originally started out as a kind of personal project of Vincent's. His background as a musician, dancer and juggler inspired him to create a unique experience through the simple idea of evoking music through movement. He developed the gesture technology in order to play virtual instruments, create visuals and jam with a band. I find it amazing that an invention that was initially created for artistic and entertainment purposes has transitioned into such an important and forward thinking technology.
I'm sure that we would all agree, the most fun application that we witnessed was the virtual game. All it takes is a few seconds of standing in front of a video camera and magically we are immersed into the game itself, appearing as a character on the tv screen! With a swoop of a hand, I was shooting targets, with two swoops I was flying through the air like a superhero! I can't wait for this technology to hit the mainstream. It might just make a gamer out of me! With Sony and Microsoft already licensing this technology, hopefully I won't have too long to wait. Wii anyone?
I have to admit, I am a big fan of the floor. The Gesture FX ground floor enticed me to dance, swim, even clean (sneaky Ford and Epson, very sneaky!) Anissa and I felt that it should be in a dance club and seriously, it really should be. Vincent mentioned that it has been implemented in this fashion in clubs in Japan. As Japan is my vacation dream spot, I vow to one day find this Gesture FX ground floor club and try it out! Who wouldn't love it?
Looks like someone else thought this was a good idea a few years ago ....Siggraph 1998
The Gestpoint technology is another application that I am really excited about. As a sufferer of carpal tunnel syndrome for more than 5 years now I see this as a way to escape the keyboard and mouse at some point down the road. Although to truly find release from these binds I think that voice recognition software would have to further develop as well. Perhaps with both of these technologies working together in the mainstream...?
One of the most talked about gesture based technologies right now is Microsoft Surface. A fantastic interactive table that allows multitouch input for navigation, gaming, displays and much more. I wonder how many people know that this technology was pioneered by Gesture Tek with their Illuminate table. It is not quite fair that Microsoft is getting all the credit now is it?
I am not sure how the next multimedia pioneering presentation can compare to this. The possibilites of gesture technology are fascinating and endless. Who knows, maybe we will live the lives of the futuristic characters from Minority Report very soon.
Other interesting links: Gesture Bar, Gesture Phone
I'm sure that we would all agree, the most fun application that we witnessed was the virtual game. All it takes is a few seconds of standing in front of a video camera and magically we are immersed into the game itself, appearing as a character on the tv screen! With a swoop of a hand, I was shooting targets, with two swoops I was flying through the air like a superhero! I can't wait for this technology to hit the mainstream. It might just make a gamer out of me! With Sony and Microsoft already licensing this technology, hopefully I won't have too long to wait. Wii anyone?
I have to admit, I am a big fan of the floor. The Gesture FX ground floor enticed me to dance, swim, even clean (sneaky Ford and Epson, very sneaky!) Anissa and I felt that it should be in a dance club and seriously, it really should be. Vincent mentioned that it has been implemented in this fashion in clubs in Japan. As Japan is my vacation dream spot, I vow to one day find this Gesture FX ground floor club and try it out! Who wouldn't love it?
Looks like someone else thought this was a good idea a few years ago ....Siggraph 1998
The Gestpoint technology is another application that I am really excited about. As a sufferer of carpal tunnel syndrome for more than 5 years now I see this as a way to escape the keyboard and mouse at some point down the road. Although to truly find release from these binds I think that voice recognition software would have to further develop as well. Perhaps with both of these technologies working together in the mainstream...?
One of the most talked about gesture based technologies right now is Microsoft Surface. A fantastic interactive table that allows multitouch input for navigation, gaming, displays and much more. I wonder how many people know that this technology was pioneered by Gesture Tek with their Illuminate table. It is not quite fair that Microsoft is getting all the credit now is it?
I am not sure how the next multimedia pioneering presentation can compare to this. The possibilites of gesture technology are fascinating and endless. Who knows, maybe we will live the lives of the futuristic characters from Minority Report very soon.
Other interesting links: Gesture Bar, Gesture Phone
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Visualization Studio
Finally, our first multimedia pioneering talk with Song Ho Ahn of the Visualization Studio. The small research studio is a mostly government funded operation that develops applications for e-learning, medical, engineering and scientific research.
The first thing presented to us was an e-learning application made for the police department. I was excited to see that this application was developed in Flash and xml as this is exactly the kind of thing that we will be learning. While not all of the elements of this application are considered to be "pioneering" techniques, I was still fascinated by the capabilities of flash which I feel I have yet to really discover.
I enjoyed the 3-D animations that had been developed in Ogre and I am eager to look into this program a bit more. An example of this software was used in animations created for a government website called Canadian Mysteries in History. Unfortunately, the actual animation as seen on the web is quite poor in resolution and doesn't quite have the same visual effect.
The "F.A.C.E." image recognition application was pretty interesting. Image recognition is still a developing field with many possibilities. Seems to be quite a hot topic these days, interesting to many people in our class. It still seems a bit sci-fi to me right now but I am sure the future will bring it along. For more information on this check out the many, many listings on you tube.
I love the Immersion Studios interactive movie experience. Three screens with 3 projectors, audience interaction through tablet pc's, and branched video. Too bad it wasn't functioning properly but I think we all got the idea. Unfortunately for the public this type of experience is presently too costly to produce and will not be available to us any time soon. Looks like the companies that specialize in this just can't stay afloat.
There were a couple of terms floating around during the presentation that I have heard of in the last few weeks but still have no idea of their meaning or context. I'm going to take this opportunity to clarify a couple of these...
API- Application programming interface- is a source code interface that a computer application, operating system or library provides to support requests for services to be made of it by a computer program ahhh thank you wikipidia!
Flex- Ok, this word comes up often when I am googlying Actionscript 3.0 but was also mentioned by the Visualization developer, lets see... according to adobe "Adobe® Flex™ 2 is a cross-platform development framework for creating rich Internet applications (RIAs). Flex enables you to create expressive, high-performance applications that run identically on all major browsers and operating systems."
-doesen't that just sound like a miracle? How do we use it? Will it really help us with our internet lives?
Other interesting links- Visual recognition through a cell phone?
Face recognition software as a password
Until the next blog....
The first thing presented to us was an e-learning application made for the police department. I was excited to see that this application was developed in Flash and xml as this is exactly the kind of thing that we will be learning. While not all of the elements of this application are considered to be "pioneering" techniques, I was still fascinated by the capabilities of flash which I feel I have yet to really discover.
I enjoyed the 3-D animations that had been developed in Ogre and I am eager to look into this program a bit more. An example of this software was used in animations created for a government website called Canadian Mysteries in History. Unfortunately, the actual animation as seen on the web is quite poor in resolution and doesn't quite have the same visual effect.
The "F.A.C.E." image recognition application was pretty interesting. Image recognition is still a developing field with many possibilities. Seems to be quite a hot topic these days, interesting to many people in our class. It still seems a bit sci-fi to me right now but I am sure the future will bring it along. For more information on this check out the many, many listings on you tube.
I love the Immersion Studios interactive movie experience. Three screens with 3 projectors, audience interaction through tablet pc's, and branched video. Too bad it wasn't functioning properly but I think we all got the idea. Unfortunately for the public this type of experience is presently too costly to produce and will not be available to us any time soon. Looks like the companies that specialize in this just can't stay afloat.
There were a couple of terms floating around during the presentation that I have heard of in the last few weeks but still have no idea of their meaning or context. I'm going to take this opportunity to clarify a couple of these...
API- Application programming interface- is a source code interface that a computer application, operating system or library provides to support requests for services to be made of it by a computer program ahhh thank you wikipidia!
Flex- Ok, this word comes up often when I am googlying Actionscript 3.0 but was also mentioned by the Visualization developer, lets see... according to adobe "Adobe® Flex™ 2 is a cross-platform development framework for creating rich Internet applications (RIAs). Flex enables you to create expressive, high-performance applications that run identically on all major browsers and operating systems."
-doesen't that just sound like a miracle? How do we use it? Will it really help us with our internet lives?
Other interesting links- Visual recognition through a cell phone?
Face recognition software as a password
Until the next blog....
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)