Wayne McPhail

Speaker: Wayne McPhail
Date: Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Topic: Attitudes to Innovation

About Wayne McPhail
Waye McPhail and Dan Zen (our IMM professor) are well acquainted as they used to work together at the Southam Inc.’s InfoLab. Wayne established the InfoLab in 1991 as a groundbreaking research and development studio. He has also produced online content for many major companies such as Bell, AOL Canada, and Sympatico-Lycos where he was the Director of Content. If you’ve noticed a strong trend towards content, that’s because Wayne started out as a journalist at the Hamilton spectator and has been working in both print and online content production for over 20 years.

Wayne’s foray into the online world began even before the interwebs existed. He began to gain interest in the mid 1980s in hypertext documents and found that he could reach a wide audience around the world at very little cost compared to the world of print.

Thinking about the Future
Wayne had a few interesting quotes when discussing his views on imagining the future:

“The future is here. It’s just unevenly distributed” – William Gibson
“We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror” – Marshall McLuhan
“The best way to predict the future, is to invent it” – Alan Kay

Essentially Wayne discussed the bubble that individuals like our IMM student group live in where technology is easy and simple to use. He reminded us that for most people, technology isn’t their world. Personally, I need no reminder of that considering my family background. My grandmother comes from a village that had no running water or electricity and her definitions of a successful person are radically different than what we focus on in a tech driven society. I am proud to say that she recently learned how to use the microwave, somewhat.

Wayne also discussed the need to break away from seeing the future as an extension of the past in order to be innovative. I think this is probably the hardest thing to do as we spend most of our lives being told to stop daydreaming, focus on reality and accept our responsibilities. It seems to be that in order to innovate you almost need to break with reality/society for a bit to pursue your own path.

Think of Zero
Another key idea to keep in mind when imaging the future is to imagine zero – or in essence negligible cost. Wayne demonstrated this idea with the cost of memory. It used to cost $48 in the 1980s for what costs $0.00048 now. If someone told me in the 1980s that was the case, I don’t think I would have believed them. Well, actually I wouldn’t have known what memory was. I think my biggest goal in life in the 80s was if I could afford the large ice cream cone. So let’s say if in the 1990s someone told me that by 2009 I could buy 2GB of memory my jaw would have dropped.

Now think about bandwidth becoming negligible in cost and everyone having an internet connection much like their water or electricity. What kind of content do you think would exist if this was the case? What kind of content would exist if there were no lag time in watching videos online? I would love to be able to just choose what shows I wanted to watch on my personal online TV and never have to subscribe to cable or satellite again. Recently I’ve been buying season’s passes on iTunes but there’s such a limited selection here in Canada that it’s frustrating.

Disruptive Innovation
If online TV replaced regular TV, what would happen? Would it severely disrupt the advertising world and the broadcasting agencies? Disruptive innovation changes what we see as the norm. For example, digital cameras were unheard of but as they began to capture clearer images and become lower in price, they replaced film almost completely. Reading magazines like Popular Mechanics is always interesting with how they predict disruptive technologies. At times the predictions come true and at other times you pick up an old magazine to shake your head at the lack of progress we’ve had.

A recent disruptive innovation that Wayne focused on is the iPhone. The iPhone changed the mobile landscape with its touch screen technology, application store, and better browsing than the Blackberry – the most common smartphone. As iPhone development progresses, Wayne envisions a radically different unit, perhaps one that would help us monitor our health for example.

Batteries, yes batteries, are also due for a disruptive moment. Imagine almost instant recharging batteries or batteries that last for a week or more. We may even see electric cars that can recharge in minutes in the next few years due to “Nanoball” batteries.

Thinking Ahead
As Wayne discussed disruptive technology and novel interfaces, I couldn’t help but think of one of my favourite science-fiction novels “This Alien Shore” by C.S. Friedman. In the novel all individuals are implanted with a computer chip in the ventricles of their brain at birth. This chip then grows and integrates itself into the neural network of the individual giving people the ability to monitor/control their vitals, connect to the internet, and learn by downloading information directly into their brain.

Though I highly doubt we’re anywhere near that level of technology, it brings to mind the massive amount of science fiction that is written, often by individuals who have no grounding in science or engineering, that then serve to inspire those who may be able to bring to life at least some of their imagined work. For example, a lot of science fiction has themes of a paperless society where portable screens and gesture based 3D environments exist. OLED paper – a flexible plastic has been promising to become the paper replacement display might bring to life those sci-fi ideas. Granted, I recall reading one of Dan’s blogs saying that by now it would be a mainstay, but I still haven’t seen one in a store near me.

All this focus on technology also makes me wonder about whether we are innovating for the right reasons, or if we innovate just because it’s something “cool”. As our environment degrades around us and a large portion of the world’s population falls further into dire poverty, I wonder if the amount of money we spend on trivial uses for technology is a good thing. I’m not sure where I stand on the issue as I’ve always loved innovation, but have never known whether to side with the “Let’s fund a research mission to Mars” or the “Let’s use the money to fix our problems in our own country first” camp.

I believe as we continue to innovate, we need to keep in mind the larger issues at hand and look at how what we create will impact society and the environment. Maybe it’s because I come from a biological science background where innovation isn’t always as innocuous as the latest mp3 player, but looking at how what you create fits into the grander scheme of things is something I believe should always be kept in mind. A great book to read, though not computer tech related is David Suzuki’s ” From Naked Ape to Superspecies”. It explores the risks we take by allowing innovation to occur in a vacuum without consideration of the greater world around us.

Jam3Media

Speaker: Adrian Belina Art Director of Jam3Media
Date: Friday March 13, 2009
Topic: Motion Graphics

Jam3Media
Jam3 is a name we hear often when we enter the IMM program. I think Dan is quite proud to point out a company started by IMM students that has become so successful. The company has been recognized in Communication Arts Magazine, won many site of the days, design blogs, and are frequently featured as FITC finalists.

Jam3 has become known for doing challenging Flash work really really well (that’s right, two reallys are necessary). As their reputation grows for mastering these “Flash challenges”, even more challenging work comes their way. I remember at the start of the school year all of us clicking on their site wondering how in the world they managed to create the dynamic block lettering on each page. All you heard was “wow” and for the programmers in the group “I wonder how they coded that”.

Motion
Most of the Jam3 site features really neat animation that doesn’t take forever or “force” the user to sit through painfully long introductions. Adrian’s talk focused on how motion adds to a site: “Cool motion stimulates the user, makes the experience more enjoyable and adds value”. Motion is a part of the design, motion, creative-idea-experience, and development puzzle. Also, unlike the days of Flash past, motion is done through code.

Jam3, not relying on timeline animation use GreenSock products such as TweenLite, TweenMax and TweenFilterLite. Typically they use a chain of delays in TweenMax (or Lite) to create their animations and add some easing to them to make it look a touch more natural and fluid. Given that the GreenSock Tween products offer many more easing options than those that come with AS3, Adrian quickly offered a warning to avoid all but Quint, Expo and Back. He also pointed out never to use a Linear ease unless you’re fading something. Oh, and Bounce and Elastic can be cheesy, so stay away, unless of course you want cheesy.
Other rules of thumb for motion include:

• Build your site from the background colour up
• Have as many things as possible animate in
• It should take roughly five seconds for the complete site to build up from the background colour
• Overlap animations to create a sense of fluidity
• Always animate content in and out, do not cut into a new section during a transition
• Keep everything snappy, don’t make the user wait long
• Animations out should always be quicker than the animation in
• Don’t be lazy, tweak the numbers until you have the perfect flow and succession
• Get creative with text, rollovers and even scrolling
• Don’t be afraid to use sounds to describe things
• Combine After Effects with Flash for custom animations
• Experiment with PaperVision 3D even if you don’t need it

Though most of us understand that animating images is cool, but what about text? Some pointers specific to text:

• Moving is always better than fading, so slide it, zoom it, scale it
• Mask a paragraph in line by line
• Create a text effect that jumbles all the letters in, or brings in the letters in some other creative way

Essentially it’s about the details and out of the box thinking. Stay away from awful presets was also a message Adrian conveyed (Anyone remember SWISH?).

Math
Moving away from the pointers, what are all these easing methods discussed with tweens? Another 3rd party tweening package has an excellent diagram of the path followed by each type of Tween at http://hosted.zeh.com.br/tweener/docs/en-us/misc/transitions.html.  The originator of the tweening equations Robert Penner also offers a chapter from one of his books http://www.robertpenner.com/easing/penner_chapter7_tweening.pdf discussing some of the math behind the tweening equations. Yes, it’s Macromedia MX, but read it for the theory, not for the code. I’m definitely not a math expert, the last time I took Calculus was ten years ago, but tweens really are just all those dreaded equations from class coming back to provide you with a nice natural looking animation.

For those of you who are wondering about the actual equations:
Note that p(t) indicates that position is a function of time.

• Quint – equation for motion is based on the time raised to the fifth power p(t)=t⁵
• Expo – equation for motion is based on exponential growth. Robert Penner bases his on p(t) = 2^10(t-1) but I’m not sure if this is what TweenMax uses.
• Back – this may be utterly wrong, but looking at Penner’s original classes, it seems that back is based on p(t) = t²((s+1)*t-s)) where s is the amplitude of the back effect.

Recommendations
For those of us who suffered through the math section, here are some recommended links from Adrian so that you can lose yourself in cool motion and forget the pesky numbers behind it:

• www.fitsgo.ca  – cool scrolling
• blog.zupko.info – papervision examples and tutorials
• 84.ufc.com – using After Effects and Papervision together for navigation
• Little Mosque on the Prairie Curling Challenge – Excellent example
  of integrating video with motion done by Jam3

Spatial View

Talk Date: February 18 2009

Speaker: James of Spatial View

Topic: Autostereoscopic 3D

When I think of 3D, I think of horror films from the 50s with an audience full of people wearing those red/blue glasses. The glasses are used to view anaglyph images – images in which two color layers (cyan and red), superimposed, but offset with respect to each other produce a stereoscopic depth effect. It seem the 50s really were the heyday of 3D movies, which then declined from popularity due to the difficulty in maintaining the two different prints perfectly synched up while playing on two different projectors. In the 70s, a new technique to emulate 3D was used in which images were shot on a single film strip in an “over-under” technique in which the offset images were printed just above each other in an individual frame. This started filmmakers back onto the 3D track, which then gained resurgence in the 80s in IMAX theaters. Though 3D films aren’t quite the craze they were in the 50s, some are still being made. Just his February, my Bloody Valentine was released in 3D as a remake of the 80s horror flick.

Spatial View takes a different approach to 3D, shifting away from the use of stereoscopy which necessitates the use of glasses, and instead focusing on autostereoscopy. Autostereoscopy relies on the screen itself to create the three dimensional effect desired. There are two methods to accomplishing this – Parallax Barrier and Lenticular.

Parrallax Barrier

A parallax barrier is a layer of material placed on an LCD screen with a series of slits that allows each eye to see a different set of pixels. This creates a sense of 3D through parallax. Unfortunately, there is a loss of brightness and resolution due to the barrier. Though parallax barrier can support multiple viewing angles, there is still a loss of 3D effect if the viewer isn’t viewing the screen from an optimal position.

Lenticular

Lenticular involves a series of lenses overlaid on the screen which magnify pixels in different directions depending on where fall on the lens. This causes each eye to see a separate view. Any number of views can be used, though typically two are used, depending on the dot-pitch of the screen and size of the lens. The technology is the same as is used in lenticular printing – e.g. holographic baseball cards. Unlike the parallax barrier which blocks a certain amount of light, lenticular lenses refract light thereby not losing any brightness in the image. Often lenticular is used with eye tracking to provide a “sweet spot” that follows users.

Spatial view offers a 3DeeFlector for 13.3″ notebooks which uses lenticular technology to allow viewing of 3D content on your very own laptop. They also offer a parallax barrier 19” gaming display monitor for the bargain price of $999 – which makes me wonder how dedicated you must be to video games to shell that out. Interestingly, since games already contain 3D modeling information, drivers that come with the monitor allow gamers to see the games they already own in 3D with up to five views.

When James came in to discuss Spatial View, Matt and I were working on Carnival Craze – a proof of concept iPhone game developed by the Visual Design Institute at Sheridan in partnership with Spatial View. Matt and I were both wondering why the game used up/down/left/right arrows instead of the tilt technology of the iPhone. It seems the lenticular 3DeeShell that sits over your iPhone (approx $50) has a sweet spot that doesn’t respond well to tilting. James let us know they’re working on improving that. In case you’re wondering, their laptop cover uses eye tracking to keep the sweet spot in front of you so it doesn’t suffer from the same drawback.

Not only does Spatial View offer displays and overlays, but they also provide plug ins for tools such as Flash, After Effects, 3D Studio Max, and Maya so that you too can create 3D content. As for those of us who might want to shoot footage in 3D for use on autostereoscopic displays, you’ll either need two cameras mounted side by side to take slightly offset images simultaneously, or a LOREO 3D lens. If you own an iPhone, you can also purchase Spatial View’s 3DeeCamera and start snapping away. Then again, the poor quality of the iPhone camera might dissuade you from trying to take 3D images with it.

Personally, after seeing the 3D music video James brought in I don’t believe I’m too interested in seeing more 3D video. It seemed slightly nauseating and strained my eyes. I prefer seeing my movies in good old 2D, and if I want to see 3D I’ll go outside and interact with the real world. Then again, perhaps they’ll get to a point where 3D imagery becomes as easy to look at as 2D. When that day comes I’ll reconsider my stance.

GestureTek Tour

Speaker: Vincent John Vincent

Topic: GestureTek

It was hot, very very hot.  Placing a bunch of projectors in one room would do that I guess. Vince (Vincent John Vincent) of GestureTek spent around an hour discussing the progress of GestureTek technology to our IMM class as we all fought off the urge to pass out from heat stroke.

Listening to Vince while trying to avoid heatstroke

The story started in 1983 when Vince was studying psychotherapy at the University of Waterloo and working as a doorman at a campus bar that a lot of computer science students attended. After relentlessly quizzing them about computers, Vince ended up working with Francis MacDougall to try to create an alternate reality to use for psychotherapy purposes. Given the technology of the day, Vince and Francis ended up using their technology more for stage effects for Vince’s band.  After awhile of touring,  1986 was the year they co-founded GestureTek. GestureTek technology revolves around live feedback from a camera to the system running a projection to give users real time interaction with the subject matter. Some of the installations use green screens (chroma key) to allow the user to step into the reality on the screen, whereas others use a simpler motion keying method to allow users to see a ghostly image of themselves interacting with the screen.

As computers became more powerful, more of Vince’s original vision for what GestureTek could do was realized.  Recently GestureTek has had much success in the physiotherapy sector with their simulations that allow users to step into a physiotherapy program on the screen. The technology tracks key locations of the person’s body to record metrics of their performance on their physiotherapy routine, allowing therapists to measure progress quantitatively instead of qualitatively.  Personally I found the GestureTek health division to be much more fascinating than the other applications of their technology which centred more around advertisement displays.

We all got to play around with the various installations such as their floor, wall and kiosk displays. Most of these were advertisement based and involved us kicking/throwing around objects on the screen. Their green screen area was quite impressive, allowing the user to step into a cartoon world of gameplay. At one point Vince was even flying through 3D space on a broom in the virtual environment created by the game. It was also interesting to see how well the pointer system worked when Vince was navigating through a typical selection screen using only his finger to point. The setup had two cameras embedded on either side of a frame that would then map his finger point to what appeared on the projector. Holding his finger in one place long enough activated buttons that we would normally click on using a mouse. I was reminded a lot of a guest speaker I had in teacher’s college who had created “magnet lessons” where students would have to create biological processes using magnetized objects on the board. When I asked him why he didn’t create a computer version of his methodology, he became quite agitated and stated that the screen and mouse get in the way of really interacting with the objects. I’m sure that speaker would be happy to see inventions such as GestureTek’s that allow users to immerse themselves into computer generated environments.

The idea of computer generated realities to immerse oneself in isn’t a new idea, but convincing experiences still aren’t quite up to science fiction standards like that of Otherland by Tad Willams.  Science fiction has a long history of realities we can step into using a headset or some sort of plug. The most popularized concept of that being the Matrix movie trilogy with the idea that we are permanently plugged into a very convincing artifical reality. GestureTek’s most convincing immersions I found were the ones in with a green screen was used, allowing the user to at least feel that they were their avatar on the screen.

Another interesting aspect to GestureTek was their use of infrared strips that beam infrared light across surfaces to track user touch. These strips were used both on their interactive wall displays and their multitouch surface table.  Unlike Microsoft Surface which uses an infrared camera situated under their table, GestureTek’s table was much less sensitive to variations in light.

Using the multitouch table

Having experienced both Microsoft Surface and Gesturek’s version of the table, I found GestureTek’s to be much easier and enjoyable to use. It seemed to me that GestureTek’s was much more responsive to touch and unlike Microsoft which supports a maximum of 35 touch points, Vince said that there is no real limit to what their table can handle. Another benefit is that it works directly with Flash instead of having to use Microsoft’s SDK.

With all the touch applications these days, I guess the question isn’t what the pros and cons of each system is, but what direction applications are going. It seems that many industries that involve gesture or touch are focused around advertisement and entertainment. Though much of GestureTek does revolve around those markets, their health division really stands out in proving that such technology isn’t for trivial uses only. I’ve always loved seeing technology being used to improve lives and am happy to see that GestureTek isn’t just about the trivial nature of ad revnue, but also about helping people.

James Eberhardt – Multimedia Pioneering

Speaker: James Eberhardt of Echo Mobile

Topic(s): QR technology, mobile development, iPhone SDK

After an hour of hearing James discuss QR technology, I remain on the fence as to whether QR technology will take off in Canada. Though he’s convinced that within 5 years QR technology will be as prevalent here as it currently is in Japan, I’m not as sure. Japan has embraced QR in marketing and as marketing agencies in North America look for new ways to grab customers, QR codes look like a logical choice at first glance. A QR code on a poster could allow the consumer to navigate immediately to the product’s site. Imagine walking downtown Toronto and seeing that interesting poster of some new item. You might give it a passing glance, but what if you could take a picture of the QR code and have it map out how to get to the nearest store right on your phone? A passing thought of “That looks interesting, I may want to buy that” can be turned into “Here’s the store, come on over, and by the way, here’s a discount for taking the time to stop and look at this display.”

It sounds great, but what about limitations that may get in the way? As
QR codes (a.k.a. 3 D codes) – The holy grail for mobile marketers? discusses, we need to think about mobile constraints. QR codes require a person to approach the image to take a picture, at which point they need to run the image through a reader on their phone to translate it to whatever information was contained within. All this requires proximity, appropriate reader software, and a phone that supports the reader. Imagine trying to huddle up to a poster to take a picture while being jostled in pedestrian traffic and then finding out the shot you took was too blurry to be decoded properly. Also, as James pointed out, until the reader software comes bundled on most phones, very few people would take the time to find the appropriate software for their specific phone and download it.

Speaking of QR readers, we have to consider what functionality they will provide to manage QR content. Let’s say I took 10 different QR snapshots during my day and they all contained various types of information. Will my reader be able to catalogue it all for easy reference? If the QR was a business card, would the reader know to add it into my contact list? Could I add reminders or to dos onto QR content that interested me? From what James discussed, the current readers are a mishmash of abilities and most lie in the realm of just translating the QR into text content. Until QRs can be integrated as something functional instead of just random links collected during the day, I just can’t see myself being interested in using it. I’d more than likely walk by every QR code I saw as it would just require all that much more effort later in the day to sort out what I thought was interesting at the time.

Perhaps if QR codes were used to navigate my environment, I would find it much more useful. Semapedia, for example, links QR with codes with actual geographical sites to allow people at the site to link to information about it. I can’t even begin to list the amount of times I’ve walked by amazing architecture and wondered when it was built, who built it, why it was built, etc. QR in the environment has the potential to create a self guided learning adventure in any area. Perhaps instead of brass plaques we could have brass QR plaques affixed to buildings. In Japan they are even using QR codes for food information and safety. Considering the move towards greater awareness of what we eat, I believe QR would be a welcome addition to grocery stores and fast food outlets in North America as well.

Of course all these neat applications hinge on whether enough phones support the QR technology so that it becomes ubiquitous.  In the end it comes down to the mobile providers. There really is no incentive  at the moment for Rogers or Bell to bundle QR readers with all their phones. Perhaps if a major company decided to push QR readers so that they could incorporate QR into their ad campaigns it may be a technology that takes off sooner rather than later.

From what James said, it seems that much of what happens in the mobile world relates to political decisions between major companies. Though many of us would like to treat our phones like portable mini computers, much of our customization choices are limited to whatever the mobile providers wish to offer. Apple has taken away some of the monopoly around mobile applications with their introduction of the iPhone App Store. With the release of the iPhone SDK for developers, a multitude of applications have appeared in the App Store, giving end user more choice in what they want to do with their mobiles. A caveat for developers is that applications need to be approved by Apple before they can be posted on the App store or installed on an iPhone. Google is attempting to rival Apple with their release of the open source mobile platform called Android on the G1 mobile. [See the comparison between the iPhone and G1].

The release of an open source platform for mobiles makes me curious to see how it will unfold. Will it end up being the “geek” platform to run, or will see users becoming developers as they attempt to customize their phones to suit their needs? Judging from the computer world of the Linux users vs. the rest of the world, I would assume Android might end up going down the Linux path. I hope, however, that this is not the case and that Android really does create a customization trend that pushes the envelope on mobiles being more than just talk and text. With enough pressure by the users, perhaps mobile service providers will drop their rates to the point that we’re all willing to use our phones as objects that help us interact with out surroundings as well as our virtual world.

With the mobile SDK releases by Apple and Google, I suspect that we’ll begin to see mobiles as the next computing arena. As web developers, will we have to traverse down the path of various SDKs just so that we can showcase our work in the mobile world as well?  One would expect that online web and online mobile browsing would be the same, but as we’ve seen this is not quite the case. Even with the iPhone, aka the “hottest” phone on the market, Flash applications are still not supported. Though I’d like to see technology converge and become standardized, I highly doubt this will be the case.

While I wait for the grand new world of phones that help us interact with our world and make life just a tad closer to the sci-fi world I’ve always hoped for, I’ll be sitting here trying to text a message at something faster than 5wpm.

Hello world!

I thought I’d at least keep the title as Hello World is fitting for a course that deals with interactive multimedia. This blog will be a site for my ramblings about multimedia pioneering. As speakers come in to give their talks, you’ll be seeing more of my posts show up.