Ratchet Up

Sushi Windows [Waiter, There's A Bug In My Meal]

The Military Rolls In A Video Cam

“At first glance, you won’t notice that the Eye Ball R1 is a camera built for combat purposes. It is as handy as your typical baseball, roughly measuring 3.5 inches and weighing in at less than a pound.

The one thing that sets it apart from the other surveillance cameras is that it can be thrown around like a ball, literally. You might even mistake this feature as an NBA innovation. Its rubber and polyutherane casing allows you to throw it anywhere. The camera won’t break even when you chuck it against a brick wall as the materials that comprise the housing allow it to absorb the shock and bounce off surfaces.

But the real action begins after the Eye Ball has been thrown. Its camera function activates after it settles from a bounce. It can capture video images from up to 25 meters. It also records audio being emitted from a distance of up to 5 meters.

You would be thankful if you’re the soldier who is tasked to retrieve information from the device as it broadcasts data in real time to a handheld unit at a comfortable distance of 200 meters. Its omnidirectional lens can rotate at 4rpm and gives a 41-degree horizontal and 54-degree vertical view of the terrain. It is also equipped with night vision function.” [Mobilemag]

“Motion Events”: The New Face-Smart Video Surveillance

igital “spy cameras can instantly pick people out of crowds on the television show ”24.“ But real-world video surveillance was stuck in the VCR age, taking countless hours to sift through blurry black-and-white tapes. Stopping a problem in progress was nearly impossible, unless a guard just happened to be staring at the right video monitor. [...] Faces and license plates can now be spotted, in almost real time, at ports, military bases and companies. Security perimeters can be changed or strengthened with a mouse click. Feeds from hundreds of cameras can be combined into a single desktop view. And videotape that used to take hours, even days, to scour is searched in minutes. [...]

But digital video requires far more space on the network than e-mail or Web pages do - so much that the extra data traffic can quickly cause the whole network to grind to a halt if it is not managed properly. The trick is for the system to send as little high-resolution video as possible - and instead pass on short descriptions about what the cameras are seeing.That is where 3VR comes in. Every time someone passes in front of a camera connected to the system, the software logs a separate ”motion event.“ The time and location of the event - along with a still picture - are sent to a security guard's desktop computer. The guard can then browse through these pictures instead of staring at a bank of black-and-white monitors showing images that are constantly changing, waiting for something to happen. If a picture catches the guard's eye, he can click on it to see the video of the scene.

The system shows more than what the cameras see. Often, it can tell who the cameras are watching, too. The 3VR software assigns an identification number to every person a camera spots, and establishes a profile based largely on the geometry of the person's face. Whenever the face is captured from a different angle or in a different light, the system creates another mathematical model. Each time a person is taped, another model is added to the profile, increasing its accuracy.

Once the profiles reach a certain critical level of detail, it becomes fairly simple to search the ”motion events“ to find out where someone has been - essentially the same as entering a name on Google. The video forensics made possible by such software can be valuable; similar technology was used to trace the suspects in the London terrorist bombing last summer. But 3VR can be set up to do more than retrace a person's steps. The system can also set off an alert almost instantly if someone on a watch list enters a building or a restricted area. [...]

”We've had cameras,“ Mr. Louie said. ”But their biggest weakness is being proactive - 'Hey, this guy's been here before, stop him.' And that's because we've had to be 100 percent reliant on the operators. You can't expect a guard to remember a face months after the fact. But put a little intelligence into the recording box, and it can remember for months at a time.“

For now - and the foreseeable future - 3VR's system is effective only in small, controlled environments where the lighting is consistent and only a few people pass in front of one camera at a time. Picking out criminal suspects on the street or in a crowd - as the city of Tampa, Fla., tried to do in its Ybor City district from 2001 to 2003 - is still beyond the ability of 3VR and every other surveillance system. [...] The camera networks are part of a larger trend - along with Britain's plans to monitor every car on every major road, and the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping program - toward ”wholesale surveillance, the kind of stuff Stalin only dreamed of,“ he said. ”The question is, do we want that?“ [...]

Most companies that sell intelligent video software systems make setting up those rules a matter of a few mouse clicks. The systems can also notify a guard if a package is left on a railway platform, a car drives too quickly toward a building or a person walks up a down escalator, anything that seems out of the ordinary. VistaScape's software can also combine hundreds of cameras into a single, three-dimensional digital map. People and vehicles are represented by icons. Clicking on the icon brings up the view from the nearest camera.

”You can look at the whole facility - the movement of everything,“ said Steve Ruggiero, director of maritime security at Total Terminals International in Long Beach, Calif. He has installed an 80-camera network across the 384-acre property. Surveillance-software makers may also find a market in retail stores, and not just for catching shoplifters. The algorithms that look for intruders could see whether checkout lines are moving and which displays are attracting the most attention.” [Noah Shachtman: The New Security: Cameras That Never forget Your Face in the New York Times, January 25, 2006]

And The Word [As Image] Came From the Mountain: The Ubiquity of Images

In tracking the proliferation of images via digital production and distribution technologies, the idea of instantaneously sending pictures from the top of Mt. Everest has a special magic. No doubt it's generational, since when growing up in the '50s the ascent of Everest and the “conquest” of the moon defined human ambition achieved. So it's fun to read through a short article in Wired about how easy it is these days to send images [and follow expeditions] virtually in real time:

“Imagine watching in almost-real time as a loved one scales the world's tallest mountain. It's possible with Contact—software designed to bring Earth's most extreme environments into your living room. Created by HumanEdge Tech, a developer of expedition-grade communications systems, Contact allows climbers to instantly upload georeferenced dispatches containing video, photos or text from the flanks of Everest and other remote locations to an expedition's server. No webmaster necessary. [...]

...the newest generation called Contact 4.0 GEO has multi-layered, 3-D flash maps created from photos and models of Everest. Armchair adventurers can follow an expedition's route, zoom in on specific camps and positions, and look at weather forecasts and live satellite images. Comparatively, Google Earth is blurry and brutally slow over the Himalayas. [...]

...outfitted with HumanEdge Tech's 7-Summits Package, which includes a GEO-equipped, satellite-phone-compatible iPaq PDA; iridium satellite phone; Sony Cyber-Shot digicam and every cable and charger needed. The entire setup weighs about three pounds and costs $3,000. [...]

And GEO is simple enough for mountaineers to use with frozen fingers and oxygen-deprived brains. After transferring data from camera to PDA, the climber types a headline and text into the e-mail-like interface; attaches the images, date and GPS position; and hits ”submit.“ Moments later, the data uploads on the expedition's website. [...]

But while the blog-like entries are good for updating folks at home, they aren't interactive. Enter Inmarsat. In December, the company launched BGan, a broadband service that could allow climbers in the Himalayas to hold video conferences at 29,000 feet up, using laptop-sized sat terminals.”

Send Me A Message [In Audio]

So here's a new twist. Not only can you make and distribute audio as podcasts, but now if you have a [free and recommended] account with Odeo, you can actually put an audio recorder permanently onto your blog, or into an individual post. Like the example below. [Although thankfully the one for your nav bar is much smaller. Odeo has a thing for outsized graphics.]

The Odeo recorder enables readers to record and send a comment or message to you using any micropohone they may have plugged into their computer. Here are the way easy instructions on how to do it. Join up, then log in and paste a bit of code into your blog's nav bar or an individual post as here.

Yet another new way to talk.

Sighted In Akihabara: Samsung Camera Phone That Receives TV

[Via PicturePhoning]

Missing Pages: Photos > Movie

Missing Pages is a 24 minute short film shot entirely with a digital still camera. The photos—manipulated using a technique dubbed “Fotomation”—delivers fluid photo > cinema visual effects. The project is the result of 14 months of constant work.

You can check out the first 7 minutes of this film—now making the rounds of the festival circuit—in Quicktime.

Internet of Things

The notion of an internet composed of objects with RFID tags sharing information—in effect, an internet of things rather than an internet of people—has become a popular meme. Below are the good bits from a longish article on all of this from Sun.

“The EPC network, using tiny RFID (Radio Frequency ID) tags, will enable computers to automatically recognize and identify everyday objects, and then track, trace, monitor, trigger events, and perform actions on those objects. The technology will effectively create an ”Internet of things.“ RFID will fundamentally impact the industries of manufacturing, retail, transportation, health care, life sciences, pharmaceuticals, and government, offering an unprecedented real-time view of assets and inventories throughout the global supply chain. And in the process, whole new vistas (and challenges) will open up to software developers. [...] we stand on the verge of an era that will see previously unimagined networked devices and objects [...]

Even trees are on the network. Fifty battery powered ”micromote“ sensors now dangle from UC Berkeley's Mather Redwood Grove, part of a pilot program to monitor the health of groves of redwoods. The sensors register light, moisture, and temperature, enabling scientists to continuously monitor the microclimates surrounding given trees. [...] In the future, everything of value will be on the network in one form of another...And once they're on the network, we can aggregate data from those diverse devices, and then deliver that data to equally diverse devices -- in informative and compelling ways...here we are connecting trees, race cars, and astronauts to the network. It's going to become a much more seamless spectrum. [...] With the official release of the Electronic Product Code Network, we are about to see the ”Internet of things“ paradigm enter the big time -- the world of mainstream commerce. [...]

RFID is a generic technology that entails using tiny wireless transmitters to tag individual objects, uniquely identifying them. Such RFID tags allow companies to automatically track objects, trigger events, and perform actions upon the objects. RFID chips have now been made as small as 0.3 millimeters (about the size of a pencil tip). There are a variety of different types -- active (battery-driven), semi-passive (also battery-driven), and passive (driven by the inductive energy of a tag reader). [...] In order to provide a truly useful ”Internet of things,“ it's necessary to ensure open standards and global interoperability. [...]

The vision of a world where computers could identify any object, anywhere, instantly [...]

But to realize the Auto-ID Center's vision, it's first necessary to define, build, test, and deploy a global, open infrastructure on top of the Internet. [...] At the core of the Auto-ID Center's just-released infrastructure for RFID technology is the EPC code, the numeric data transmitted by a tag. The EPC code is, in effect, intended to be the next generation of the Universal Product Code (UPC), or bar code, that is found on virtually every consumer item today. But unlike the UPC, the EPC is designed to operate not only without ”line of sight“ (that is, wirelessly), but to uniquely identify each individual object. [...] Tag prices are currently $.20 apiece, but are expected to drop to $.05 apiece. [...] Wal-Mart recently notified its top 100 suppliers that they must install RFID tags (for inventory tracking) on all cases and pallets of their products by January 1, 2005. And the remaining 12,000 suppliers are expected to follow suit by 2006. When Wal-Mart speaks, the retail industry listens. Clearly, RFID is a technology whose time has come. [...]

To meet the needs and challenges of the burgeoning ”Internet of things,“ developers will need to change their notions about what a networked device is -- and how it can be used to provide compelling and profitable services. In short, it's time to think outside of the PC/handheld box. [...] As an application developer, you have to sit back and say, if everything is connected to the network, how will that change the way I process information?”

Multi-Touch Interfaces...Continued

I posted some early reports about the touch sensing project coming out of NYU recently. But in the last days Jeff Han, the lead guy behind this work, has given a presentation at the ETech conference. So I'm going to include his brief remarks here, plus some more links below.

If you're wonder whether it's worth the read, check out this amazing video. Or these photos of his gear posted on Flickr. Or this video shot from the audience at the conference by editors of MAKE magazine.

This stuff is literally
just coming out of the lab right now. You're amongst the first to see it out of the lab. I think this is going to change the way we interact with computers.

Rear-projected drafting table. Equipped with multitouch sensors. ATMs, smart whiteboards, etc. can only register 1 point of contact at the time. Multitouch sensor lets you register multiple touch points, use all figners, both hands. Multitouch itself isn't a new concept. Played around with multitouch in 80s, but this is very low cost, very high resolution, and very important.

Technology isn't the real exciting thing, more the interactions you can do on top of it once you're given this precise information. For instance, can have nice fluid simulation running. Induce vortice here with one hand, inject fluid with another. Device is pressure sensitive, can use clicker instead of hand. Can invent simple gestures.

This application is neat, developed in lab. Started as screen saver, but hacked so it's multitouch enabled. Can use both fingers to play with the lava. Take two balls, merge them, inject heat into the system, pull them apart. This obviously can't be done with single point interaction, whether touch screen or mouse.

It does the right thing, there's no interface. Can do exactly what you'd expect if this were a real thing. Inherently multiuser. Rael, come up and help me out. I can work in an area over here, and he can be playing with another area at the same time. It immediately enables multiple users to interact with a shared display, the interface simply disappears.

Here's a lightbox app. Dragging phtoso around. Two fingers at once, I can start zooming, rotating, all in one really seamless motion. It's neat because it's exactly what you expect would happen if you grabbed this virtual photo here. All very seamless and fluid.

Someone who's new to computing culture can use this. Could be important as we introduce computers to a whole new group of people. I cringe at the $100 laptop with its WIMP interface.

Really simple and elegant technique for detecting touch point, scattered light by deformation caused by touch on screen.

Kinaesthetic memory, the visual memory where you left things. Ability to quickly zoom, get a bigger work area if you run out of space, etc. changes things. More of an infinite desktop than standard fixed area.

Now, of course, can do the same thing with videos as with photos. All 186 channels of TW cable.

Inevitably there'll be comparisons with Minority Report. Minority Report and other gestural interfaces aren't touch based. Can't differentiate between slight hover and actual touch. Disconcerting to user if they have action happen without tactile feedback. I argue that touch is more intuitive than gross gestural things. Also gestural is very imprecise.

Ability to zoom in and out quickly lets you find new ways to explore information. What's interesting is that we're excited about potential for this in information visualization applications. Can easily drill down or get bigger picture. Having a lot of fun exploring what we can do with it.

Another application we put together is mapping. This is NASA WorldWind, like Google Earth but Open Source. We hacked it up to use the two fingered gestural interface to zoom in. Can change datasets in NASA Worldwind. They also collect pseudocolour data, to make a hypertext map interface. [Demo stalls, restarts] Three dimensional information, so how do you navigate in that direction. Use three points to define an axis of tilt. Could be right or wrong interface, but example of kind of possibilities once you think outside the box.

Virtual keyboard, rescalable. No reason to conform to physical devices. Brings promise of a truly dynamic user interface, possibility to minimize RSI. Probably not the right thing to do, to launch in and emulate things from the real world. But lot of possibilities, we're really excited.

Lots of entertainment applications, multiuser with many people playing in parallel. Here's a simple drawing tool. Can add constraints and have multiple constraints, to make a reallye asy virtual puppeteer tool. Lot of math under the surface to do what's physically plausible (algorithm published last year at SIGGRAPH).“ [O'Reilly Radar]

Operation Photo Rescue

While we're on the subject of comparisons.

In an effort to help the residents of Pass Christian, Mississipi in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, photojournalist Becky Sell and photo editor Dave Ellis have embarked on a mission to recover the photos and memories that would be lost to the storm.