Yay google labs for existing and what is perhaps 20% time?

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=television,radio,film,web&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=6&smoothing=1

This space

http://lifehacker.com/5318607/youtube-experiments-with-3d-video-viewing

Yeah that's right. I'm going to post a link with little comment. If Mr. Cohen can get away with it so can I.

Face to Face

Just watched a really interesting talk from Chris Dede held at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society that brought me back to a topic I've written a little about before.


Conceptually, it seems pretty clear that the science of augmented reality is still stuck on producing reality inside the computer. Instead, I think the focus should be creating new realities through the computer, paralleling quasi-teleportation.


Here's how it would work:


Take two conference rooms. In both rooms, one wall is a giant Ultra-HD screen linked to the other room via fiber-optic cable and an 8K camera, or maybe a grouping of these cameras depending on the dimensions of the room.


Walking in, nothing would appear different about the room, other than the fact that one wall is pitch black. Then it turns on. This fourth wall is now a "magic-mirror", linking the other room to your room and vice versa. Essentially, both rooms have now created a third room that they collectively share.


This isn't video-conferencing. This isn't virtual reality, and while the equipment I'm talking about is still experimental and available in limited quantities, Moore's law – or perhaps more accurately the demands of consumerism – will say otherwise.



The "killer-app" in this instance would probably be distance learning. A system like this would enable a lecturer in a far off land the availability of teaching an evening course to a class of students across the globe while maintaining the same classroom structure. The essential difference is that the experience for both parties sitting behind the camera/screen would be in such high-fidelity that it becomes truly indistinguishable from reality.


Just give it 10-20 years ;)

Schlieren!

Forgive me while I post a Wikipedia article that I thought was cool...

Schlieren (from German; singular "schliere") are optical inhomogeneities in transparent material not visible to the human eye. Schlieren physics developed out of the need to produce high-quality lenses void of these inhomogeneities. These inhomogeneities are localized differences in optical path length that cause light deviation. This light deviation is converted to shadow in a schlieren system.

Reposts are a thing of Beauty

I know reposts are kind lame, but I wrote this and liked what I wrote (ok, maybe the question was a bit of a softball):

Q:

what say ye ??
i have been a loyal IE user (ok stop with the jokes), i use zoom (outstanding), veoh (pretty good) adobe media player (so-so), u-torrent (very nice) . . .
do i need miro??
is there anything i cannot get anywhere else ??
is it better quality?

A:

You've pointed out a number of programs that perform similar functions in conjunction but one important thing to remember in this case is that Miro achieves all of this on a single, dedicated platform and in a very user friendly and efficient manner as a free, open-source application backed by a 501c3 non-profit organization. There's a lot that follows from that last part, including how and why the Miro project has evolved the way it has and ultimately how it relates to its users.

To answer your question, I can't say for certain that you need Miro in the sense that we have video you can't get anywhere else or at a higher quality than otherwise available. Miro doesn't host proprietary content or any video content at all for that matter -- the Miro Guide is fundamentally a dedicated video RSS aggregator with extended community functionality.

That being said, as a filmmaker I definitely think it's important that there is an open video platform out there to distribute and promote my work on, and there are other independent artists out there that share this same concern. Take a look at the History of Broadcasting over the last century and you'll quickly see the correlation between conditions of production and distribution and their ultimate effects on the final product. The commodification of media has lead to cyclical content wherein advertising revenue trumps actual content. Put two and two together and see that the type of video you're more likely to see on Miro probably wouldn't be as easily available otherwise.

I could go on and on, and obviously as an intern and former Screen Studies studies student I'm a bit of a biased source, but I'd urge you first to consider the philosophy in which the Miro project was conceived in and how its goals couldn't be achieved any other way.

That's why you should use Miro :)