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April 01, 2008 | Comments: (0)

This weekend I read this book on augmented reality (AR):

Augmented Reality A Practical Guide

By Stephen Cawood, Dr. Mark Fiala
First Edition January 2008
Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf
Pages: 328
ISBN 10: 1-934356-03-4 | ISBN 13: 9781934356036

I learned a lot about the need for markers for synchronizing virtual reality with the real world. I learned how to set up some desktop AR demos using a computer, Fiala's ARTag system and a webcam. I learned the nitty-gritty of doing AR programming in C++ with Fiala's ARTag API, Intel's OpenCV computer vision library, and OpenGL graphics.

I didn't like the book much, however: it felt to me like an academic paper blown up to book length to no good purpose. I know that won't make the authors or editors happy, but that's my opinion.

What I really want to figure out is how to build a handheld AR system based on a cell phone or digital camera. What spurred me on was a slightly cheesy episode of Numb3rs called Primacy, in which AR is used to extend a MMPRPG into the real world.

I suppose that this would be possible to do with an iPhone using its SDK, although I'd worry about the iPhone's limited bandwidth outside of WiFi hotspots. It might also be possible to do with an Android phone, once one exists. It could probably be done with other existing smart phones and even ordinary phones using their C++, C# and Java SDKs. It would be fairly easy using the .NET Compact Framework. I think I could do it using the BREW SDK, which I've used before, or the Symbian SDK.

I'm not at all sure how much AR functionality I could shoehorn into the limited memory and CPU power of a garden variety cellphone, or how effective marker recognition would be with the limited resolution and slow response time of a standard cellphone camera.

I'd be happy to hear from anyone who has experience in this area.

Posted by Martin Heller on April 1, 2008 07:52 AM

January 12, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Financial Crisis in Second Life

Linden Lab recently came out with a new policy basically forbidding virtual world entities that aren't demonstrably financial institutions in the real world from acting like banks in Second Life. Last Thursday, there was a "Metanomics" panel in Second Life about the situation. The transcript and video are here.

We're talking about "banks" that charged 11 to 21 percent interest weekly, and used virtual land for collateral. That would be usury in the real world, and predatory lending.

They also paid 2.5 percent per week on deposits, which would be unsustainable in the real world. Before a previous policy change forbidding gambling in Second Life, these "banks" had virtual ATM machines in all the in-world casinos.

Was this all a big, complicated scam? I'm not sure, but it certainly smells wrong.

Posted by Martin Heller on January 12, 2008 12:32 PM

December 19, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Beowulf Pre-viz used NVidia boards

I mentioned last month that I was interested in (and somewhat skeptical of) the Vicon motion capture technology behind the new movie of Beowulf. In fact, I haven't seen Beowulf yet myself: my wife and I decided that my twelve-year-old son wasn't ready to see it, and I haven't yet had the opportunity to go see it in adult company, given the concert for which I was preparing. I'll have to check and see whether Beowulf will still be playing in IMAX 3D this weekend.

I've recently heard from NVidia that Sony Pictures Imageworks used NVidia's professional Quadro boards to boost the creative pipeline for Beowulf. I can remember hearing a similar story from Silicon Graphics about 10 years ago: at the time, they had lowered the cost of a graphical workstation for CGI from hundreds of thousands of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars.

That number is down by another order of magnitude, to thousands of dollars. The NVidia Quadro boards that Sony used for pre-visualization, which is the step where you figure out the composition of each scene before you do the final rendering, sell for a mere $599 and up.

What's next? Kids, be the first one on your block to create your own photo-realistic animation! (Just kidding: it's hard work.)

I also asked about the software that Sony used. "The final images were rendered with RenderMan. Shot lighting and compositing was done with Imageworks proprietary software called Katana for lighting and Bonsai for Compositing. Animation working renders were done with RenderMan and Maya, and layout images were done in MotionBuilder in real time and Maya pending the purpose."

Posted by Martin Heller on December 19, 2007 01:21 PM

November 16, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Beowulf: Does Motion Capture Make Sense?

I'm a big fan of Beowulf: no, not the new movie, the Anglo-Saxon epic poem. I've read it several times in the original and in modern English translations, most recently in the bilingual edition with Seamus Heaney's fine verse translation.

I haven't yet seen the movie: maybe I'll get to it this weekend. I'd like to see it in IMAX 3D rather than at my local multiplex. I'm not sure I'll be able to do that, but I'll try. I may decide that's it's a travesty of the poem, but I'll try to judge it on its merits.

The new Beowulf movie uses motion capture to capture live performance data for use in digital animation. The technology used is quite a bit more sophisticated than rotoscoping, but not state-of-the-art: in Beowulf, the body and face performances were captured with Vicon, which captures a few hundred markers. The state-of-the-art is Mova Contour, which captures hundreds of thousands of points, in what Mova calls markerless high-resolution surface capture.

Reviewers are calling Beowulf "creepy" and "uncanny." The Times blogger David F. Gallagher said "When it was over, I felt relieved to be back in the company of uncreepy flesh-and-blood humans again."

I can certainly see using motion capture for video games. I can sort of see it for TV. I'm not sure whether it will ever make sense for movies, at least for movies being viewed on a big screen.

What do you think?

Posted by Martin Heller on November 16, 2007 07:05 AM

September 06, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Silverlight Talk in Second Life

OK, I've hit my buzzword quota for the day.

Seriously, Brad Abrams gave a talk about Silverlight in Second Life at the end of last month. As it happens, I missed it: it was at 3 PM SLT/PDT, which is 6 PM EDT for me, and my wife expected me home for dinner. Real life always wins.

Fortunately, Brad has posted the slides, Silverlight media demo and Silverlight RIA demos on his blog. I suspect that going through the media on your own PC will be a better experience than sitting through a demo in Second Life, especially given what Tim Heuer had to say about his own experience.

I understand exactly the problems Tim had. The problem with media starting out fuzzy and then getting clearer is an artifact of the way Second Life does incremental scene rendering. There's a bandwidth throttling preference setting in the Second Life client that you can adjust to make this better, but I don't know of a way to make it go away.

The problem Tim had seeing the speaker from his seat could have been solved if Tim had more experience in Second Life instead of being a newbie. Instead of flying his avatar around and annoying everyone else, Tim could have adjusted his camera position (using the Alt key on the Windows client) or used Mouse Look (started with the M key). There's also a Disable Camera Constraints option (Ctrl-Alt-C). Without going through some training, there was no way Tim could have figured that out.

(I can't believe I'm giving advice about using Second Life. I'm barely past the newbie stage myself.)

By the way: Silverlight 1.0 has shipped. Silverlight 1.1 remains in Alpha. Get them here.

Posted by Martin Heller on September 6, 2007 02:10 PM

August 10, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Second Life Responds: A Conversation with Joe Miller

In response to my Friday posting on August 3rd about reliability and voice in Second Life (SL), Joe Miller, Linden Lab’s VP for product and platform development, called me on the phone the following Monday.

If you look at Joe's bio you'll see that he's "responsible for extending the Second Life platform to reliably support very large member communities." Joe is also personally interested in getting voice working in SL.

We discussed the problems I had encountered with voice in Second Life, batted around a few possible scenarios that might explain what happened, and nailed down the time, region, and local conditions so that Joe could have someone check the logs. Maybe some good will come of my venting after all.

We also discussed how Second Life goes about trying to achieve the balance between reliability and features that I was talking about in my blog post. Joe said that he agrees that reliability is a big question for users, but he made the point that they've been making a lot of progress. The majority of in-house Second Life developers -- Joe said 68% of them -- work on reliability, stability, and performance; major new features are usually either acquired or contracted out.

Voice was contracted out, if I understood Joe correctly. WindLight, which "simulates the ways that sunlight is scattered by the atmosphere under different climatic conditions, such as fog or haze", and Nimble, a cloud simulator, were both acquired from WindwardMark Interactive. (The five founders of WindwardMark now work for Linden Lab in Boston, but WindwardMark still exists.)

Developers at Linden Lab are organized into studios, and a couple of the studios concentrate on fixing bugs. The Blacklight studio is where all new developers at Linden work, and Blacklight has the job of fixing the top bugs each week. According to Joe, the bug closure statistics are moving in the right direction.

It certainly sounds like Linden Lab is doing the right things. Nevertheless, there have been several operational problems at SL this week, which affected the availability of the servers: these are disclosed on the Official Linden Blog. SL probably isn't at one nine reliability yet, as far as I can tell, but I hope it gets there, and soon.

Posted by Martin Heller on August 10, 2007 02:25 PM

August 03, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Second Life: Reliable, it Isn't

The big news today in Second Life (SL) is that it now supports voice. I downloaded the new client to my fastest desktop and tried to attend a voice meeting about technology for developers. I gave up after five minutes, because the voice stream I heard was too distorted to follow.

I also noticed that my avatar had taken on distinctly feminine characteristics; I didn't know why. I teleported to someplace quiet and tried to edit my avatar's appearance, but I couldn't: that function seems to be broken in the new client.

Fortunately, I still had last week's SL client software installed on my laptop. I logged off of SL on the desktop, and when I logged into SL on the notebook, my avatar's appearance was normal (if you can call a Harajuku male avatar normal), and I was able to edit its appearance without a problem.

There's a balance to be found in software between features and reliability and stability. SL has chosen features, and pretty much forgotten the balance. There is a new client to download roughly once a week, sometimes to add features, but often to fix bugs. Worse, the server grid goes down frequently: if I were doing business on SL and paying for service, I'd be seriously annoyed. Actually, a lot of SL users are seriously annoyed: read the blog comments, for example the reactions to the voice announcement at the bottom of this page.

At a gathering I attended a few weeks ago, someone joked that it would be great if SL could get to one nine reliability. It was funny mostly because it's so true.

Supposedly, the Windlight atmospheric rendering enhancements, which came and went in a matter of days last month, will be reintroduced "soon." What was it I was just saying about features versus reliability?

Think "Where have all the flowers gone?" What's the song's refrain? "When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?"

Posted by Martin Heller on August 3, 2007 01:19 PM

July 09, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Ratatouille, Second Life, and CGI

Saturday I spent some time looking at the re-creation of the Sistine Chapel on the Vassar Campus in Second Life. Sunday I took my kids to see Ratatouille.

I thought the Sistine Chapel simulation was pretty impressive; my wife, who doesn't make allowances for the limitations of the computer, thought it was a travesty.

There is a school of thought that holds that art shouldn't be reproduced, because the reproduction can't ever do justice to the original. The late Dr. Albert C. Barnes felt that way, and wouldn't allow color reproductions of his collection of paintings to be printed; the Barnes Foundation did publish books, but printed the illustrations in black and white so that no one would imagine that they were seeing the correct colors.

Seeing Ratatouille, which I liked a lot, and comparing its graphics to those in Second Life, brought to mind the attempted mugging scene from Crocodile Dundee: "That's not a knife. This is a knife!"

Now, considering that Second Life tries to be an interactive client-server system that responds in something more or less approximating real time when all conditions are perfect and renders to an ordinary computer screen, and Ratatouille was rendered frame by frame by a server farm at Pixar to extremely high-resolution image files, this isn't a fair comparison in terms of computing power or display resolution. According to Pixar's site, rendering a movie frame takes about six hours, although some frames have taken ninety hours.

But the fact is, our eyes don't care how hard it was to produce an image, and don't care about the limitation of hardware. Ratatouille looks, sounds, and feels real enough to suspend disbelief in a basically absurd story; Second Life comes up short of suspending disbelief even when incredible care and effort has been expended to make a simulation as realistic as possible.

What's your take on this?

Posted by Martin Heller on July 9, 2007 07:30 AM

April 30, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Giving Second Life a Second Chance

At the end of March, I wondered aloud whether companies like IBM were really serious about doing PR in Second Life (SL). That got me quite a few comments, mostly from people who, on even cursory examination, clearly have stakes in SL.

"illuminator" agreed that SL isn't work-safe, or home-safe with children in the house, but encouraged me to spend more time and explore the system, having found it fascinating himself. Traven Sachs explained some of what is going on with the deceptively porn-heavy "popular places" list in SL, and offered to show me around the system. Sachs runs Wolfhaven Productions, which is a vendor of SL artifacts.

QTLabs, an IT consultant specializing in 3D virtual worlds, likened porn in SL to streetwalkers in any large city, and offered the opinion that "Second Life and 3D virtual worlds are changing the way humans communicate and share information." 57 Miles, a blogger who writes about SL, said "For some it just grabs you. It did me. For others it takes some perseverance before you become fully immersed." 57 Miles also offered to help me out on SL.

Jane Janus, who runs seminars in SL, admitted that SL is buggy, and opined that "the search engine really is awful." But then she went on to claim that

Barack Obama is rolling out a second life campaign strategy because the demographics of users are 20 - 32, his target market.

Universities are putting their digital libraries on second life. Virtual classrooms are far superior than current online courses.
The opportunites are endless. And inevitable.

Ahem. That's probably going farther than I'm willing to accept, and verges on "resistance is futile." Borg, anyone?

Phoenix Psaltery invited me to check out the Metaverse Messenger (M2), a weekly newspaper that covers events in SL. Psaltery is a staff writer for M2. Alliez Mysterio, a real-estate developer in SL, offered to show me around SL, with the coment that "yes it can be addictive but I guarantee you it will be the best addiction you ever thought you had."

Jon Udell pointed me at a video he'd made last fall, http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/10/16.html. It was something he himself described as "snarky" at the time. I couldn't view it using IE at the time, but I was able to see it using FireFox when I tried again, and I can see it in IE now that I have installed a new version of QuickTime. Jon's point, which was finally clear when I could actually view the video, was that the use of 3D in SL at the IBM press event he "attended" was basically gratuitous: technically interesting, but offering little real advantage over the 2D Web.

Finally, Petey, who writes a blog that's mostly about how SL sucks, gave it all a different perspective:

Don't let the kool-aid drinkers fool you, Martin. Second Life is not the future of the Internet. It is no social revolution. It is, instead, an intrepidly marketed and somewhat interesting MMORPG that will, I think, be dead within the year.
Legal issues and eventually revealed hyperbole (like the fact that less than .002% of the registered residents have a positive monthly cash flow of *any* fraction of a cent despite claims of economic opportunity) will show people that while Second Life may be a fun place to build something cool, funny, or interesting, it is not by any means revolutionary in character.

I remember the 1978 Jonestown tragedy fairly clearly. "Kool-aid drinkers" isn't funny unless you don't know what it really meant. Other than that, Petey makes a lot of sense.

I have been back to SL once or twice since my last posting. The system was working a lot better than it had been, and I was able to go through a full orientation tour. It was a surprisingly pleasant experience: I discovered that there was sound I could turn on, and that I liked the music being played just then. It was evening in SL, the avatars were behaving themselves, and the island setting of the orientation was charming. I could almost feel the evening breeze.

I could get to like this. Now, if I only had time to explore...

Posted by Martin Heller on April 30, 2007 06:00 AM

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