What's Next?

The topic of our most recent talk from Wayne McPhail was the future. Wayne is indirectly responsible for getting Dan Zen interested in Interactive Multimedia. He has been involved in online since the late 80’s and he started as a journalist at the Hamilton Spectator. He became interested in hypertextual documents – a way for people to share information easily and it became a way to share “great stories in new ways." So basically, he and the internet go WAAAAAY back. He shared some interesting quotes with us as well, such as:

“The future is here. It’s just unevenly distributed” – William Gibson

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it” – Alan Key

Wayne stressed that we are living in a bubble – everything around is inside this bubble, but not all of the new ideas and technology are in their world. He showed us a trailer from Bladerunner to illustrate the idea that people understand technology at different rates and the learning is not blanketed across everyone. I especially liked when he talked about the difference in storage space from a decade ago to now. It's crazy to think that in the future we will have even more memory and even smaller devices to store it on. I hope I don't get left behind when all of the new technology emerges, but instead stay current. That's one of the things I like about this industry is that you have to be constantly learning.

Another point that he stressed is that we’re moving to a space where interface is multimodal. We’re not just dealing with mouse and keyboards. Most of what we are dealing with is going to be touch based. This was especially interesting since our client project dealt with gestures and touch based applications. Seems the future of the Minority Report isn't too distant after all. He left us with a final quote:

"Winners are going to innovate – think about new ways to create interfaces."

Let's talk about tweens...

On a misty morning in March, we had a visit from Adrian, who works for Jam3Media in Toronto. He had a great presentation for us about making things look good and always pushing to make everything cooler. I have a hard time doing this sometimes since "cool" is such a hard concept to convey. I know it when I see it, know it when I don't - but making it cool is a whole other bag of potatoes.

He talked a lot about ways to make design more effective and interesting, especially flash based work. I hadn't really considered how awesome tweening could be. I mean I know that it certainly looks cool (see there's that word again), but I hadn't really thought about tweening every single element. On the other hand, any excuse to use TweenMax more is fine by me. He even talked about different tweens that he thought worked better than others. For example:

Cool Tweens = Quint, Expo and Back
Cheesy Tweens = Bounce and Elastic
Tweens that should NEVER be used = Linear



He also showed us some examples of sites that he was impressed by and we oohed and awed like dutiful students. They were, without a doubt, very cool. On example was the UFC site done by Red Interactive. Sites that are done this well really blow my mind and make me try that much harder to try and execute amazing design.

Overall it was a really great talk and I think all of the class really appreciated Adrian coming in.

Spatial View shows up in 3D

Today was all about 3D - James from Spatial View came to talk to the IMM class about new innovations. He started his talk by discussing different ways that people view 3D.

Stereoscopy
These are the Anaglyph (red/green, red/cyan) glasses, and the issues with these glasses are that you can’t get good colour/contrast, but they provide you with good depth perception.

Polarized glasses are the type that are the most popular form found in theatres and they allow for full colour, high quality images, but doesn’t translate to home viewing.

Cross-eyed view is another way to view in 3D - similar to those Magic Eye books and posters they used to have.

Below is an image of an old fashioned stereograph.


Autostereoscopy
This method uses different techniques to achieve 3D without using glasses. It's pretty cool, he made us sit down in front of his laptop and we were shown a video in 3D, but we didn't have to put on the dorky glasses. However, I found that it gave me a bit of a headache, so I can't imagine watching for more than a few minutes. The Parallax Barrier works by taking advantage of the parallax caused by they barrier being in front of LCD screen. Each eye see the screen at slightly different angle which causes the 3D effect. Parallax barriers allow for more than two views to be seen allowing multiple viewing angles - for example I was able to see the 3D effect when I was standing off to the side as well, but it was in black and white.

Lenticular Displays
Lenticular displays operate on the same principles as lenticular printing
Pixels are magnified in different directions depending on where they fall on the lens, so each eye sees a different view. Any number of views can be used, depending on the dot-pitch of the screen and size of the lens. This display offers better brightness than barrier because light is not being blocked it is being refracted and is often used with eye tracking to provide a sweet spot that follows the viewer.

Gesturing at GestureTek

Last Friday we trekked down to Toronto to visit GestureTek, the "pioneer, patent-holder and world-leader in camera-enabled gesture-recognition technology for presentation and entertainment systems." Vincent John Vincent took us on a tour of their many creations and told us a bit about the history of the GestureTek company.

Way back in the stone age of 1986, when I was still playing with Western Barbie and My Little Pony, Vincent was developing a breakthrough in computer-human interaction. Using an old school Commodore 64, they were able to come up with a rough system, but eventually switched over to Windows and have been having success with the Windows OS since. Over the years they have expanded their patent and have developed all sorts of gesture controlled goodies. Some are geared to be educational, others are helping people in their lives and some are just plain fun.



The photograph shows us listening to Vincent as he demonstrates the AirPoint, which allows you to point at the screen and use your hand as a mouse. It's really neat and allows a level of human-computer interaction unencumbered by remotes or pointers.

Another really interesting invention that they have created is the Immersive Virtual Gaming, which allows users to stand in front of a green screen and see themselves in an interactive video game. I was a bit sad that I didn't get to try this one out, but it was cool to watch regardless.




One thing that I hadn't realized the GestureTek technology could be applied to was physiotherapy. Apparently the units are extremely popular and helpful in the rehabilitation of patients. I was extremely pleased to hear this because I was racking my brain trying to think of additional real-world applications of the technology and this was one that I hadn't considered. To think that their technology is tuned enough to track every single movement you make and calculate how well you complete the movement is really mind-boggling. The reason I find it really neat is because I have a Wii fit and sometimes I wonder if I'm doing the movement correctly because it only registers your balance.

There is already tons of media attention surrounding GestureTek and their achievements and as they continue to grow, I'm sure they will push the limits of this technology to explore new creative and groundbreaking avenues.

"The key idea is the immediate interaction with the information"

James Eberhardt visited our Multimedia Pioneering class today and talked about his experience with QR codes and iPhone applications. He does a lot of Flash programming and teaches an introduction to New Media at Ryerson as well as an independent course. Additionally he was a speaker for Flash in the Can and is involved in FlashinTo. Let's just say that he's been getting up to some interesting things over the years.

What are QR codes?
Now, I didn't really know a whole heck of a lot about QR codes before we discussed them last class, but I now have a definite handle on them. Basically a QR code is a 2-D barcode that goes in two directions - instead of the one direction of a traditional barcode. QR codes can also hold significantly more information than barcodes, such as ASCII characters or binary data.

There are several different ways to create them, such as Kaywa's site (they also have a reader that they sell), but they all work through the camera or scanner recognizing the code and then decoding it and providing information. For example, if you see a poster and it has a QR code, just scan (or snap) it and it will direct you to the URL or provide some other form of immediate feedback.

So why do QR Codes matter?
In Japan QR codes are being put on every printed piece of advertising these days, because they allow people to retrieve information instantly, which is especially helpful for things such as URLs, because there is no typing required. Yet, Canadian cellular phone companies are reluctant to spend more money to get QR readers on phones, because there currently isn't a large enough demand and thus, they aren’t willing to invest. However, James thinks that QR codes will be widespread in Canada in the next five years due to data rates dropping.

James really emphasized that "The key idea is the immediate interaction with the information." In short, just because QR codes are used at the moment doesn't mean mobile technology will stay this way, but rather it is the ability to easily access information that is valuable. He even used the example of an elephant as a way of demonstrating that "hey, if this giant herbivore did the best job, then that's what I would be using."

Unlike some past technologies, I like the idea that mobile technology really adds a real world experience. I love the idea of walking around, seeing a poster about an event and scanning it to save for later. Some people might not be interested and likely would forget about the link, but for me it adds a whole new dimension to online bookmarking sites (which I love). It's almost like the whole world is your inspiration scrapbook that you can draw from later.

On to iPhone Application
Ahhh.... the iPhone. People have some pretty strong opinions about the iPhone, so I think everyone was waiting for this portion of the presentation with bated breath. The application development is a pretty cool subject and it makes me wish that I actually owned an iPhone, so I could download apps and try them out. Guess I'll have to settle for talking about them. So, James doesn’t actually know when Flash might be introduced to the iPhone because there is the usual corporate hub-bub to go through. Who is going to make money from this? Apple or Adobe? It always comes down to who’s giving who money. It remains to be seen whether it will happen at all, but it seems pretty likely.

That's all folks
I appreciated James's presentation for the information that he provided about emerging technology in mobile; he really knew his stuff and it was great to hear from someone in the industry. Who knows what the future holds and everything could change depending on what people develop and how the trends shift. I appreciate the human element trend in these mobile devices - here's hoping it sticks around. For more information on the Canadian Mobile Industry, check out http://wirelessnorth.ca.

Why Rodeo?

Well I was originally going to go with the classic Anne's IMM Pioneering Blog. Just as I was congratulating myself on my ingenuity Dan (our teacher) pointed out that our blog name should be something more interesting than ______'s Multimedia Blog. So I branched out with the pioneer idea and just kept going west.

And really, what's more western than rodeos? Prairies? Do prairies have cowboys? If you said yes, you'd be wrong. Prairies are all about the farmers. Rodeos on the other hand are all about the jingling spurs, dirty chaps and dusty stetsons. Just listen to Garth Brook's Rodeo and you've got the idea. Cowboys take risks (ever seen a bullrider?) and that's what an interactive multimedia pioneer is supposed to do.

That explains the rodeo part, but what about the Multimedia part? That's actually going to be the focus of this blog.