Clay's Blog » Video Tech

Gmote on the MyTouch 3G and an Ubuntu 9.10 HTPC

Clay McGovern — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 23:02:39 +0000

Finally got a chance to play around with Gmote on my MyTouch 3G running Android 1.6. Installed the Android app a couple of months ago and then never set it up on any of my desktops. This afternoon I installed Gmote server on my custom HTPC hooked up to my Samsung HDTV. It’s running Ubuntu 9.10. I’m writing this post on the beautiful 1080p 42″ screen, as a matter of fact.

I downloaded the server tarball from the Gmote website and ran the shell script to start and setup the server. It didn’t run the first time. Ended up having to install the latest JRE – no big deal. Ran the script again and the server started up prompting for a password to be created and to tell the server where my media files were. The server uses VLC to access and play media files on the host machine. I’m less interested in that functionality. The thing I was interested in is the remote mouse access functionality. Essentially you make the phone touchscreen into a remote touchpad for the server. Sweet.

I turned on wifi on the MyTouch and fired up the Gmote client software. If you’re on the same network the software will go out and find the server on the default port number (8889). If you need to access it across the 3G network you can port forward that port from your router. I’ve already got another PC setup as a DMZ and I’m not doing any other port forwarding. The only downside for the wifi for me is the battery that the wifi radio eats on the phone. Pretty cool little piece of code. Now I can sit in my recliner and control the machine from 10 feet away, which is good, ’cause that’s where I left my Bushmills…

Frakencamera or Camera 2.0

Clay McGovern — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 20:42:35 +0000

Marc Levoy and his graduate students at Stanford are creating an open source camera platform for researchers in digtital photography and computational photography to write code on top of. Proprietary cameras make it difficult or impossible to write custom software to take advantages of new advances in fields like computational photography.

Levoy and his group hope to have their prototype sent to manufacture soon so that they can provide them at cost (hopefully just $1000) for researchers to experiment on. A couple of the ideas they mention are applying high dynamic range tools inside the camera rather than through editing software like Adobe Photoshop, and having a camera take internittent high quality stills while shooting lower resolution video and then combining still frames algorithmically with the video frames in software. Check out this video about their work:

Dan Goldman’s Interactive Video Object Manipulation Project

Clay McGovern — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 14:44:44 +0000

Just ran across some amazing work being done by Dan Goldman, who did his doctoral work at University of Washington and is currently working as a Senior Research Scientist at Adobe in Seattle.

The research is focused on interacting with video and with objects in video and relies on current work in computer vision. The technology allows users to interact in some really amazing ways with video for annotation and motion analysis. The process uses a storyboard metaphor to visualize a short video clip in a static image. The user can manipulate spatial relationships in the storyboard image in a natural way to interact with the video stream. Some details and references are available on the Adobe Technology Labs site. Check out the technology in action in this amazing video clip on Vimeo:

Dan Goldman – Interactive Video Object Manipulation Project

Deep Linking in YouTube Videos

Clay McGovern — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:28:24 +0000

Saw an interesting post on TechCrunch yesterday. YouTube recently rolled out a new feature that is a welcome addition to their toolbox: deep linking to a point inside a video stream. It’s a very easy implementation, as well. All you need to do is add a ‘#’ at the end of the YouTube URL and then reference the time code following the ‘#’ sign. For example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1flVlL4Mf8k#t=0m20s

Very useful!

Microsoft Image Composite Editor

Clay McGovern — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 20:51:40 +0000

Microsoft Research recently released a great little panorama image stitching utility. You can check it out at the Microsoft ICE project site. The utility is a free download.

One of the really nice features of this tool is that it can export to many different image formats. Once exported, one could bring the image into, for example, a video editing package to do pan and zoom effects for video. In addition, there is an export option for Deep Zoom Tileset that creates a series of stitched images and some XML data that allows the image to playback on the web inside of Microsoft’s SliverLight 2 browser plugin. The result is a nice pan and zoom image similar to what one gets with a QuickTime VR movie. You might have seen this in Microsoft’s PhotoSynth tool. And this is all free. Grab the software and have some fun!

I’m hoping to get a couple of experiments up soon, but I’m waiting on a server configuration change for the SilverLight files to run correctly in the browser. I’ll post them when that happens.

Speed, Flash, and Traffic: SIGGRAPH 2008 Wrap-Up

Clay McGovern — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:46:02 +0000

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.

I generally try to go to one or two of the large Production Sessions, where panels that worked on digital effects for Hollywood productions give a behind the scenes look at the technology and techniques that are used to make the latest year’s movies. The technical papers given at SIGGRAPH are directly implemented in these production pipelines with astonishing speed, so this year’s special effect was often last year’s technical paper at SIGGRAPH. This year I attended the session on Speed Racer, which I haven’t yet seen, and, as the panel joked, nearly nobody else in the room had either. The presentation was very interesting, and it was, in fact, one of the only sessions of this type that I walked away from with the thought I might be able to implement something from the presentation myself. There were two cinematic effects in particular that were used in the film that helped to give the movie a more anime-like feel. The production team used QuickTimeVR to create spherical camera movement effects and they used diagonally shifting composited backgrounds with a foreground chroma-keyed subject. Both of these effects worked with the kind of “unrealistic” camera perspectives which give anime productions their essential feel. I’m going to try to implement them the next time I work on editing my example piece for our Digital Storytelling project.

On Thursday I attended a Computer Animation Festival Talk called “Flash Forward: A forum on Flash’s Increasingly Vital Role in Games, Online Entertainment, Art and Academia.” There was a great panel for the talk that included Evan Spiridellis, one of the co-founders of JibJab and Cartoon Network’s Greg Araya who has worked extensively on “Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends.” It was a nice mix of demonstrations of great character animation, web interfaces, and entertainment, as well as an interesting peek into the Flash animation pipeline for major productions. It was really kind of pitiful, though, that nobody from Adobe was anywhere to be found either in the session or on the Exhibition floor.

And finally, on Friday, I attended an extremely interesting class on Transportation Visualization. The instructors for the class were Theresa-Marie Rhyne from North Carolina State University, Michael Manore of AEC Visualization, and Ronald Hughes from North Carolina State University. All three are members of the Transportation Research Board’s Committee on Visualization in Transportation. The instructors were very interested in starting a collaborative dialog with graphics professionals and to express the need for assistance from the SIGGRAPH community. Visualizations have taken the form of 3D models and fly-throughs for construction projects, abstract data visualizations using real-time graphics, and others. The class focused on a series of examples provided by the instructors. As an introduction to the current needs in transportation visualization, the class was very successful. There was a great discussion during the Q&A with a researcher at Carnegie-Mellon who was interested in developing Augmented Reality applications and asked about RFID tagging and available sensor data in current construction and transportation projects. I’ve been interested in data visualization in general for some time, but I will be working on a project next summer with Professor Paul Barron in the Law School (and current Tulane CIO) during which we will be working with approximately 5 years of peer evaluation data from his Negotiation and Mediation Advocacy course. I’m working on implementing Flash/Flex charting and learning Processing (an open source programming language aimed at visual designers). I’m looking forward to having a good time playing around with ways to visualize the data.

Digital Projection, Spatial Augmented Reality, and Shape Grammar – SIGGRAPH 2008

Clay McGovern — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 18:38:40 +0000

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.

On a related topic, I attended a session today by Johannes Behr and Dirk Reiners (who happens to be at University of Louisiana, Lafayette) on virtual and augmented reality applications that transcend the WIMP interface model. WIMP stands for Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pointers, which has dominated computing in recent decades. Again, this is all made possible by the availability inexpensive hardware and extensions made to the X3D standard provided freely by the authors. Having seen the example code in the class today, I think I could implement some simple 3D stereoscopic applications with little difficulty. This would be a perfect fit for the projects the ILC has in mind for our work with Tulane’s Middle American Research Institute which I mentioned in my last blog post.

And finally, for this post at least, yesterday afternoon I attended a fascinating class offered by Mine Ozkar and Sotirios Kotsopoulos called “Visual Thinking Via Shape Grammars”. This was my first formal exposure to the idea of shape grammars, though I have heard the term before. The theory was initially presented by Stiny and Gips in 1972 and includes the idea of shape computation following rules defined in a grammar of shape. The theory has both fascinating explanatory power and useful generative power, depending on the purposes for which it is applied. Kotsopoulos gave many examples from architecture employing the theory both as an explanatory analysis and as a generative tool. I have to say, this class was right up my philosophical alley. Similar enterprises have a long-standing history in philosophy, culminating in Anglo-American analytic philosophies of the middle of the last century, but having expression in the work of Spinoza, Leibniz, and Alfred North Whitehead to name just a few.

SIGGRAPH 2008 in Los Angeles

Clay McGovern — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 03:49:17 +0000

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.

Digital Storytelling at Tulane

Clay McGovern — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 18:52:03 +0000

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.

Early in the workshop, participants formed a story circle and presented their chosen stories to the other participants. The rules of the story circle, though simple, are meant to allow for a safe mechanism for getting feedback from the potential audience for the story. This initial engagement with the story in its performative aspects was invaluable for two reasons. First, it was an opportunity to hear the story as a spoken piece. And, second, and more importantly, it was a way to get feedback from others who are hearing the story. The kinds of suggestions for the most part took the form of statements like, “I like the way you talk about [some person in the narrative] and I wanted to know more about that.”

One of the key result of the story circle, for me at least, was the opportunity to see where it was that I was telling too much and not showing enough. Showing rather than just telling is one of the cornerstones of a good story. And in digital storytelling, one has a great advantage in showing rather than telling because one can select visual components to help achieve this goal. As an example of the editing process, here’s my initial script and the final script after editing based on feedback in the story circle. I’m still very happy with the original script as a written piece, but, without a doubt, the final version is much better as a spoken piece. If you’re interested in more details of the process take a look at the Digital Storytelling Cookbook, a free download on the Center’s website.

On the technical side, we held the workshop in the ILC Hands-on Classroom, where we have recently updated Dell machines running Windows XP. Several of the participants were Mac users and they used their own laptops. On the PC side, we used Sony Vegas Movie Studio to construct the final video files. On the Mac side, some participants used Final Cut Express and at least one used Final Cut Pro. The facilitators are able to tailor the training for either Mac or PC environments. Daniel and Jessica brought along a small audio mixer and a nice microphone. The audio was recorded on a Mac laptop. Of course, the voice recording is perhaps the single most important part of the digital story – bad voice quality will doom the final product more than any other individual constituent part.

This workshop was not meant simply for each of the participants to create a story project of their own, though this was a nice thing in itself. We’d like to take this excellent process and use it to teach other faculty and students in order to enable them to tell their own personal stories. There are obvious applications in our freshman writing curriculum, and this will be one of the places where we pilot this project. But on a larger scale, we’d like to help build up a story archive in conjunction with Tulane’s new focus on community service in the curriculum. As Tulane students go out into the community to aid in the reconstruction of New Orleans and other important volunteer projects, they will each have many stories to tell. And these stories will make a great showcase both for these students and for Tulane as an active participant in the life of New Orleans.

If you’re interested in seeing my story in its finished form, you can find it here:

YouTube

The LucidTouch’s Novel Approach to Multi-touch Interfaces

Clay McGovern — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 22:27:15 +0000

Just read a nice article on New Scientist about work by Microsoft and Mitsubishi on a novel approach to handling the occlusion problem and the “fat finger” problem of current multi-touch interfaces. There’s also a video of a prototype of the LucidTouch device.

The current prototype device uses a camera on a boom focused on the hands on the back of the device. An overlay shadow is superimposed over the image showing the location of the hands without occluding the display. Active finger touch points are shown and a very intuitive method for showing the hand-off of selected items between fingers is also used. It’s a nice glimpse of what’s ahead in the multi-touch arena.