Paul's Perspective

Immersive Entertainment

A magazine reporter asked me:

> It appears the entertainment
> world took a shining to immersive imaging around 2000-2001, as in Sony's
> experiment with PlayStation and NBC's broadcast of NBA games... why did
> the technology fail to catch in these uses? Was it just too expensive?

My overly-long answer that was not used:

I would guess that it was both too expensive and too difficult.

In production, it would require new expensive complicated multi-lens devices. [It would also obsolete the already-purchased cameras any production company's business plan would have accounted for as a long-term amortization.]

Even worse, I am sure the logistics of filming a scene from multiple angles simultaneously proved to be a nightmare.
Blocking the action and moving one camera with one point of view is tough enough: trying to have multiple things going so that the viewer could pivot the POV while things were happening would be all-but impossible.

And there is the issue of a star's appearance and vanity that is also coming to light now with HD: stars look great... When shot at certain angles with exacting lighting and filters etc -- not when lighting and angles are haphazard.

Distribution would also be difficult: I don't know what the increased storage would be, but it could have been 6-12x or whatever number of lenses were shooting each scene, right? Each would have captured a separate video stream.

On playback, it must have required significant processing power, to either merge the separate videos into what would appear as one continuous environment -- or even if that "merging" was done on the production end, to decode and present that immersive environment on a player would be more taxing than just running a single-POV movie.

And most importantly: I'd bet the end result just was not compelling enough to warrant all those added costs and difficulties.

While I loved that GG Bridge demo I told you about, and would have paid for it, and more for a similar drive through SF, for example -- I would not want to watch a whole movie that way. The point of a movie director is that he directs your attention, after all, in a way to make the most involving, compelling entertainment. If every scene allowed/required me to look all around to maybe catch the important action, it would be like a game, or worse, it would be work, not fun. I might do it once, but not as often as I would just relax and watch a single-POV movie. This is the same argument against interactive TV: people *like* passive entertainment. Many if not most of us don't like video games, at least not often.

And as for the NBA thing -- I always thought that was flat out silly. When you watch just about any sport, you want to look at ONE spot -- where the action is -- follow that ball. Why would you want to pivot your view around? Maybe ONCE pre-game to take in the stadium or something. But how often during game play does someone in the audience look away from the ball to to scan the bleachers?

Geez, I've written a book here and I'm still eating breakfast!

User-video Impacts U.S. election

It certainly sounds like hyperbole to say that YouTube decided the November 7 election and caused the control of Congress to change -- but that might not be all that much of an exaggeration...

While the U.S is almost always portrayed as harshly polarized into 'red' and 'blue' states, the truth is that the country is 'purple:' elections [especially the last two presidential ones] are close calls in most states: the coasts and the South are not Democratic strongholds, nor is everyone in the Midwest or the 'heartland' a staunch Republican.

This near 50/50 mix means that media is more important than ever in swaying middle-ground and undecided voters to cast a ballot one way or the other.

But while TV has long been a major [and expensive] factor in political campaigns, now the power of video is in the hands of just about everyone -- affordably.

This last election was particularly close: but while the long-out-of-power Democrats won a decisive majority in the House of Representatives, the race to control the Senate was too close to call for days after the polls closed.

Finally it came down to the undecided Senate race in Virginia, and the office held by U.S. Sen. George Allen... the man most famous of late for calling a campaign worker for his opponent a "Macaca" -- while that man was video-taping him.
How many people watched the video on YouTube? Nearly 400,000, reports the Boston Herald.
Of course those weren't all Virginians -- but the Senator lost his office to Democrat Jim Webb by about 7,000 votes, out more than 2.3 million ballots. [Webb is a former Republican and Navy secretary under President Reagan, showing again how closely the country is divided...]

The Republicans made use of YouTube as well, of course: the Herald reports that more than 1 million viewers downloaded well-produced clips of Sen. John Kerry's infamous botched "joke."

Another example of the growth of User video is the group-blog company Pajamas Media, which outfitted its contributors covering the election with 8MP Canon PowerShot A630s [$256 on Amazon], using the still camera's video capabilities to capture dozens of clips that were then streamed via YouTube.

We've long promoted the importance of non-professional video captured with ubiquitous camcorders, cameras, and phones -- and now that the capture is coupled with Web-based distribution and access, it is really a paradigm change [pardon the now-trite phrase].
Most recently at our 6Sight conference we hosted the session on "The Global Video Revolution."
The saying "the revolution will be televised" has become a cliché; but in this case web-based video was a prime factor in a "revolution" wherein leadership over the House and Senate shifted from the party in power for 12 years to it opponents.

That such dramatic change is done peacefully is the strength of democracy -- and now video is an even stronger influence on how the voters in that democracy exercise their franchise.
--From my Future Image Weekly Briefing

Democratization of Video: Pre-Revolution

This is a post I first wrote for our company blog at livefrom6sight.com:

The most powerful communication technology -- video -- has not been accessible to most people.

Most people could not easily or affordably capture or express something on video and then share it with a wide audience -- even with affordable camcorders and PC-based digital video editing.

But now, thanks to web-based sharing sites as exemplified by YouTube, that is changing:
Anyone can post a short clip, and thousands if not millions of people may watch it.

In 1999, I was over-enthusiastic about the possibilities of digital video for both production and distribution:
With my friends and family, I started to create my own 12-hour TV serial.

But dreams of being a mini-mogul faded after many months of trying to coordinate everyone’s volunteer time into a production schedule. It was like herding cats.

Also, many of my projections were wildly optimistic: developments I thought were a few years away have yet to arrive.

Nonetheless, it was the most fun I’ve ever had -- and I think most of what I foresaw in 1999 will still come to pass eventually.

After the jump: my still-very-lengthy business summary from the previous millennium, with some names changed to protect the guilty.
[Such as the show’s name is changed to just “the show.”]

PRIVACY -- PAST TENSE

PRIVACY -- PAST TENSE

The ramifications of surveillance and image recognition are quite serious, and bode massive changes in society -- especially when coupled with image capture in ever-smaller devices, greater storage and computational capabilities, and wireless transmission.

A potential future we have long been discussing now appears to be quite possible -- and even probable:
In a few years, most public spaces will be under video surveillance. Within a decade it will just be accepted that if you are not in your private home, then you are on candid camera.

And what is even more important: all that video footage will be transmitted, stored, and analyzed -- and you will be identified.

That means that whatever you do, wherever you are -- will be a matter of record.

The above is a foregone conclusion, I believe: the combination of speeding technological capabilities and security fears all but guarantee it.

The only question is who will have access to this information:

Everyone, or just the government?

I believe it has to be "everyone," because anything less than that will translate, practically speaking, into "only those with power and money" having access.
[Or those with great hacking skills.]

But this will mean that everyone will be able to find out almost everything about the public behavior of anyone else:

Crowd in line at DisneyWorld? Everyone you know will see it.
Get in a bar fight last week [or ever]? Your job interviewer will know.
Where was your spouse last night -- really? Check and see.

WHAT IS PRIVATE?
WHAT IS ANNONYMOUS?
To many people, this sounds like some nightmare scenario -- a complete elimination of "privacy."

But I put the quotes around that word for a reason: the notions we have today of what "privacy" means are not long-held values -- they are very recent developments.

After all, just a few hundred years ago everyone lived in small, close-knit areas from which they rarely traveled -- and so everything anybody did outside their homes was seen -- or at least, possibly discussed -- by almost everyone they knew.

Thus the importance of shame in curbing antisocial behavior in the past -- and the weakness of the social fabric today.
Our ancestors would be unable to comprehend the virtual anonymity we all take for granted now: we can do almost anything with the assurance that [unless, say, we are arrested] no one close to us will ever know our actions.

Many arguments against surveillance that hold "privacy" sacred can come off as merely protesting that one should be able to engage in any activity without embarrassment.
I would agree with that core notion -- but I’d add that it does not require one be able to act without identification, responsibility, admission, or acknowledgement.
Stand up for what you do.
Don’t do what you can’t stand up for.

I don’t want to beat the drum for increased surveillance, government control, and societal restrictions.
But I acknowledge that -- barring some unlikely social upheaval -- increased surveillance is going to happen.
And now is the time to debate and determine what else occurs.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Years back I outlined a screenplay around this idea of what changes will happen in society. The basic plot covers the shift from only the government having access to the omnipresent omniscient surveillance to -- by revolution -- everyone having it.]

The power has gone out

Here's a powerful example of spooky ironic timing:

It's been raining all day. I had not stepped outside except to lean out the front door in the morning to feed the outdoor kitties.*

So at 2:30 I slipped on my slippers, and stepped onto the porch. I stood "outside," nicely dry under the roof overhang, watching the rain come down hard and the wind blow through the pines... for less than a minute, and then I was freezing.

I was wearing only pj bottoms and a t-shirt, after all.

I closed the door behind me, thinking that the outdoor cats had it rough but they were stupid to never rest in the wood planter box in which I laid blankets for them, and that man I was glad my house is nice and warm, and...

And the power shut off.

Jeez -- Talk about failing to knock wood!

*BTW -- Neither indoor nor outdoor cats care for the Alpo beef dinner I tried for the first time. Yes, a big cheap can of dog food. While I expected the ridiculously finicky indoor cats to turn up their noses at it, the outdoor cats had previously inhaled anything I set before them. They ate the Alpo, but only after walking away at first, and glaring at me a long time to ensure that nothing better was coming.

Checking in at CES

The night before I had put everything work-related that I needed all in my bag: voice recorder, note pad, charged cameras, cel phone, print out of meeting locations and hotel info... All set, I thought...

Then I realized I did not know where my press pass was.

I eventually found the email confirming my online registration -- which concluded with the note that they were mailing my hard-copy credentials.

I had no idea where that mail was. It could have been sent to the company's Bay Area office, instead of my home. The office manager had sent me two packages since with forwarded mail, but...

In my office were three piles of paper... and SIX boxes filled with what had been stacks of paper on my desk.

No, I am not organized...

I went through it all three times. And through my file cabinet. And my office drawers. And my luggage. And my briefcase.

Nothing.

Oh well, I was sure I could get re-issue credentials. But I had wasted more than an hour looking...

At the show, I got out of the cab, split the fare with the salesman I'd shared a ride with, and walked into the packed chaos of the South Hall.

A cute girl -- the first of hundreds at this exposition -- tried to hand me a trade magazine, but instead I got directions from her to the press room. Up the packed escalator, through two swarming hallways, and then a security guard asked for my credentials as I entered the press room. That's what I'm after, I told him. An older man pointed me to the proper line, where I found that apparently no one had got their press badge in the mail. Many of us had the same message.

At the counter I handed a woman my email print out with my registration number, and in a few seconds she handed me my credentials. "I wish they were all this easy," she sighed. I turned to the guy next to me to see that yep, he was a troublemaker trying to get the passes for multiple people, even though you have to show picture ID... and the two guys on the other side spoke only a foreign language and were indignant the clerk did not [no, they weren't French; I did not recognize the language].

In the press package was a ticket for a tote bag. Last year we had all received a backpack that had a built-in roller base and extending handle. This year's wasn't quite so cool, but it was a more than decent bag, and quite large. The woman who gave it to me in exchange for the ticket was a short, wide woman with a big smile. "I have to ask if that is really your name." I pointed to her name tag: Killings. She chuckled, and said that it was. "Sometimes I point it out to people when I need to get something done," she laughed.

I asked where the coat check was. As most journalists have tons of computers and supplies and magazines and press kits with them, the huge press room / lounge would have been a swell place for one... but nope, the nearest was in a business center that was all but on the other side of the convention center.

So I entered the swarm, making my way upstream [as most people were heading out from the keynote speech at which Bill Gates was embarrassed when three demos failed...]

It was $2 per item, so I stuffed my clothes bag and my leather jacket into the new press tote bag. I gave the guy $3, and he was apparently unprepared for the tip as he pointed out the price to me again.

So, I was finally checked in and unencumbered... and ready for the show.

CES - The show floor

I exited the business center coat check, turned a corner --and was in the Intel booth. Across from it was the Microsoft section.

Together they were half the hall. Admittedly it was one of the smaller halls, but...

I really did not see anything new in their sections. Just version ten of last year's version 9, that kind of thing. Microsoft was pushing portable Windows media players, Tablet PCs, Media Centers, and more, including an oven that was controlled through windows... [Okay, in Microsoft's defense it was one of the smaller companies at the third party booths in Microsoft's section.]

A guy from Alias gave me a demo of the Sketch drawing application for the Tablet PC. I want a Tablet PC -- and now I want Sketch as well.

Then the woman at Microsoft's own Tablet PC area started to also demonstrate Sketch -- or so I thought. Instead it was a free program that had a near-identical interface -- but which also offered paint simulation, which Sketch did not.

In the Intel booth it was a lot of "All media is digital and will be routed to you wherever you are -- and PCs are the most flexible tool to work with all this." It was interesting how often an Intel sales pitch made note of the Linux tools available, as if the company were sticking its tongue out at Microsoft across the narrow isle...

Coming out of the Microsoft booth -- I got lost. I would like to think I have a good sense of direction and orientation, but...

Snow in Vegas!

Thursday was a clear and sunny day.

The coolest thing I saw -- in a money-to-burn-for-attention kind of way -- was Motorola's outdoor snow-covered mountain. It was one of those big slides, four stories tall or so, but with a jump added three-fourths of the way down, and a couple of snow-machines blowing snow up and down the run. Snowboarders careened down the slide, and did trick jumps off the ramp.

At least, I assume they did... while I stood and ate a sandwich, they also stood around.

Friday morning it was raining - and the snow run was unmanned.

Two hours later it was snowing!

But I don't think the snow boarders came back out for another show...

My main CES observations

I have now been going to CES for about 15 years. No, I haven't had to go every year, thank God... but enough to make some generalizations.

At previous years the show was a smorgasbord of weird and wacky items. Each hall, each section, offered a bevy of strange new products in categories I had not heard of, let alone had to cover.

This year, convergence has taken hold -- and that means most products have a lot of overlap with others. Phones are cameras. Cameras are WiFi displays. Picture displays are video players. And everything plays MP3s.

This also means that all the big companies are making these products. There simply is not an untapped niche to exploit, no technology with which a small or start-up company can get its feet in the door. If someone does come up with a new spin, it will get quickly engulfed within the arm's length feature list of these digital convergence devices.

Mostly obviously there are far too many companies making far too many only-slightly-differing big screens.

Samsung's booth in itself showed why the field is too crowded -- and why you should hold off buying for at least a few years. The company's bragging point was its 102-inch display, the world's largest -- this month. But it also showed a wide variety of big flat screens, LCDs and plasmas, projectors, and more. And around the corner from all of this month's models it showed a new-fangled screen with a much higher resolution and some other bells and whistles -- and a nice little chart showed why it was so much better and wave-of-the-future than anything else out now. So why buy anything today?

Across the aisle from Samsung was a very large booth [okay, about a tenth the size of Samsung's, but still bigger than my house -- hardly a "booth"] from a company I'd never heard of before, What were they showing? Lots of big screen TVs. I wanted to grab the CEO and demand to know what drugs he was taking. Can he not see Samsung? Does he think he can undercut the price of one of the world's most profitable companies? One with its own factories? Does he think he can out-innovate a conglomerate with a huge R&D budget? Out market a company with some of the most ubiquitous [and snazzy] advertising? I just don't get it.

Speaking of blind optimism, I stopped to talk with a very cute young woman about the many cameras at her company's [reasonably sized] booth. There were a lot of 3MP/3x optical zoom units -- commodities. Did they make anything distinctive? No. Were they a manufacturer that could undercut current market pricing? They were looking for distributors, she answered, seeming to indicate yes. But actually it was no -- they were simply another wanna-be brand buying surplus from Taiwanese manufacturers, and this company thought it could step in and be another middleman. They apparently don't know there is no middle to be had. In this low-spec range of commodity product, the manufacturers are selling each unit at a loss to companies like HP -- and doing so both to keep their assembly lines running, and to keep clients happy for bigger budget products.

My other main observation is that each product I saw narrowly misses being a must-buy item -- in fact many new products were placed side-by-side with another product that showed just why you should not buy either model today. The best example I saw of this was, again, at the Samsung booth. They had a very snazzy camcorder, incredibly teeny yet comfortable to grip and use, with an impressive 10x optical zoom lens. Like all new camcorders, it could also capture stills -- but this new camcorder could only take video-resolution stills, which means not even one megapixel. That was true of digital camcorders five years ago! This year many camcorders take 3MP or greater resolution still photos.

And what was the nearby product that proved just how silly video-resolution still capture was in any product? Why, the next unit over was a mobile phone that captured FIVE megapixel stills! If a PHONE can take 5MP photos, there is no excuse for a digital camcorder to take VGA resolution pictures...

[That's all I can say about cameras, as covering photography is my actual job. My boss paid for my trip to CES, and I have to do my camera coverage for our company publications... But I will say Kodak had the coolest products at the show -- and in all my years at high-tech journalism, that is the first time I have ever typed those words!]

...but these Samsung cameras [phone and camcorder] merely exemplify the bigger trend I noted above: almost every product was just not ready for prime time. I held up one fancy gadget after another -- and with each I said to myself that yeah, if money was no object I would enjoy buying this -- but money is an object, and I can tell how this thousand dollar device will disappoint me within days, as its shortcomings are obvious.

The high tech consumer electronics business is overreaching itself right now, coming out with a flood of products none of which deliver everything they promise.

Heater if needed

The rain has slowed a bit. Of course, as I went out to the storeroom to get the propane heater the downpour was torrential...

Mr. Heater Buddy -- who named this thing? Who calls their buddies "Mister?"

I haven't used this heater in years.

And, well, propane scares me.

It has ever since I was 8 and a propane sales woman told my dad and me about the explosion that killed her husband.

She spoke of propane like it was a devil, an insidious gas that flows downhill and that would find an open flame or spark no matter how well guarded.. and yet she continued to sell propane and propane accessories, as my buddy Mr. Hank Hill would say.

Fortunately the heater directions are printed on the back. I turned the dial, clicked on the pilot lighter... Nothing. Tried again. Nothing.,

The propane tank was empty.

Thankfully, I had a spare, and had even brought it with me out of the store room, so I did not have to bundle up and get wet again.

I put the new tank in, and reread the directions and saw I had done it wrong previously... I was supposed to hold the gas on for 30 seconds. This time it worked. The pilot lit. I held the gas on for another 30 seconds as instructed, and then turned it to high. Heat! I wouldn't freeze tonight!

Of course this thing is designed for outdoor use only... But that is because of venting issues.. meaning you can't leave it running as it will burn through your oxygen. But if the house gets freezing, I can turn it on for five minutes or so to take the bite out of the air without suffocating.

I am glad I put in all that new insulation this summer...