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....