July 30, 2003
GPS camera
Finally, a camera that knows where it is. Ricoh recently released the Caplio Pro G3 (Japanese info here) in Japan with an optional GPS card.
July 29, 2003
July 28, 2003
Stereoscopy Leads Seabiscuit by a Neck
One of the most hyped films of the year, Vivendi Universal's (V: news, chart, profile) "Seabiscuit," came in fifth place, and the surprise winner was Miramax/Dimension's "Spy Kids 3D: Game Over," the lowest-budgeted film among the top 10 releases.
July 25, 2003
Mobile Capturing Today
A small group of us are meeting at MOCA at 1pm today to run around downtown with cameras and GPS units to capture content for the Mobile Media project this summer. This is our first try, so we have no idea what we are going to do or how. USC IM members, friends, etc. are invited. If you have your own camera and/or GPS unit, please bring it.
July 22, 2003
Location Markup Language
As the Mobile Media project moves forward, mark-up languages for location-based information are important for us to study. Below is an excerpt and some links of interest.
Currently, there is no standard, comprehensive and functional markup language (XML specification, ie XMLSchema or DTD) that can express and encode the full gamut of data generated by GPS devices. The Geography Markup Language (OpenGIS) specification is more appropriate to mapping applications, describing geographic "features" rather than location information.. The Navigation Markup Language specification (from W3C) has not been updated since mid-1999 and is woefully incomplete as regards GPS-generated location data. There is a Simple Waypoint Markup Language (from Iseran) but it only deals with waypoints and has not been updated for a year. Finally, there is GPX (from a Yahoo Group GPSXML) that can encode waypoints, routes and tracks, but does not take into account the encoding of real-time position (and other) GPS information, and has other design issues. Chaeron is actively involved in the specification and development of a comprehensive XMLSchema GPS/Location markup language (GPSml) to address this evolving requirement.
Chaeron's GPSml (and source of the above excerpt)
Geographic Markup Language
W3C Reference on POIX
W3C Reference on Navigation Markup Language
Simple Waypoint Markup Language
GPX
OpenGIS
W3C
July 21, 2003
Electronic ID Tags Network
I thought this would be of interest to Scott and Kurt. It's about "Wheels of Zeus", a new company whose technology, WozNet, can be described as:
"... a simple and inexpensive wireless network that uses radio
signals and global positioning satellite data to keep track
of a cluster of inexpensive tags within a one- or two-mile
radius of each base station. WozNet, he said, will include
a home-base station that has the ability to track the
location of dozens or even hundreds of small wireless
devices that can be attached to people, pets or property.
The tags - expected to cost less than $25 each to produce -
will be able to generate alerts, notifying the owner by
phone or e-mail message when a child arrives at school, a
dog leaves the yard or a car leaves the parking lot.
'We started out with the idea of a product to keep track of
stuff,' said Mr. Wozniak, the 52-year-old engineer who was
the technical brains behind the first Apple computer in
1976. 'We ended up inventing a new class of wireless
network.'
There may be other potential applications for the low-speed
data system, like text messaging, Mr. Wozniak said, as well
as other uses that he declined to describe..."
Full NYTimes article here:
Apple Co-Founder Creates Electronic ID Tags
July 15, 2003
Microcontent for mobile phones
We've been using a free app for moible phones in Japan called nooper that delivers microcontent to your phone. Things like reminders that you set up (take out the trash!), rain alert for specific areas, and website update notifications. Pretty simple but very useful.
R.I.P. Netscape
It was only a matter of time after the MS/AOL settlement, but it looks like as of today, Netscape is dead.
With the newly launched Mozilla Foundation, however, it looks like Mozilla is in good hands.
Office 2003 / XML
With Office 2003, Microsoft’s strategic direction for the suite has changed. Microsoft has moved away from adding “kitchen sink” features to Office and instead is focusing on connecting Office 2003 to other forms of data and applications through support of the XML format, Ken Smiley, director at Forrester Research, told NewsFactor. The upgrade is the first incremental step in turning Office from a set of individual desktop applications to a portal for Web services within the enterprise, Smiley said.
Office 2003 will enable enterprises to take data from backend systems and instead of trying to access it through a browser bring it directly into applications such as Word and Excel, manipulate that data, and save it in a format understandable to the backend system. “The XML data source will reside on the backend server and be subject to Web services calls,” Smiley said.
Latest SGI Products / Pre Siggraph Announcements
Desktop:
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (July 14, 2003)-SGI (NYSE: SGI) today extended its workstation line with the new Silicon Graphics® TezroTM visual workstation, a powerhouse system that sets a new bar for desktop performance and reliability. TezroTM delivers leading-edge visualization, multiprocessing, and digital media to technical and creative users and is designed to help individuals and teams deliver cutting-edge results in ever-shorter production cycles.
Mountaintop:
The Onyx4 UltimateVision system raises the bar in visualization by delivering:
A system architecture that, in a single system configuration, scales from two to 32 graphics processors, or pipelines-more than twice the scalability over previous Onyx systems and 16 times over the nearest system competitor
Eight times the system performance of an Onyx® InfiniteReality®
Up to 80 times the pipe bandwidth over competing cluster solutions
Price points and configurations tailored to empower individuals, transform team productivity and scale to tackle the most extreme visualization challenges
Location Linked Information Project
Location-based project by Matt Mankins at MIT Medialb:
Location Linked Information (LLI) is a project that attempts to merge virtual spaces and communities, such as those that reside on the Internet and in traditional databases, with the physical world, the world of atoms.LLI uses geography, measured in degrees latitude and longitude as the primary key linking the two realms.
LLI is similar to augmented reality systems which overlay digital information on top of the physical world. Whereas augmented reality systems typically concentrate on solving the user interface problem, LLI attempts to solve the data access and search infrastructure issues. In LLI users navigate the physical world with a variety of XML-speaking devices, discovering and leaving "handles" to information nuggets.
A distributed network of databases manage the information nugget pointers which are URLs to actual information. Information nuggets themselves are position/time/url tuples that lead the viewer to further sources of data.People use client devices to peer into the virtual world around them. Client devices can come in many different form factors and be specialized for finding particular types of information.
LLI clients integrate position sensing (currently with GPS), Internet access (GPRS/CDPD), and a browser user interface.
The LLI system uses the Jabber protocol to tie togeter devices across the earth. Clients communicate with trusted "home servers" via Jabber encoded XML Streams. Relaying through a home server (such as is done currently with email) provides users with a more anonymous location browsing environment.
LLI clients search for information via the Jabber asyncronous discovery protocol, which relays search requests to other servers across the Internet.
In LLI, the world has been divided up into latitude/longitude based cells. Location-keyed data nuggets are then published to individual cells.
Applications that can take advantage of this system include both those that wish to permanently tag an area (static nuggets), as well as dynamic object presences (dynamic nuggets). Dynamic systems could be used for vehicle tracking (air,car,boat,etc.), friend tracking, or on anything else that moves. :)
July 12, 2003
Justin Hall on mobile games
WGR Article: E3 2003 Nuggets, Baby
A massively multiplayer online game would seem a natural extension of mobile phones' capabilities; the devices are already networked and always online. Maybe you don't want to stare at a 3D person wandering around a postage stamp, but there are ways to set up resource trading and social groupings for play with friends and strangers. This happened with WAP games like Atomic Dove. It's sure to happen with Java or BREW games too
July 11, 2003
IEEE Spectrum Article on Cellphone Locator Technology
The cover story of the July issue of IEEE spectrum is about "Cellphone Locator Technology Might Save Your Life In An Emergency - But Will It Cost You Your Privacy". Scott's hardcopy is on Jen's desk, while the link below contains the entire article.
It provides a description of technologies (GSM and TDMA typically use Uplink Time Difference of Arrival; CDMA uses Assisted GPS which sends 'hints' to the mobile phone via the network which the phone uses, with its onboard GPS), issues regarding implementation; example applications; new technologies (coin-sized transceivers accurate to within a centimeter at a distance of 1km (or so it says); and so forth.
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/jul03/e911.html
My Mobile Narrator is *not* my Mobile Phone
After experiencing the very preliminary demo of our Mobile Narritive Phone yesterday, I was struck by the contrast between my positive feelings for the Nokia-Phone-As-Text-Narrator (nice sharp screen with just enough text/story about the topic and fits nice in the hand and is lightweight and yeah, I would carry this around to read its stories) and my prior hatred of the Nokia-Phone-As-Phone (stupid keyboard layout with bad tactile feel, cheesy cheap housing and uncomfortable to hold to the ear). It reminded me of some other work:
"Nass' and Reeves' work considers to what extent people react to technology as if it were more real than it is," Perry said. "They have found that to a very considerable extent people treat their computers and other computer-driven technology in the same ways that they treat people - as if the computer possessed reason, feelings, etc. People also treat pictures on screens as real objects, rather than as representations of real objects. This is relevant to anyone who wants to design technology or content that is as effective as it can be," Perry said.
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/95/950106Arc5423.html
While seemingly elusive, seduction can be achieved through the careful integrations of functionality and visual design to create products that go beyond a user's expectations for the task at hand...Seductive experiences are often multisensory and use broad, rich, sensory media.
http://captology.stanford.edu/Key_Concepts/Papers/CACMseduction.pdf
July 10, 2003
cell appliances or bridges?
I want my mom to be able to do simple text messaging but with a full sized keyboard and screen. If someone built a special 'cellphone appliance' as opposed to 'internet appliance' this would be possible. Has anyone read about devices other than cellphones and pdas which directly use the cell phone network, or act as bridges? For example a cellphone to X10 bridge would allow a 'cellphone' remote control to be built. Or, a cell-to-900mHz bridge would allow 900mHz wireless phones in the house to place calls over the cell network. Of course a cell to 802.11b or cell to ethernet bridge would be useful. (I know I am mixing cell/voice applications with cell/data and there is no need to reply with ways to build the SMS system for my mom, it is just an example.)
GBA game with sun sensor
There's a new Game Boy Advance cart out in Japan that has an on-board light sensor. The main character uses a "sun gun" that the user has to charge up by actually going outside to collect sunlight...cool.
More info here.
Mobile News
Check out this Wired News article from today.
This U.K.-based project is using Hypertags to beam information to a mobile phone, but the idea is similar to our Mobile Media Project.
For example, it could be used in museums and galleries, where visitors could download high-quality audio and visual content about exhibits. Tourists could retrieve sightseeing information as they walk through a city. Users could even leave contact details like their e-mail addresses to receive updates on events, exhibitions or special offers.
OSCON 2003
The O'Reilly Open Source Conference (Grid) is going on right now in San Diego. I'm not there this year, but there are a bunch of interesting uses of technologies to help people follow along:
- OSCON 2003 TrackBack
- Semi-Un-Official OSCON 2003 Wiki (blog)
- OSCON 2003 Community Coverage (fed by a chump bot)
Just imagine cool stuff that's going to be happening with the next generation of distributed notification/aggregation/discussion tools.
July 09, 2003
Viral Communications Program at Medialab
The communication industry is in an upheaval equivalent to that caused by the advent of personal computers in the early 1980's. In that earlier revolution, traditional giants who held to mainframe technologies and centralized services were outpaced by newcomers with new ideas about individual ownership, incremental adoption and instant turnover. This will now happen with communications.
July 08, 2003
Mobile Flash
Just spent a few days with Pete Barr-Watson, here in Tokyo for the Moblogging Conference. He's a FLASH master and had a lot to say about Flash on mobile devices - a lot of it posted on his blog here.
July 07, 2003
Interactive Cinema at MLE
Interesting "interactive cinema" project by Michael Lew at Media Lab Europe (will be shown at SIGGRAPH'03.) Similar projects in their Story Networks Reseach Group:
Office Voodoo is an interactive film installation for two people. It tells the story of Frank and Nancy, two bored Irish officemates, condemned to spend their lives in an office. This infinite film is an algorithmic sitcom inspired from Sartre's play "Huis clos", crossbred with an office life simulator.
Two physical voodoo dolls, that represent the protagonists, can be manipulated in order to change the emotions of the characters in the film. It is a social laboratory where the viewers can experiment on the influence of emotions as initial conditions in any social interaction. As viewers get skilled manipulating the dolls, they can control the emotions of Frank and Nancy, and see what happens when : Frank is cranky and Nancy is hyperactive ? Frank is horny and Nancy is depressed ?
The interactive film is made exclusively of real lens-based footage shot with real actors, but it runs on a real-time editing engine that fluidly assembles the film shot by shot as one watches it, while respecting the conventions of continuity editing.
The installation is built as a little immersive wooden house for two people - a cross between a confessional, an arcade game booth and a kinetoscope parlour.
"Theater That Uses the City as a Stage"
Upcoming site specific performance piece in NYC reported in the NY Times(thanks peggy):
From the top of One Times Square, where the ball drops on New Year's Eve, to the Chrysler Building to the Roosevelt Island tramway, Deborah Warner had scouted locations since October. The search was not for a film but for an environment in which to place a site-specific performance installation called "The Angel Project." That project, which Ms. Warner regards, quite simply, as "a walk," is the theatrical feature of Lincoln Center Festival 2003, which starts next week.
While the Kirov Opera is filling the Metropolitan Opera during the festival, theatergoers taking part in "The Angel Project" will be led one by one at five-minute intervals through an individualized journey to nine locations, many in the area of 42nd Street. The walk is scheduled to begin on Roosevelt Island, where people will be given a guidebook to follow as if on a kind of theatrical treasure hunt.
Everyone goes on the same journey, but, Ms. Warner said, each person "will see something entirely different by virtue of the canvas being so huge." The audience will help to define the experience. It is, she said, "like inviting somebody in, giving them a key to a house and leaving them to it."
July 3, 2003
Theater That Uses the City as a Stage
By MEL GUSSOW
From the top of One Times Square, where the ball drops on New Year's Eve, to the Chrysler Building to the Roosevelt Island tramway, Deborah Warner had scouted locations since October. The search was not for a film but for an environment in which to place a site-specific performance installation called "The Angel Project." That project, which Ms. Warner regards, quite simply, as "a walk," is the theatrical feature of Lincoln Center Festival 2003, which starts next week.
While the Kirov Opera is filling the Metropolitan Opera during the festival, theatergoers taking part in "The Angel Project" will be led one by one at five-minute intervals through an individualized journey to nine locations, many in the area of 42nd Street. The walk is scheduled to begin on Roosevelt Island, where people will be given a guidebook to follow as if on a kind of theatrical treasure hunt.
Everyone goes on the same journey, but, Ms. Warner said, each person "will see something entirely different by virtue of the canvas being so huge." The audience will help to define the experience. It is, she said, "like inviting somebody in, giving them a key to a house and leaving them to it."
Strange and often startling things will happen at the various locations, as rooms in the buildings chosen are animated and become the equivalent of interactive museum installations.
Because ticket holders will move at their own pace — the trip should take from two to three hours — there may be some unintentional overlapping among visitors. The size of the audience will be limited. Despite the fact that the project will run for the entire festival, from Tuesday to July 27, on most days from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., only 2,350 tickets will be sold — at $90 apiece. A limited number of student discount tickets will be available at $20.
Ms. Warner, best known in New York for her productions of "The Waste Land" and "Medea" (both starring Fiona Shaw), has directed plays and operas on the widest diversity of international stages.
Her work ranges from one-person shows like "The Waste Land" to a spectacular "Coriolanus" 10 years ago at the Salzburg Festival in Austria, with 50 actors, 250 extras and 15 horses. These productions and others have led to Ms. Warner's ranking as one of Britain's most innovative directors.
Those previous ventures dwindle logistically next to "The Angel Project," which will have to allow for New York's multiplicity and traffic, human and motorized. Theatergoers will proceed by foot and by subway to the sites. Some 40 performers, most of them nonprofessionals (many pretending to be angels), will work in two shifts along with 20 production assistants to create the project.
A version three years ago, at the Perth International Arts Festival in Australia, sprawled through 13 buildings. It has been a far greater challenge for Ms. Warner to choose locations in New York and to persuade people to open their buildings to her world of theater. As she edged toward the preview performance next Monday, she said: "I can't think of a more difficult city to do this in. It's dizzying, but I'm also excited by the possibilities."
Ms. Warner described the journey as "a silent communion" in which people can find "a poetic relationship with their city." As she said, "There isn't a room at the end of the project where everybody gets together and discusses their experiences." After the walk, the project is "your own rightful property."
"It uses architecture as a framework to reopen imaginative space," she said. "Where other forms use words, we directly use architecture." The project plays off "the heights and depths of the city," and the goal is to see buildings — some familiar — as if for the first time.
Ms. Warner offered clues as to what might be held over from the Perth production. There, one room was filled with "living lilies planted in a garden of snow" (though the snow was actually salt). In another room, a fax machine continually spewed pages of "Paradise Lost."
Although she made it clear that the project "will be unique to New York," its roots go back to "The St. Pancras Project" at the London International Festival of Theater in 1995. For that, she reopened the long-abandoned but still palatial Midland Grand Hotel next to the St. Pancras rail station for "a fantastical walk."
In 1999, the piece continued to evolve as Ms. Warner and her collaborators regrouped at the empty Euston Tower office building in London. This "Tower Project" filled the top three floors with sights and sounds, including winged angelic figures and a striking view of a miniaturized London below.
From that came Ms. Warner's concept of "reading a building's silent text, very much the way one would read a text of a play or a score." Her exploration of New York actually began in 1996 when she and Ms. Shaw scouted locations for "The Waste Land." Looking for a place to stage their dramatization of the Eliot poem, they traveled across the city from Ellis Island to the empty 26th floor of the World Trade Center, rejected because it gave Ms. Warner vertigo. Finally, she produced "The Waste Land" at the unused Liberty Theater on West 42nd Street. Seven years later, 42nd has been renovated and the Liberty is now unseen behind Madame Tussaud's, but it will be reopened for "The Angel Project," a fact that seemed to please her. This is, she said, "the most hidden, anchorite-like, beautiful, walled-upped" building in the city.
On her return to New York, she revisited some sites, like the once elegant Cloud Club at the top of the Chrysler Building, which in the intervening time has been stripped of period detail. Another area in that building is scheduled to be one of the stops. The Empire State Building and Grand Central Station were eventually discounted because they are so well traveled. While looking for places with iconic resonance, she wanted to avoid a hint of tourism.
She investigated Grand Central from the glass walkway overlooking the station to the subterranean area once inhabited by the homeless, but she concluded that the restoration — though authentic — had made the building lose its integrity. She said there was "a marvelous viewing platform at Rockefeller Center, but it's now been merged with the foyers of the Rainbow Room." A catacombed underground electrical substation — a high-tension Frankensteinian lair on the West Side — was also rejected as not useful except for someone seeking a history of electricity in New York.
In her search she often found herself going down blind alleys. After she chose a place, it was not always available. All the sites in the three cities have been provided at no charge. For her, One Times Square was a real find, a towering structure filled with history and memories but now vacant. The electronic billboards provide the income to support the building.
From the director's point of view, the project is related to her other theatrical work, including "The Waste Land" (in its use of found space) and "Medea" (because the audience was encouraged to take away variant ideas about the play).
At the same time, the work is closely allied to environmental artists like Antony Gormley and Richard Serra. "The best theater that I saw in the last four years is in the Tate Modern," she said. "The interaction of the public with the huge installations in the downstairs space is a form of theater. If it's a living human in relation to empty space, and he's moving, I guess it's an act of theater. I don't think theater is defined by the spoken word."
As for the Angel Project, "The ticket holder puts himself in the position of performer, writer, director and possibly designer." She laughed and added, "In that respect, the ticket is very good value."
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July 06, 2003
data addiction
yeah, i know some of you have read this, but i think it's applicable to our research project.
Data Addition Article @NYTIMES
word.
1IMC
Funny images (and comments)from the 1st International Conference on Moblogging that Tatsu and I presented at this weekend in Tokyo:
Pete's Eats
1IMC live moblog
Marginwalker(Gen Kanai)
The Feature by Justin Hall
