Eddy's occasional random thoughts

Marc Andreessen's blog today mentioned this cool demo:

This uses video goggles with a head-tracking sensor to remotely control the orientation of a camera mounted on a pilot-less plane, letting you virtually explore the heavens.

Apart from the general wow-factor of flying around the sky without ever leaving the ground, it reminded me of another piece of impressive technology I came across recently: quad-copters.

Here, a high-speed DSP is used to combine realtime feedback from gyros and sensors on position, wind direction, etc. to control four rotating blades independently allowing for stationary hovering in a wide range of conditions with no pilot input required. Great for remote video surveillance etc.

Combining these two pieces of technology seems like a perfect opportunity. Has anyone done it yet?

And a missing piece of the puzzle: even using stereo cameras to feed the video goggles, the image will still be flat since there is no way to remotely focus it (other than relying on auto-focus). Has anyone developed a set of video goggles that can track the eye's ability to focus on specific objects? Combine that with a pair of remote cameras that can track the eye's focus in that way and you could have REAL telepresence (once the latency isn't too high, of course).

Isn't it great that we live in an age where such amazing technology is affordable enough to let people devise interesting hacks in their spare time...?

Thanks to Kieran for pointing me towards this impressive Wii Remote hack, covered by Engadget here.

Johnny Chung Lee has done a marvellously simple hack which uses the standard Wii remote controller, plus some ballpoint pens modified to emit infra red, to convert any surface into an interactive touch-screen. With multiple pens, you can support multi-touch effects (as seen on the iPhone and iPod Touch), and previously mentioned on this blog back in March 2006.

Here's an example of his technique in use:

(Make sure you watch the video long enough to see the technique in action; it's very impressive, especially when combined with a video projector.)

Johnny's software to make all this work is free, and available here.

Marc Andreessen's always-interesting blog today talks about OpenSocial, a new standard spear-headed by Google which aims to provide a common API for embedding new web content and apps across all the main social network sites.

This is very similar to the Facebook Platform API launched a few months ago to critical acclaim, but with the significant difference that OpenSocial is an open standard which pretty much everyone else except Facebook is jumping on the bandwagon to support.

Marc's blog does a much better job of describing the benefits than I can. In a nutshell, though, it means that if you run a website that offers a useful service, you can now easily allow it to be embedded in any of the main social networking sites (LinkedIn, Friendster, Ning, etc.) by just adding some basic HTML & Javascript support.

This should be fun...

(The official Google launch is tomorrow, at which point http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial should become operational.)

My friend James was impressed by the Tilt-shift photography I mentioned in the previous post, and sent me some related material.

Seam carving is an image resizing technique which works by identifying horizontal and vertical seams with low information content and then removing them, rather than simply removing pixels according to a fixed scaling algorithm.

This means that the proportions of important items within the picture are maintained. The same technique can be adapted to increase the size of an image (especially in a single dimension) without making it look skewed. And more intriguingly, by first marking parts of the image as "low value", you can seamlessly erase elements of a picture automatically -- no Photoshop expertise required.

This YouTube video does a good job of describing it:

Not content with this, James also pointed me towards .kkrieger, a simple 3D shoot-em-up with an impressive twist: the executable size is less than 100 KB. (Yes, that's Kilobytes). The program would have easily fitted onto a standard 170 KB floppy disk from the Commdore 64 era 25 years ago!

Despite this, the game has pretty decent graphics and sound, not dissimilar to Doom, as this screenshot shows:

The amazingly small file size is achieved by generating all textures algorithmically at runtime. This leads to long, though not excessive load times.

To download the game or read more about it, visit the main .kkrieger website.

When I had a film camera 15 years ago, I took almost no photographs with it: about one roll of film per year, on average. Then I got a digital camera, and since then I've taken a ridiculous number of photos - currently around 36,000 and climbing.

So, while I wouldn't call myself a big photography buff, I do have a passing interest in photography techniques and methods.

No doubt that's why my friend Steve sent me a link to this website, which describes Tilt-Shift photography, a style that makes normal scenes look like they are in miniature:

We're used to looking at photos where everything is in focus (to infinity) so when the depth of field is restricted, the brain is tricked into it's a model scene. The effect is quite surreal!

Check out the website mentioned above for more information.