Clay’s Blog

Well, another SIGGRAPH is history. It’s been a terrific creative battery recharge. Thursday and Friday highlights include a really cool Production Session on how the various visual effects companies that made Speed Racer went about replicating the look and feel of anime in a live action motion picture, a very entertaining and interesting overview on the use of Adobe Flash for animation, and an absolutely fascinating class on transportation visualization.
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It’s been an inspiring conference so far. The classes I’ve attended have been excellent. On Monday I attended the half-day course on projectors and spatial augmented reality for (I think) the 4th year running. Ramesh Raskar and Oliver Bimber were fantastic as usual. They were joined this year by Aditi Majumber who spoke about large-format displays and Hendrik Lensch who spoke on computational illumination for 3D scene modeling. One of the things I really get excited about in this class is what Raskar calls RFIG. In essence, this entails adding a photosensor to an RFID tag and then projecting structured light from a handheld projector on the photosensor in order to acquire a relative position for the tagged item. With the unique identifier and the relative position, we can query a database and then project useful information about the identified items directly on the items themselves using our handheld projector. All this is made possible by very small and relatively inexpensive handheld computers with wireless network access and attached projectors. You can check out their work, including the full-text of their book, Spatial Augmented Reality, on the supporting website: SpatialAR.com. Great stuff.
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I arrived at the Los Angeles Convention Center today and picked up my credentials for this year’s SIGGRAPH Conference. If you’re unfamiliar with the organization or the conference, it’s a part of the Association for Computing Machinery; SIGGRAPH is the largest SIG (Special Interest Group) in the ACM. The full name is the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques, which is more than a mouthful.This year’s conference has added a couple of new features. The fantastic Animation Festival has been expanded and more deeply integrated with the rest of the conference. Screenings are being paired with artist and tech talks and will be running throughout the day, with special big-studio presentations in the evenings, including Pixar and Dreamworks.

In addition, conference organizers are implementing a new RFID tracking component to gather demographic data about attendance at conference sessions and events. The RFID tags are embedded in attendee ID cards (attendees can opt-out by recycling the card at the conference). This year is a pilot of the technology with expanded use next year if all goes well.

I’m especially interested in how this works out. The ILC is partnering with Tulane’s Middle American Research Institute on some interesting RFID projects as MARI moves to new and renovated storage and display space over the next 18 months. On a related note, the half-day class on computer graphic projector technology, including Spatial Augmented Reality, is in the morning at 8:30. I’m hoping to come away with some good ideas for implementing this technology in our MARI-related projects in the near future. I have a meeting set up on Thursday afternoon with engineers at Motorola on current RFID technology, thanks to the gracious assistance of Ian Thomas, Vice-President of Business Development at O’Neill Software, Inc.

I don’t think I could imagine a better week of total geek heaven.

Just heard about a really cool flickr visualization called Tag Galaxy (Thanks, Mike!). When you visit the site you can search flickr for a particular tag and then build a stack of related tags to narrow a search. Related tags are displayed in a 3D visualization in the style of a planet with each related tag displayed as a smaller satellite object orbiting the original “planet.” As you click through each additional tag in the stack, the process repeats narrowing the search. When you are finished narrowing your search, you simply click the central “planet.” Images meeting your search are arranged as the outer surface of the sphere. You can click and drag to rotate the sphere and click on individual images to pull them out and show them in front of the rest on the sphere. Another click brings the full image up and provides some of the flickr metadata and a link to the flickr page for the image.

As a visualization that provides an easy way to browse a large number of related images quickly, this tool is very successful. Often, 3D interfaces do not provide the most efficient means to accessing data. But in this case, there’s and excellent fit. Take a moment to check out the site. It’s definitely worth the bookmark.

http://taggalaxy.de/

I just saw a post on TeleRead that mentioned that Book Glutton is up for a Webby award. I’d heard of Book Glutton before, but I haven’t checked it out until now. It’s a really cool idea for a community website.

The idea is that you create an account on the site and then access public domain works or user contributed texts using a slick little browser-based book reader, called The Unbound Reader. The twist is that you can open a pane on either side of The Unbound Reader that lets you chat with other readers of the current book in real-time or make annotations that are stored for your own access or shared with other users. In addition, the community aspect of the site includes reading groups that share interest in particular topics or authors. You can join already existing groups or create your own group, which might include your friends or colleagues.

The idea reminds me of the WordPress theme called CommentPress. These tools are really exciting from an instructional technology point of view. They really allow people to work together in close collaboration on a shared text. And they both provide a mechanism that brings together the strengths of wikis with the close reading of a shared document. There’s some great potential here from an educational perspective. It’s hard to beat this kind of active engagement.

I’m attending another excellent New Media Consortium online symposium. This time the topic is educational uses of mashups. As with any subject covered by academics, there’s been significant effort and time spent in the symposium on defining the topic of the symposium itself. Several of the presenters have spent time trying to put a finger on just what a mashup is.

For the most part, the focus is on new tools and structures that combine data from multiple and sometimes disparate sources in novel ways. Often the product is a visually interesting website or Internet-based tool. But, in its broadest sense, almost any cultural artifact can be seen as a mashup. In a real sense, everything that is a cultural product takes the current cultural landscape as a given upon which it can then build, borrowing more or less from previous cultural artifacts. The movement of mashing up and remixing is transforming how we experience culture and its products. And because educational institutions are situated in culture, it is unsurprising that this movement is being embraced by educators. The topic is fascinating from a technological as well as philosophical point of view.

So far, one of my favorite presentations has been “Confessions of a Mashup Un-Artist” by Brian Lamb of the University of British Columbia. Brian’s presentation was itself a masterful mashup, more a live performance employing images, video, music and text than a traditional presentation. In addition, the NMC folks did something really excellent by having Brian perform in Second Life and then streaming the performance out to the web using Adobe Connect. That setup allowed the performance to be recorded, which is how I was able to experience it because I had a class during the actual time the performance was given. Take a peek at what it looked like:

It was absolutely fantastic. Some of the symposium participants really had no idea what to make of it. And many others really got into and started dancing in the amphitheater. Really great stuff.

At the beginning of last week, I had the pleasure of participating in a workshop hosted by the Innovative Learning Center on Digital Storytelling. The workshop was led by two great facilitators from the Center for Digital Storytelling based in Berkeley, California. Daniel Weinshenker, the Director of the Denver Office, and Jessica McCoy, an instructor based at the Berkeley office, did a wonderful job leading the workshop. If you’re unfamiliar with Digital Storytelling, take a look at the Center’s website. Jessica is also involved with an organization called Stories for Change. Both websites host several amazing examples of digital stories.What I found most valuable in participating in the workshop was the opportunity to see a mature process for helping participants formulate and incrementally improve their stories in such a way that simply engaging in the process in good faith led to a product that was drastically better for having been through it. Participants were asked to come with a written script in the range of 350 words, or at least a set of notes that could be turned into a script. We were asked to gather together as much media as we could, such as pictures, video, sound recordings, and music, that would help to tell the story in more than words.
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Just saw this post in the NMC’s RSS feed. It’s dated for tomorrow (24 February) but the post is up now. This is exciting news. I’ve found my experiences in Second Life to be very rewarding so far, but I have been concerned that Linden Labs has too much power over all aspects of the virtual world to be compatible with the open atmosphere cultivated in American higher education. It’s good that NMC is pursuing alternative open source initiatives while still maintaining their commitment to Second Life. This seems like good news all around. I’m excited about participating in the endeavor.

For the last two days, I have been attending a conference sponsored by the New Media Consortium on the Evolution of Communication. The conference is being held wholly in Second Life.

This is the first time I have spent any amount of time in-world and it’s my first real work being done there. I have to say, I have been very skeptical of the use of Second Life for this sort of thing.

But my experience so far has been spectacular. I am using very high-end computers with massive bandwidth, though.
My colleague David Robinson hasn’t had quite as good of an experience going back and forth among different machines, some of which are not the latest hardware.

All things considered, I am more positive about Tulane’s investment of resources in Second Life to build out our island. Participating in a conference like this one has given me some good ideas about how best to use the tool and how not to use it. The conference has been very enlightening and the presentations have been excellent, as is the norm for NMC events.

Just uploaded a recording of a presentation I did yesterday on eBooks. Here’s the description:

eBooks: Promise and Reality

eBooks have been around for several years and every couple of years the technology is hyped as being ready for mass consumption. We’ll take a look at the current eBook landscape. I’ll demo several hardware solutions, including the Sony PRS-500 Reader System and alternative devices like cell phones and the PlayStation Portable. I’ll demonstrate how to use BookDesigner to convert among formats and other software tools. We’ll talk about sources for eBooks like the Gutenberg Project. We’ll also take a look at newly announced technology, including Amazon’s Kindle eBook reader, Adobe’s new Digital Editions format, and color eInk devices that were shown at SIGGRAPH this summer.

View the Presentation

(Adobe Presenter Flash format)