http://developer.android.com/design/get-started/principles.html

His reply, “I would teach how science works as much as I would teach what science knows. I would assert (given that essentially, everyone will learn to read) that science literacy is the most important kind of literacy they can take into the 21st century. I would undervalue grades based on knowing things and find ways to reward curiosity. In the end, it’s the people who are curious who change the world.”

Read the full AMA here

…”The relevancy of Flash and potential of HTML5 both lie in the hands of the creative community. More importantly, the future of the Internet remains a vast and exciting canvas so long as we seek to continually provide the most engaging and effective user experiences possible.”

-Jared Kroff, Creative Director, RED Interactive Agency

One of highlights of the new FP11 is the use of the GPU accelerated 3D api for 2D rendering, focused specifically on 2D games. Lee Brimelow has a great starting tutorial here. I am a big fan of write-once, deploy anywhere, and that has always been a core concept of Flash Player. Adobe has embraced platforms beyond browsers and beyond the Flashplayer itself, and this flexibility and lack of ‘ego’ make them a solid partner for designers and developers.  Some other great features in FP11 include native extensions, integrated runtime environment (basically no separate AIR download needed) and of course Stage3D (in cooperation with the best community-built 3D libraries!) and some good solid Flex UI components for mobile. So enjoy the new capabilities and the fact that Adobe does listen and cooperate and stay agile despite it’s strange position in a market with no direct competition but a constantly moving target.

That said, writing once and deploying as an app to multiple devices come with two prices – an incomplete API, and performance issues. The latter can be greatly affected by how code is written and what techniques are used or avoided, and any source of experimental results, like thie one below, are more than welcome. Still, Adobe has not only persevered but done an amazing job taking up the task of becoming not just browser independent, but mobile independent, leaving much of the quality risks and rewards to the programmers and designers:

http://www.codeandvisual.com/2011/flash-on-iphone-better-than-blitting-real-world-performance-results/

A picture is worth a thousand words, but how much is drawing a picture worth? Researchers at Nottingham university have asked the question: “If a diagram helps understanding, does drawing it help even more?” The Colloquial answer would likely be yes, but having quantitative data backing it up is a big step. I just hope the research paper has some diagrams in it.

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/pressreleases/2011/august/drawing-integral-to-science-learning.aspx

A programmer is like any craftsperson: the core of the idea is finished in 10% of the time but they cannot help but tweak and tune and refine and enjoy their own creation to the point where someone else has to drag it out of them to publish.

In other words, anything that is loved by its creator is never finished.

http://conference.archimuse.com/mw2011/mw2011_online_the_permanent_backchannel

These are the most highly trained people in the world. They know what they have to do during their mission down to the number of turns to install a screw, and have trained for 10 years to do 6 days of work. They know all the answers – they’ve seen every piece of equipment they will use and run thousands of simulations – it’s meant to be boringly routine by the time the real thing comes about.

But still, they bring their own cameras, like tourists, and we all know the reason. It’s obvious. Human curiosity goes beyond all the facts – it lives in wonder and it lives in the unexpected. It lives in a world of Ideas. Pursuing Ideas, not answers, is what we do.

One particular show exemplifies this: the CBC Radio 1 show “Ideas” –  inspiring because it addresses the human aspect of curiosity. Each episode covers a single Idea with a capital “I”: Examples include: “What is Beauty”, “Our Relationship With Dogs”, “In Praise of Ice”, and “The Death of the Book”.

Experts are interviewed conversationally and a story naturally unfolds from their personal relationship with the big concepts. Jargon is absent, the discussion is personal. What is your relationship with what they do and explore? How has it changed you? How has it made you, You?

The topics are chosen as a broad curriculum of science and humanities. You can’t fail to to be inspired by something, but not just because it is new, and not just because there are remarkable people speaking, but because the story is engaging.

The show grabs you with seemingly simple questions that likely have been sitting in the back of your mind and validates them as more than just idle musing; when so much curiosity is addressed with pat answers or diversion, this program says, “yeah, we were wondering the same thing…”

It never pretends to have answers, but instead presents viewpoints of people whose passion it is to think about these questions. None are represented as absolute or right, but subjective viewpoints – “What I think”, and also “Why I started thinking this way”. The wonder, passion and curiosity of the people make the topic engaging and approachable. So much of this is lacking in conventional education. Here’s three viewpoints on why this may be the case:

Removing personal human experience from answers reduces their power. We are curious. We explore. We ask and seek. A person asks a question because they are personally curious and feel the start of passion or frustration that they want to address. There is motive. Textbooks do not have motive. Answers presented as facts with a beginning and end do not have a motive. They simply exist as monuments and not signposts. Instead, the focus on the people that ask similar questions  and have explored them in a their own way; this brings with it a closer relationship and a validation of curiosity as a social exercise. Mentors are simply fellow questioners, not static sources on a lonely path of inquiry and response.

Presenting answers as self contained, complete, and absolute can punish curiosity - A question has momentum, direction and purpose – it’s not a target to be hit with the One Right Response. A question is the start of something – maybe something big and life-changing for the questioner – and the response should reveal a piece of the terrain that could be explored with this momentum of curiosty. The last thing a question should do is meet this momentum head-on and stop it cold.

Answering curiosity is much more than giving an answer; it is choosing to engage the questioner with your viewpoint. It’s not an opportunity to cut off further questions but to shape and encourage more powerful inquiry – to make a better questioner that can seek the next piece of the puzzle, and the next one after that, and ultimately to make their own pieces to fit.

This applies to any field of education. Answers that lead to more insightful questions are a success. Rewarding curiosity is one of the most human things we can do.  It’s not Questions & Answer, it’s wondering and wonder. I’ll cover what this can mean in practice in Part 2.

(image from CBC)

Curiosity demands exploration – a feedback cycle of trying and observing – of failure and success in increments and sometimes leasps. Game makers get it. Scientists get it. The best educators have mastered it because they know the best teacher is personal experience.

So why is ‘explanationism’ the default (and unsatisfactory way) that curiosity is satisfied? Partly because the tools to manage directed inquiry and exploration are just not there. Spaceref has a great article on a software package that aims to provide this management for student science; specifically, educating children on the scientific method. This method is usually listed as a set of bullet points in science class: hypothesis->experiment->revise hypothesis…. but the tools to conduct many interesting experiments are not practical in a classroom. Example? Billion dollar telescopes, timespans of decands or nanoseconds, powers of gigawatts. One approach is to provide a software-based science  simulation toolkit: flexible enough to allow creative thinking and many outcomes.

The experiments described…on experimenters demonstrated that, yes, there is a benefit to allowing kids to learn things the way learning is meant to be: through exploration, experimentation and feedback. Interestingly, the software did not limit experiments to simulation within the computer – it encouraged data gathering in the real world. ‘Getting’ the scientific method means using it, not learning the bullet points. Read the article here, and check out the free software at the nQuire site

An early review of the Macintosh in 1984

One thing that does seem very familiar is praise for an intuitive interface that is common through all the applications on the Mac. The common toolbar up top, the WYSIWYG word processor was a revelation coming from blinking cursors and function keys, and the compact, elegant form factor.

These were all praised as part of the whole ‘Mac’ experience.

Seem familiar? The formula of consistent, intuitive, elegant interfaces, both software and physical, have always been what set Apple apart, and core values that have survived 27 years of computer evolution should be considered heavyweights in any interface project. The best aspects of “New” can themselves not be so new.

And the photo? It’s of my MacBookPro sitting on top of a 27 year old Apple IIc carrying case I found under some camping gear. The fit is perfect, and the case itself is a study in simple elegance, even if it is a product of its time!

In the case of the CSDC, Geocentrics and other partners and sponsors are seeding the university and college populations with the ‘starting kit’ of knowledge and expertise needed to propose new designs within a Challenge framework.

Providing software and course material at a university level is a great way to get started, but how did those students get their interest in space to begin with? It was not from the Lego satellite design challenge but generally from their own interests and pursuits. Maybe, thought there is the opportunity, early on in education, to inspire by enabling.

A satellite design team is an end result – technical, funded, dedicated -but with barriers to entry. The nature of the task is tough: hardware design, software design, understanding of math, physics, electronics, orbital dynamics and project management are not something a keen 10 or 12 year old can take on, alone or in a group. However there is an opportunity to allow him or her to design, test, build and try; online multimedia and simulation.

These tools of virtual design using game design methodolgy and parameters can engage rather than intimidate, and essentially empower the student within the game’s world. They can spent billion dollar budgets to explore Europa, or test new propulsion technologies, or build their own space exploration program. Because rough edges of reality can be removed to allow focus on key ideas and to provide a shallow, rewarding learning curve that ultimately provides more educational opportunity and depth than a textbook that is left closed.

The fact is that kids are intuitive learners, and faster ones than adults; they can get the feel of a complex problem with multiple variables more quickly than an adult and master it in ways that are core to who they are. Given the opportunity, they can learn the ‘language’ of space exploration, for example, as easily as they may pick up a new language.

The learning opportunities provided by the CSDC are incredible, but the lesson can be extended to younger audiences, who can be inspired most of all.

In recent years a new class of telemetry-based games have mixed reality with the game itself. The player is you, and the game is what you do, where you are, and even how you get there.

Toyota paid close attention to this and came up with a method of making the vehicle itself part of a social game. Simply put, they took the ‘game’ that many hypermilers play against their fuel consumption gauges, and made it social, with a careful eye on the affluent demographic that uses their product. The more efficient you drive, the more money Toyota donates to a charity.

Rewarding a Driver’s good behavior in a closed-loop feedback system is as important as managing any mechanical component of the vehicle. Since the system in question happens to be a human being, the vehicle effectively has to plug into the Driver’s behaviors in order to provide some measure of influence.

People are motivated by games with shallow learning curves, challenging scenarios, and incremental rewards focused on social status; we think in terms of games anyways, so Toyota chose to focus on the reward side of the game equation by bringing social status into the picture.

Buying the luxury Hybrid is already part of the game that is conspicuous consumption, so why the need to expand on this? Because those with more disposable income tend to define who they are within their community by the events and charities they support with their time, business expertise, or donations. An implicit reward of this is not just the satisfaction of contributing, but being seen to contribute.

Toyota chose to tap into this behavior loop by making not just the purchase of the Hybrid a social statement, but the way in which it is driven – the more efficient the driving, the more money is donated to a UNESCO charity by Toyota on the Driver’s behalf. This makes the social statement ongoing and at the same time addresses some of the perception issues raised in using a vehicle that cost an enormous amount to build in terms of energy and resources.

So how does it work? From a Driver’s perspective, the game goes like this:

Controls: Driving
Objective: Keep the analogue gauge Eco Meter within then “Eco Zone”. Feedback is nearly instantaneous, and is as simple as looking at the needle’s position
Feedback: Within the vehicle the LCD UI shows more detailed historical information, but more importantly the driving data is uploaded to Toyota servers and stored per-vehicle
Points System: Simple numerical points are rewarded for EcoDriving behavior. The points system is of course massively inflated and has no correlation with real-world mileage, fuel consumption or anything identifiable. This is a requirement of any good points system. A leader-board is also included in the interface.
Badge System: The social reward system is the donation mechanism where a Driver uses the web site to convert points into donations to a UNESCO charity. Toyota alllows the Driver to choose the specific charity, allowing customization of the Driver’s social identity within the game.
Replay Value / Mastery Curve: The game is simple, but the methods of mastering it can be challenging since the games is essentially a physics-based 3D driving game with full simulation of all conditions! Replay is mandatory, as the Driver is implicitly playing the game when driving, and involvement/opt-in is as simple as glancing at a gauge.

So, does this make a full game system?
Let’s check:

• Easy accessibility
• A like-minded community
• Simply learning curve
• Intuitive interface
• Instant feedback
• Instant, large-value points system
• Leader-board
• A social badge mechanism
• Long mastery/ High replay value
• An alteration of Player behavior

Looks like a big yes!

(image source: Lexus Japan)
(Link Source: Autoblog Green)

As pointed out by the show staff (nice work keeping an eye on the buzz the show is getting and keeping in touch with your audience!), one of the interesting interactives, using hotpots is “Napolean’s Lies”. showing the difference between historical truth of an event and it painted depiction.  By displaying  an ‘alternative’ reality version of the painting as the user explores, interaction and exploration are rewarded with more than just text and additional images, but with the chance to alter the artifact.

The strengths:
Elegant, immersive design of a hybrid flash site, good use of sound effects, good leveraging of easily understood interactive modes, a few great examples of ‘choice and outcome’ role playing, effective balance between content access and encouraging exploration, effective deep linking for sharing. Also, plenty of information about why interactives were made and requests for feedback on the site. Good server architecture for fast loading and streaming, plenty of web-only exclusives to attract views and an interesting Blog that takes an interest in the viewer.

What could be built on:
Make specific interactives or the My Discoveries feature sharable on Facebook as well as Twitter: “Facebook: Jufa wants to give you a personalized tour of the Museum”, more open-ended interactives with simulation or game-like interfaces like “Cross Bow Defender” would be persuasive reasons for users to revisit and link value of the site. Option to explore content by the type of interaction, like “All Hotspots”, “All Minigames”.

This site, overall, demonstrates good balance between breadth and depth of content with particular focus on getting visitors to watch the show while meeting now-necessary ‘societal improvement’ goals by sparking a deeper interest in museums and their mission.

A recent example is the NASA call to the aviation industry to forecast the airliner of the future, such that specific performance goals are met or exceeded. But can this model be used in interactive education?

(image credit: NASA/Boeing)

What was most interesting were the results: from a present situation where almost all aircraft look nearly identical to many future visions which share little in common. The entries all look totally different in order to meet the same set of goals and from the same starting point (present technology and infrastructure).

This uniqueness can’t all be attributed to engineering, since the results would tend to be similar and rather conventional. There is an element of play at work – the designers want the aircraft of the future to look distinctly different – not just for performance reasons,  but to show their capabilities unbounded by more immediate practical matters. In fact the distinct lack of conventional designs was an indication that the competition had the desired effect – to get the industry to think outside the current solutions and to show eachother that the team down the street will be thinking outside of the box next time, too. The industry as a whole benefits in becoming more aware of its own capability; the competition results in the industry as a whole cooperating to realize its own future.

So, that’s the corporate world – does it apply to education and to interactive learning?

NASA could certainly find out with a competition for school age kids to enter their designs for the airliner of the future, providing a set of tools and challenges that engage them fully at their level.

A quick example of what’s possible would be an interactive simulator or designer, like the one I made here. Tying this to social media and sharing can demonstrate that other students are equally interested and providing a community that can collectively improve its skills and knowledge and creativity. This follows a design pattern that starts with the raw concept and uses tools built around it to enable a creative community of similar interest. In short  moving from Equation to Simulation to Game to Community.

I hope that in the future organizations who offer industry innovation prizes also mirror these efforts with similar tools and incentives for educators and students who are interested in getting beyond the textbook.

The power is in the visualization of a dynamic process using video – not still photos or arrow-diagrams. The message is conveyed clearly because the medium matches the process described: movement and process is being shown as motion and storyline. It is worth keeping in mind that the best medium or method for description is the one that fits the what is being described and the desired message. What could be next? An interactive game in which the User selects the molecules and start and end points of transcription to make a specified protein?

Adobe is remding this though in a near-term release of Flashplayer and to provide access to this new capability, the Molehill 3D API has been introduced. Adobe has provided an overview of the API and the results are simply a hundred-fold inprovement in 3D performance. This should make the Flashplayer version of Moore pleased. Oh and the best part? Adobe is collaborating with the 3D engine developers to get the tech into your favorite frameworks, like Away3D. Now if only it was 2007 and not 2011.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY59wZdCDo0

http://jufaintermedia.com/snowflake/

I have been working with the latest builds of Away3D (v3.6) optimized for FlashPlayer 10.1 in the browser environment, and wanted to compare performance of the non-hardware accelerated version (Flash 9 software rendered) using some new tablet hadrware.

The hardware here is a Samsung Galaxy Tab running Android 2.2 and Flash 10.1. Rendering about 600 polys, non-optimized (big) textures and a big skybox at full resolution drops the framerate, but the Snowbird flight sim demo otherwise works just fine. I’ll be updating this with the hardware accelerated versions of FP and Away3D and compare the results.

Platform cross-compatibility (transparency?) sure has its strengths. nice to develop once and deploy (almost) anywhere.

Flash platform is like that hill – it can be efficient and fun when there are no speedbumps, and most of those are our own fault. Fortunately, optimization of your code can go a long, long way to speeding things up, and after reading Adobe’s latest revision of the Guide (PDF), you may feel a bit dirty knowing parts of your code could run 25-50% faster. The examples contain timer data, so you know just how much performance is enhanced. It’s a 15 minute read and well worth it, especially now that mobile apps set the baseline back to 1998 processor power again, and FlashPlayer 10.1 has some new tricks to take advantage of.

Still looking for more tips? Grant Skinner (Go, Edmonton!) has an excellent presentation here (Flash).A theme of his which I like (as does your mobile device) is being a Good System Citizen – be courteous, don’t hog, clean up after yourself and all those good common sense behaviours.

(image source: columbia.edu)

Check it out from Museum Marketing

Charades on steroids? Some people have found it a bit intimidating to get up in front of their friends / family / date / cat and strut their stuff, but some more practical problems have come up for developers – How do you make a menu system with no buttons?

Ars Technica summarizes a talk given at the Montreal International Game Summit by the developers at Harmonix for their game Dance Central.

Their design process resulted in two key take-aways:

Everyone has a different interpretation of a given gesture, and that it is easier to teach people to use an interface that to bulletproof the interface for all possible users.

No Air-Click.

The obvious first thing to try with an interface is a mapping of what everyone already knows: pushing or clicking. Unfortunately in a gesture interface there is too much ambiguity in what a ‘click’ is, since depth and ranging information is still the least accurate axis in which a camera-based system can track.

A way to measure if a control scheme is going to result in confusion is called ‘coupling’. Here’s an example of a control scheme that is 100% coupled and hence has total ambiguity: Blink once for yes, once for no. Useless? Yes. How about: blink once for yes, twice for no? Well we have a version of that: double clicking, and there is still coupling – the two controls are coupled in that they both look the same at first (a single click) and a problem like that is even worse in gesture control where the of clicking isn’t there, and snapping fingers is a non-starter. So what else have we got?

Solution? More Decoupling.

One thing a Kinect is very good at is detecting motion orthogonal to the camera system; it knows left-right and up-down very well. Starting with this, the menu system can be arranged so that left-right is a toggle function, and up down is item selection. The two actions are decoupled as much as is possible in gesture land, which still allows fine positional selection.

In fact, this is not new news. Look at gesture-based communication – it is designed to be clear and non ambiguous. Semaphores, sign language, even radio communication. Decoupling reduces ambiguity.

In the end, new interfaces take new interface languages. All of these were a bit revolutionary on their introduction, even the keyboard:

           Mouse     Touchscreen     Gesture    Keyboard
Rollover     X                          X
Click        X            X                        X
Swipe        X            X             X
Depth                                   X

Now there is some ambiguity in interfaces themselves – what is the difference between an interface and an interface gesture? You could argue that a keyboard is a gesture based interface with a click confirmation, and that the rollover events are ‘tactile feedback’. But that is the point, really – there are no clear delineations, just strengths to be built on and ambiguities to be avoided. The potential of a full-body, controller-free interface is amazing, but you would not use it to implement an ‘air keyboard’ or even an ‘air touchscreen’.

Feedback Loops

Harmonix’ key lesson was that people can learn to use a good interface quickly as long as there is minimal ambiguity. The designer’s job is to provide an interface which may be new, novel, and even alien, but that provides clean feedback to the user, allowing the user to learn quickly. People love to learn something new, as long as it is not confusing, and ‘hacking’ the user is as important as programming the hardware.

And, if you are a developer, there is always the Open Source drivers for the Kinect device which are becoming available.

(image from wikipedia)

“Get their hands dirty. Engage their natural curiosity. Show them science is not answer on an exam”

Agreed!

http://ozzie.net/docs/dawn-of-a-new-day/

So, what is next? Here are 3 steps to leveraging your new touch screen ecosystem:

3 Steps to Leveraging a Touchscreen Ecosystem

1. Move beyond content navigation+consumption
   

   Text and imagery – content development has traditionally been oriented towards these formats, now with some video mixed in. The touch screen can default to simply being  a navigation tool for these pieces of static content. The computer under that touch screen is more powerful than that, and has the capability of being more than just an bigger, better interpretive panel. Examples? Why talk about water crystals when you can let a visitor design and grow snowflakes using a simulation? Why show text about an art piece, when the visitor could learn to virtually mix paints? Why show artists’ renderings of a fleshed-out dinosaur when a visitor could choose their own markings? People learn and get engaged by doing something and getting feedback from it. Is it daunting? It shouldn’t be, now with the right subject-matter experts

2. The touch screen is speaking to multiple people at the same time, not just one user

   Watching interactive technology get used, it becomes readily apparent there are at least three types of visitors crowded around: The user(s) who are hands-on at the moment, the motivators and waiters who are waiting their turn and offering suggestions, and the supervisors, who are those that are simply enjoying the experience vicariously, often parents and grandparents. The touch screen has to speak to all of them. There must be access to the area, a wide viewing angle, and ideally, a second “repeater” display mounted above to show the interaction taking place. By addressing these different audiences, the experience is not just a lineup, but a communal engagement. Since most software  systems are developed in Flash, unity3D, or a similar multi-platform framework, there is also a fourth audience: those who have internet access. Every display should be made to be ported to the web as part of the ‘inside out’ museum model.

3. Get connected

   Putting the interactive on the web is one way to leverage the new asset you’ve created, however there are more possibilities. The touch screens can be networked within the facility using WiFi, which provides the unique opportunity to track and measure a user’s individual progress through the exhibit space.  Not just as a performance metric of who-used-what-when, but as an interactive tool. A user, on entering the facility (or before-hand through the web site) can register their name and some basic details, such as interests and age group, or even teacher name. On entering the facility, each touch screen can be aware of that user, either through a keyword, face recognition, or machine-readable ID nametag. This would allow the system as a whole to know where the user has been and where they might want to go next, and tailor the experience at any given touch screen. For example, a teacher could register their class in advance for an ‘explore marine life’ 1-hour exploration program, ages 10-14. Each student would be presented content and challenges specific to that data, and the results of their interactivity can be sent back to the teacher. Students could be given specific ‘missions’ within the museum, in the role of biologists or even as the animals.

In conclusion,

This sounds complicated: coordinating, producing, vetting. Granted – a new set of skills is needed to turn static content into interactivity. However, the museum space has the prerequisite of simplicity and speed in any given engagement – the simulations need not be deeply involved to get the message across in the time allowed, and therefore development budgets need not be on the high-end. Simply, effective ‘mini-sims’ can work very well, articulating a single concept effectively. Moreover, as the museum becomes well versed in production of these elements, they will generate a set of ‘patterns’ that can be reused and tailored for new exhibits, allowing reuse of the ‘engine’ component of the software. Most importantly, minim-sims and interactivity provide something that static content cannot: a different experience every time.

Your feedback would be welcome!

1. Apple relaxing provisions on developer tools: This means, perhaps that cross-compiling from Adobe Flash development environment to iOS is back in the game. It also means that Unity3D need not worry going forward. Good news. And of course, Apple Xcode loves to compile your favorite fast C/C++ libraries, which is a bonus of you are working with something like OpenCV.

2. Flash Builder as a central development platform is looking pretty solid. Good thing they decided to base it on Eclipse and go open. If you are a student, pick up a free copy.

3. Blackberry playbook and Android support for Air2 Apps. In otherwords, write in Flashbuilder and deploy to the new QNX-based Blackberry products like the Playbook, and every Android device out there. Don’t get Android support for flash player mixed up with Air2 support: The first means Flash content within the browser is supported, the second means that Air Apps now run like native Android apps, with Air2 as the intermediate interpreter. How will the performance be? Probably a lot better than HTML5/javascript.

4. Windows Phone – although not in the same category of cross platform portability, Microsoft is the king of development toolchains and WP7 should be no different. C# is a great language to work with, and the tool chain is free to start with.

5.  Some great info on developing for mobile. If we are lucky, mobile dev will not be quite as fragmented as it could have been (say, 2 months ago) and we can focus on the experience rather than the nuts and bolts of many platforms. In that hope, Adobe does have a great set of guides here.

When I tried installing these MSI packages manually via their .msi files in the /flash builder/software/payloads/ directory I got a “1935″ install error of type “800700c1“ from windows.

The trick was to find that smipi.dll was corrupted. I found a copy on the Win7 install DVD and tried to copy it over the version found [somewhere deep ] inside of the /windows directory, however it was owned by the trusted installer and I had to use “takeown.exe“ and then “icacls.exe” via an administrator-launched command line to change ownership and permissions, allowing me to delete the previous version then copy in the new one from the win7 DVD. I had to take ownership of both the smipi.dll file and the directory it was in to make it all work. So far all I’ve seen online is people running into this problem and having to repair Windows or reinstall it, and the Adobe forums are only a partial help in this weird one. Still, it seems to happen to more than a few people. One of the other symptoms? Windows updates seemed to stop working with the same error codes.

Part of Apple’s mandate in move from a mouse interface to touch is to create a barrier between its mouse interface ecosystem, (OSX) and touch ecosystem (iOS).

This prevents lazy porting of applications which can result in a mouse-centric, pixel-accurate interface model to one developed for touch.

Briefly, the key differences are:

Accuracy: pixel perfect versus about 1cm square,

Hover:  finger hover is not easily differentiated from a click or fingerdown event,

Occlusion: a finger, simply put, is always in the way of the interface.

Fatigue: A mouse is a device that can be used for hours, but a touch that uses fingers (not thumbs) generally has no wrist/forearm support.

Touch does have a powerful advantage – one less abstraction in the connection between the user and the device: what you touch is what you get. This led to the concept of kinetic interfaces with inertia:   the expectation when actually touching the interface is that it behaves as a physical object.

But no touch is actually required – it is a limitation of the current technology that can soon be augmented.

Touching the screen itself is a technical limitation of capacitive and resistive interface systems: the touch itself provide a hollow experience – no varying tactile feedback, just a too-smooth perfectly uniform surface and a bit of finger grease. No information is conveyed by the touch itself aside from the expected visual queues, and even these have to be offset to be made visible from under the fingers.

These are disadvantages that can be addressed. Computer vision algorithms and the ubiquity of front facing cameras will aloow a software solution where a combinaton of the user’s gestures above the screen and an analysis of their line of site will allow:

More accurate control: where a finger touch is inaccurate and has roll, squish and smudge, fingers held like a grasped pencil above a surface can point much more accurately

Less Occlusion: a visual offset can be made into the interface where queued contact points are offset by a combination of the gesture and the persepective of the user, as read from head and eye positions

Less fatigue: A non-touch proximity interface can adapt to several modes of handling depending on the device orientation and location of the hands, a fully accurate 10 finger interface may not be needed if the user is just flipping pages or scrolling and these can be done from a comfortable poisition at the sides of the device.

Is the technology there yet? The software is not there yet and the supporting hardware is not in tablets and phones quite yet, however this is a function of better, cheap cameras, and more CPU cycles dedicated to gesture processing, both of which could be said to fall under Moore’s Law.

So would such an interface look like a smartphone/tablet UI, or a Windowed UI, a hybrid or something entirely new? I think it will fall near the middle in terms of UI, but with  more modes of interaction than either system and the strength of greater accuracy and finesse.

The simple fact is that having the 3D volume of space above and around a display opens up new interface possibilities that exceed a single, highly accurate mouse pointer or 10 inaccurate fingers pressed on a glass window.

©JUFA Intermedia

In museum and educational interactives, it is key to look first at these motivations before building designing the experience.

A great article on these motivations can be found at psyblog, called

“3 Universal Goals to Influence People”

The art of education is similar to the art of debate: understanding the point of view of your audience and your opponent (i.e. preconceptions) and matching you message to the motives of your user. For example, the idea of Positive Self-Concept can be translated into incrementally more challenging interactive learning games, which avoid steep learning curves.

Check out the article and I’d love to hear you comments.

Here are three key areas that work for me:

I like the challenge of perusing solutions and delivering high-quality products for my clients.

I have no fear of going out of my comfort zone. I enjoy researching and building a team of world-wide partners/sub-contractors to help me reach my goals. This process feeds my need to learn and grow and builds self-confidence. I get bored quickly, so I like a variety of activities: project management (idea-solution-leadership), design, writing – a multidisciplinary approach to getting the message out is is best.

I pursue long term relationships with clients who appreciate my insights.

My insights, creativity and work ethic. I’d love to work with clients who trust me and allow me to offer solutions to other areas of their organization (which fuels need #1 above). If I do not a get a good feeling from a new client, I will not take on one of their projects.

I Follow your Passion

I keep control of the parts of  projects that I love and are good at. I sharpening-up my knowledge and skills in these areas.

http://greensopinion.blogspot.com/2009/07/android-versus-iphone-development.html

http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/26/uc-san-diego-researchers-repurpose-3d-hdtv-for-heads-up-vr-syste/

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511335.aspx

http://thelab.lindewerdelin.com/article.php?i=151

It is the exception to an unfortunate rule where manufacturers are skinning Android with their own UI components at the expense of users.

Most of these interfaces are a personal matter of choice whether the user likes them or finds that they actually increase the usability or utility of their handset.

One thing that is not arguable however is that the Manufacturers who choose to do this are effectively becoming gatekeepers for Android updates to these Users. Need to Update to Androis 2.2? You will have to wait until you manufacturer has updated their skin and chosen to push the update to the User’s phone. The time for this is not exactly days and can be months, or never.

This differentiates mobile from desktop and notebook, where manufacturers could add some bloatware to Windows, but it could be removed and essentially made stock. This option is not available in the Android situation, unfortunately.

Manufacturers ideally should either make the turnaround times for updating phones much tighter (the update delay from from Android 2.1 to 2.2 is infuriating), or make their skin not stand in the way of defaulting to a stock install, or for that matter a whole market of 3rd party skins. If the User chooses to keep it, great, then the Manufacturer has actually made a piece of software front-end that enhances the stock UI. From recent reports this is often not the case, but because bypassing the custom UI is either prohibited or difficult, the Manufacturers are simply letting Google do the heavy lifting while they simply stand in the way of what android does best – promote rapid innovation.

Competition through exclusion of alternatives has never benefited customers.

a commenter also suggested this for ie7 compatibility with standards

Auto smoothing? yes!

http://www.hand-interactive.com/resources/detect-mobile-javascript.htm

http://team.forsvarsmakten.se/english/

Getting started with Android development

Getting started with iOS development

and of course: Java for C++ developers

and Objective C for C++ developers

and for Flash devs: Actionscript to Android

and Lee’s legendary tutorials on gotoAndLearn, featuring Flash 10.1 on Android

and if you want to use the Unity platform, they have some great tutorials.

For all these platforms, it is worth reading some of the usability whitepapers from Nokia which apply regardless of platform

http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/

http://www.williammalone.com/articles/flash-vs-html5-canvas-drawing/

(from reddit.com/r/programming)

(Reddit)

What programs like NPR Science Friday, Daily Planet on Discovery Channel Canada, and Quirks and Quarks on CBC Radio 1 do so successfully is get scientist to communicate at the level of the audience.

Now, the first stereotypical thing I can thing of in saying “at a level”, is ‘Dumb it down” for a general audience.

This is not the case at all. Simply put, “level” means putting findings in context, not just of their importance to the field of research, but in the context of the audience. Context is the background on which any message is communicated, and without it, the Audience can’t start the vital and very human process of connecting the dots and inferring. Without this, there is no wonder, just confusion, and no excitement, just disinterest message that meant for someone else.

Read the article at Ars Technica

In the end, its curiosity, wonder, and excitement that are the common threads between an explorer like a scientist, and their audience.

Another aspect that is only now becoming possible to analyze is Space – the mobile device+app understanding where you are now not just as a pushpin, but why you are there.

Adding the ‘why’ to the ‘where’ requires better geolocation, better inference of the user’s plans and goals – in short, smarter software. Augmented reality using GPS and compass is only the start of this, Natural Feature detection and other techniques that allow the mobile device to recognize scenes and objects is the next step.

PDF from Method.com

Method.com introduction

Core77′s take

The main idea? There is more to success than accomplishment. As much as it pains many technicalpeople to ‘market’ themselves, it is not necessarily a bad word. Think of it this way – if you think you have something to offer, it is part of your responsibility to let other in your organization and client base to know about it, since it benefits them and you. You are the person most qualified to understand your accomplishments and put them in perspective for others to be inspired by.

Keep an up to date portfolio of work and ideas – you can’t execute on everything at once, but by letting people know your accomplishments and direction, your talents and skills have more opportunities to be expanded.

(thanks to subreddit/programming)

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/adc-presents/create-native-installers-in-adobe-air-2/

http://code.google.com/p/in-spirit/wiki/ASSURF

At FITC Toronto this year, the Union Platform was demo’s and realease dates and licenses set. The crowd was seat-edged because the demos really were elegant and powerful.

Union matters because it makes multiuser flash effortless and for most applications, free. They even have a public test server to get you up and running with your demos, fast. I tried it, it worked, and the API was a great example of common sense good design.

Check it out at http://www.unionplatform.com/

What this means, practically, is that we don’t have to think about interfacing with it, we just use it; the thinner the manual, the better the design.

A human has a training program that is about 10-15 years long in which they master their senses and their motor skills, from stereo vision to talking , to walking and working with 2 hands and two feet and a skin sensitive to a wide set of stimuli. Not to mention hearing, sonic location on 3D, and chemical analysis through nose and taste.

This training should not be discarded in the name of technology and its interface: if you learned a qwerty keyboard when you were 5, great, but don’t assume that it is as natural as doing what you do to communicate with another person through speech, gesture and nuance.

Technology is getting close to the  point (so close!) that these natural interactions are possible. Keyboards are being assisted with gestures and voice everywhere and the fact that the manuals for these devices are thin or nonexistant says we are on the right track. I have an Acer touchscreen computer running windows 7, and although it has a keyboard and mouse, I hardly use them – they seem alien and disconnected when a few gestures and screen handwriting (or even onscreen keyboard) work just fine.

Another example is robotics. Replacing humans on the International Space Station for spacewalks and repairs has been a goal of the Robonaut program. NASA chose a human analogue for the robot, intentionally mapping arms, hands, finger joints, and stereo cameras to the dimensions and actions of a human body. Although technically not the best solution, nor the simplest, they feel the intuitive Avatar effect will more than compensate in terms of learning curve and efficiency. Once this design is solid, it can be reused in other missions, and the strange sight of a human torso, arms, and head centaur-ed onto space probes and submersible robots may become common.

So why didn’t technology mimc us in the past (or even now)? technical limitations. Good design overcame some, but not all, especially as functioonality increased beyond what could be presented intuitively. A telephone from 1955? Easy to figure out. A telephone from 1995 office? Needs training, manual, and reference card just to check voicemail. A phone from 2010? Again, no training anymore. The technology caught up to the new functionality with voice dialing, touch interface and good UI design.

This is a constant race, though and expect there to be lulls and leaps in usability as functionality outstrips interface technology, and interfaces struggle to catch up.

The cost of interactivity beyond what we see on the web now is prohibitive, just like bonus content on a DVD, the easiest thing to add is ‘outtakes’ and in this case, the easiest thing to add is Social functions, as these require nothing more from the publisher than what they are used to producing. Interactivity beyond this is hampered by a lack of a common, simple-to-use standard, like Flash.

As magazines go digitial, the biggest hurdle will be one of apathy.

Publishers have waited for a secure, reliable, ‘universal’ platform to distribute their content, and now they have been given one on a colour LCD platter, however their lack of forthought may continue to haunt them, if all user’s get is a low resolution, nontactile version of the paper copy, or worse, a monetized version of the website they could have visited for (probably) free.

Is the next step for Wired to remove their website to assure income from the iPad magazine version, or to remove the free iPhone/android version from those market places?

monetization and security can lead to innovation, however market economics may also create a race to the bottom, where previously free content that attempts to remain innovative to stay ahead can now safely maintain status quo behind a paywall.

As one commenter said – Interactive magazine’s are also referred to as ‘web sites’.

Harvard Business Review

http://www.petapixel.com/2010/05/24/museum-of-london-releases-augmented-reality-app-for-historical-photos/

http://conference.archimuse.com/forum/congratulations_mw2010_best_web_winners

The ArtBabble project’s collaborative approach and it’s community-oriented approach made it an overall winner.

The ability to participate in producing the content, and not just being a passive viewer, was a key judging criteria. Users can be other museums and institutions, making a museum’s contribution online enhance the overall community.

That is a common discussion and one that could be had with a few copies of this in view:

(one possible) Hierarchy of Content [png image poster]

Of course this is just one way of organizing your thought process, and that process should be informed by the audience, venue, context, and many other variables. However, in general terms, this is the sort of scale against which many digital interactive projects are measured for their complexity and impact as tools of learning and engagement with an audience.

Too much of a good thing: science, history, people, places, demographics.

The bottle neck is not creativity and it is not volume of things to say -

It’s  creating experiences.

Here’s a great way to fail to engage a visitor to a new installation:

1. Grab some photos from the archive and scan them
2. Have the researcher write up a large, self-contained block of text describing the photos
3. Have the interactive developer create a thematic interface to present the photos
4. deploy to a computer in the installation area so that one person at a time can view the photos.

What’s wrong with this? Money:

A good way to measure success of an interactive is effective use time per session and total sessions. How many people spend how much time getting what they want out of an interface. If the app sits idle, it’s zero. If a Visitor spends 48 seconds figuring out the interface and then leaves because their interest threshold drops, it’s again zero. And with low interest and high cost, you are losing a game of dollars per engagement.

This interface loses to a dozen books printed on plastic paper and secure-wired throughout the display area (and in a cheaper version, available in the Shop). People don’t read screen text if they can avoid it, and people already know precisely how to use a book with its rich touch interface with tactile feedback.

However this hypothetical interface does win on some counts:

1. it is flexible – you can measure the most popular images and the way people use it using analytics, same as a web site. You can then adapt the content so that the most popular stuff is up front. If the developer used an engine-content model, it is even easier to modify the content using junior help.
2. It is redistributable – hopefully you’ve instructed your interface designer to make the app in some platform like HTML5 or Flash or Silverlight or Unity3D and work for multiple screen resolutions. Now your content is on your web site, and can be distributed to schools and shared across the broader museum/science center community.

So what CAN you do to improve the content and still leverage the advantages of digital media? How can you break out of the very common mindset of ‘publishing to the screen’ ?

A great way to start is to describe what your plan is to someone at the Center – maybe a guide or interpreter.  They know the Visitors up close and personally.

If you find yourself comparing it to some other medium that already exists physically, you better back up and reevaluate the content strategy. Here are a few examples:

• For our Human Body exhibit, we are using a touchscreen so that Visitors can assemble the organs like puzzle pieces.
  But: A real puzzle is potentially more satisfying that a virtual puzzle (tactile constraints are the basis of puzzle fitting). Simulating a puzzle in exchange for being able to put some sound or text on the screen is not winning any real advantage, and losing aspects of group interactivity
• For the Beaver Dam exhibit, we’ll use the computer station like a video player showing clips of how the animals interact from that documentary we got permission to use.
  But: simply creating a video player is a one-day job for your developer, and they know that of all the things that can be done with good footage, this is the most basic. An interface used as a playback interface would almost be eclipsed these days by the novelty of placing real tapes in a vintage VCR.
• For our aerodynamics exhibit, we’ll make an animation of a wind tunnel, sort of like that real wind tunnel that is out-of-budget for this fiscal.
  But: Animation is at it’s heart engaging and interesting for a time, but the interface is about interacting, and an animation is ‘hard coded’ – the Visitor can never change it, never get a feel for the variables that create the airflow.

See where this is going?

In each case, the idea is not at all bad – it could be  interesting and engaging if done properly. But is it harnessing the computer behind that touchscreen? One that can do more computations in a second that all those  performed by humanity from 5000 years?

One can. Let’s look at those same scenarios a bit differently: we will remove the ability for us to say “like”

• For our Human Body exhibit, we are using a touchscreen to show a skeleton which can be directed to do certain tasks, like run up stairs eat a hamburger. The Visitor can try attaching various organs and musculature to the skeleton and see which parts are needed to get the job done. They can also try and make a superhuman by adding extra or hypothetical or synthetic organs to the body to see what could be possible with prosthetics.
• For our Beaver Dam exhibit, the Visitors gather around a table interface that simulates a river and lake system. Multiple visitors can simultaneously take the role of the animals, building dams and gathering food for the winter. The dams affect the simulated watershed and Visitors’ actions will affect one another.
• For our aerodynamics exhibit, Visitor can fold paper airplanes using specially marked paper which can be tracked by a standard web camera system. The Visitor can put their airplane in a virtual wind tunnel that is made by projecting wind flow patterns as video on top of the model. If the visitor moves their model in the virtual wind flow, the patterns will immediately respond. The same camera system can then track the flight of a thrown airplane and calculate speed, distance, and flight path.

Sounds complicated? Yes, maybe, but for the computer system, with the right software, it is not. And the difference between great software and average software can be an engaging simulation – it’s the understanding that an interactive should not have one or two or even 100 ways of ending.

It is a collaboration and feedback loop between Visitors and model of the knowledge you want to share with them. Encoding that model means a bit of math, a bit of thought on creating a canvas on which visitors can create and collaborate. But it is possible with the right people and the right initial direction.

Simulate rather than tell, because learning is collaborative at its heart; it is understanding feedback and it is letting go of the steps of the process so that the much more valuable model of the process can be shared. So take that extra step beyond simulating a book or a VCR or a Puzzle or a piece of paper with writing on it. Make full use of the incredible capabilities that of-the-shelf technology offers to allow creation. Offer some rules, offer some feedback and offer some encouragement, and above all, be as surprised and pleased with what Visitors come up with as they are with the opportunities you gave them to discover.

Most interestingly? It is a computer-free zone, according to the museum’s founder.

It matters a lot. It matter for everything.

Action requires money, especially government action. To get the funding it requires branding, as a good idea will not stand on its own merits without being properly sold.

In fact, if you don’t at least put the same effort in branding and selling a good idea as selling a bad idea, people’s first reaction is, ‘they must not believe in this if they did not put in the prerequisate effort needed to give it a name and a logo.

It has to be catchy, not accurate.  It has to be universally understandable n even the shorted soundbite.

Preferably the acronym has to be a word which is associated with the project in a lateral sort of way.

A brand is something allies can get behind, too. It’s easier to champion, easier to delineate; what this means is that partners know what they are supporting and by extension, what they are not. It makes it easier to get people behind a clear idea, becasue there are fewer reservations that they are supporting something with gray areas.

So, the next time you want to push your education initiative up to levels with funding, make sure it has clear branding, something short, something sweet, something catchy, and something compelling. And make sure that this is the case from the simplest acronym on up to soundbites and logos. A great idea deserves a great package.

I bet it was not because of the incredible sensitivty of its spectrometers, but rather the images.

The images – the human part. The part when photons, electron, electromagnetic waves and silicon conspire to share with us something in the language we know – the language of our senses – as if we were there.

Science, discovery and learning have everything to do with connecting to people – otherwise you might as well stick it all in crates and ship it to the warehouse scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

James Cameron uses science as a starting point and technology as a tool – he knows, possibly better than anyone alive, the value of not just making discoveries, but of sharing them with everyone.

That is why he is lobbying NASA (and NASA does listen to JC) to put 3D cameras on the latest mars rover.

A duplicate camera is needed to get human-like stereo vision on the rover – two cameras = two eyes = 3D. But camera #2 adds cost, weight, and cost, as well as power consumption and more failure points. Believe me, engineers hate that, especially when there are milliwatts of power to be budgeted to achieve maximum science.

But what we get is something unique. The cameras will allow anyone – that is anyone without a PhD in exogeology – to be on Mars. The cameras are at human eye level, and spaced like human eyes. when you look at stereo images from them, you might as well be standing next to the Rover. With the upcoming ubiquity of 3D display, and an expected lifetime from this rover of 5 or more years, and with the realization that NASA is about wonder as much as science, JC’s lobby seems a valid one.

Expect these 3D images to be included in science museum interactives to be shown before 3D movies, and to appear on parallax-gated 3D game displays.

JAXA, the Japanese space agency showed with recent highdef moon footage what we miss when we put every bit of nadwidth towards science and leave nothing to outreach. Both are necessary and both support one-another.

16GB of cards

backup/b-cam HD camcoder

wireless mic setup and ambient/shotgun mic

Single off-camera strobe

17-55 f/2.8

50 f/1/.8

70-200 f/4

two tripods

Misc:
tape: duct, packing, gaffer,
scissors or multitool
extension cord
extra AAs
gel set orange and green for flash
facecloth or hand towel for people, gear
water bottle!

What is saved:

off camera lighting for video – ambient is now good enough and fits the more natural look that is demanded

extra HD cam with wide-angle adapter

extra batteries (7D does quite well on one batt)

extra slave flash (since 7D built-in flash can trigger it off camera)

computer (since review of focus etc is so good on the 1 million-dot LCD on the 7D

That said, this is the ‘light’ kit, and I’d bring an extra strobe, brella+stand, macbookpro (good batt life) and a hotlight or two as well as chargers and A/C gear if it were an all-day shoot.

The equipment is so good that working light does not mean working at a deficit, except of course for skill in interviewing and framing a shot!

Tricks:

Know the manual controls on your camera – especially the focus ring direction.

mount the mic wireless receiver to the hotshoe of the DSLR

Charge everything the night before, bring the chargers and a power bar if its a long shoot

bring a notepad and a sharpie – write the shot  description on the pad, hold it up to the cam – its a clapper board.

keep a collapsed tripod on the DSLR when shooting video to act as a pendulum stabilizer. A Gorilla-type tripod can be articulated into your favorite DSLR video support for a given situation, too, or:

ChestPod: Good for taking the handshakes out but leaving the handheld look intact:

Don’t expect hollywood, expect real – emulate the eye.

Don’t shoot if 60fps unless you expect top slow the vid down later. 24fps is more movie-film-like. Although the eye can regiuster 60fps, this gets you into the classic too-smooth interlaced VCR camcorder look that is instantly recognizable as such.

Reduce shutter speed to a minimum for a given frame rate in video – this provides maximum smooth motion blur. For example, shooting 30fps, make sure the shutter is 1/30 sec and adjust ISO to compensate. This is aside from shallow depth-of-field and low noise is the main improvement in DSLR video over HD cams.

Finally, you will be shooting manually to really get what you want. Know how the manual controls work, and understand that autofocus and autoexposure are not there anymore, and that the shoot has to be planned accordingly.

June 12th: A change in the TOS that may be of benefit to unity developers over at Slashdot

Lee Brimelow’s article:

http://theflashblog.com/?p=1888

ars technica’s take:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/apple-takes-aim-at-adobe-or-android.ars

Joe Berkovitz’s impressions at a philisophical level (“When does programming really start?”):
http://joeberkovitz.com/blog/2010/04/08/apple-takes-stance-on-consciousness/

Unity3D’s official Blog (applies to monotouch and the compile-to-allowed languages case, which may be different than Adobe’s methods in Packager):
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/04/10/unity-and-the-iphone-os-4-0/

and an update, May 11th:

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/05/11/unity-and-the-iphone-os-4-0-update-ii/

37 Signal’s Take, especially Point #3, is really interesting:
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2273-five-rational-arguments-against-apples-331-policy

MonoTouch’s official take on things (affects unity3D):
http://monotouch.net/

Tweet tags I’m following: #331 #unity3d #monotouch

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5QSclrIdlE

What this really means is that everyone who takes a picture is now adding to the 3D geometry of a world map. No waiting for the Streetview (or Bingview) car to drive by.

It also means maps that can be iused in 4D – time now being seen as the datestamp of the images that make up the Photosynth imagery.

Making the web more interesting and accessible and engaging is by no means a zero-sum game where you have to take a bite out of someone else’s business to make an impression. Some competition never hurts, as long as it is done in such a way that it provides more options to developers and end users, and not more barriers and walled gardens.

Specifically, the Silverlight versus Flash debate that now manifests mainly in web video streaming. Simply put: as a company with massive R&D you should not have to ‘win back market share’ in the most dynamic and creative and vibrant market space ever to exist.

For example, Silverlight could beat Flash at hardware 3D, or better random-access streaming (without a dedicated media server), or a better install and update experience, or improved audio interface and control, or better core libraries (imagine Natal image processing built into webcam functions), or more seamless desktop integration (drag and drop to make a desktop app?). Rather than simply have a slightly different video codec or IDE, both of which have little impact on user experience

There are a lot of shortcomings and strengths that can be played off, without having the ‘advantage’ of being the same as your competitor , except for the right-click menu items. Microsoft has shown willingness to innovate with Natal and Surface and Photosynth. An example of skirting close to me-too, however, is somewhat apparent in the video service for Vancouver 2010…

CTV is the ‘official network of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics’ &tc,  and behind this tagline they are packing the full live streaming capabilities they have become well versed in through their specialty channels streaming systems.

They have tested Silverlight versus Flash before and gone back to flash as a primary video delivery vehicle, however Microsoft chooses their battles carefully, and have arranged for Silverlight to be the main video player within the CTV Olympic presence online (and Bing as the internal site search, branded as msn)

Interestingly the pages combine Flash for infographics and dynamic content, Silverlight for main video streaming and AJAX for navigation systems.

Microsoft hosted an event to draw special attention to Silverlight’s role (which was likely subsidized in terms of technology support) at this event at CES. Notably, the Silverlight home page makes no mention of them being the official video player for the Olympics via the CTV network, however the Microsoft Canada website has it front and center.

However, they did not do a full Flash Replacement solution for the sites, rather choosing only the Video Player plugin itself as their storefront. This requires that user have Silverlight 3, Flash 9 at a minimum, and Silverlight is not necessarily compatible with Chrome browser, according to the pop-ups on the site.

Some Ideas: “If I had access to MS R&D and Marketing…”

• An incredible Photosynth gallery of the opening ceremonies in cooperation with all the professional photographers present.
• Add to the user experienceby using dynamic streaming system to power ’360degree’ cameras at the events, allowing users to pan and zoom a synthetic camera of their own, combining this with the hardware 3D acceleration of the Photosynth plug-in.
• The relatively controlled hardware and recording environment of an Olympics would have allowed them to put Surface in the announcer studios to do unique recaps with 3D maps of venues much like Avatar interfaces (Winter sports are inherently more 3D than summer sports)
• Allow fans at the venues to interact via Natal technology with the sports experience in a more active way. Rather than waiving a few signs, they could be tracked via their Official Red Olympic Mitts and mass crowd actions could be mapped to the big display screens as collaborative mini games.
• Olympic branded XBox games with real-time telemetry of athletes to compete against as the event is being watched and immediately after. Head to head with an Olympian in Skeleton Racing seconds after or even during the real run would be groundbreaking.

All this is possible and all this could have made Silverlight and Microsoft something totally unique and desirable. Microsoft has all the tools to do this and walk away from the competition. They have the resources to take these risks, the close relationship with networks and hardware vendors, and access to living rooms all over North America via XBox Live. They are known for not attempting to enter a market until it has reached a certain critical size, but they are not engaging in good citizenship by simply entering without something really unique to contribute from the user perspective.

From a market share-grabbing tactical perspective, locking in the video player makes a lot of sense, however the web is not composed of people that appreciate great tactical victories – it is composed of people that want a better experience, and expect the site they access tomorrow to be more immersive and interesting than it is today. I am aware that Silverlight has a different feature set with unique integrated capabilities, but those advantages must be bundled with a killer interface app where the user can say to themselves, ‘This Silverlight is pretty neat – I didn’t know you could do that online’. It may be the conservative nature of the broadcast client, however I personally doubt that considering that broadcasters are in such tight competition that any advantage in sports content delivery could make the difference.

I suppose you could wrap this up by drawing a comparison to the Olympics themselves: everyone coming together to compete in a spirit of camaraderie for the ‘enbiggenment’ of all. There is no better place to test new user interaction than this, and no better time. By the time the 2012 Olympics roll around, these ideas will have been done and done, and at this rate, it could be anybody who accomplishes it.

(And if you think we have it bad in web development land now, just imagine what it was like to have incompatible and competing electricity grids.)

Some links on the latest dynamic streaming capabilities of Flash and Silverlight:

Adobe on Dynamic Streaming with FMS 3.5 with H.264

VideoVantage on Silverlight Smooth Streaming with their MPEG4 wrapper

The official website has a great video on the down and dirty pixels n’ pantone behind the design concept for the  Olympic:

http://www.vancouver2010.com/olympic-videos/transmoflection_89280ut.html

An interview with the lead designer, who passed away too young last year:

http://www.shift.jp.org/en/archives/2008/09/leo_obstbaum.html

This is process and feelings view of the product/service (“p/s”). How did the client feel about the work done? How did they engage and what was it like to meet the challenges? How did the client feel after the work was done and what in turn did the work do for their self-image and process?

These are all about relationship and process.

“Implicational”

An example that ‘brings to ground’ some conceptual topic. If your p/s is not serving coffee or bulldozers, chances are you could really benefit from these types of examples. For example: your client sells consulting services and products for ‘Smart Energy Grids’. Examples of energy usage would work very well here. Show a lamp, show a wind turbine, show and electric car – show how they work together with your client’s product.

These examples are about clarity and tangibility.

Flash, Silverlight, Objective C, HTML5. There is a crisis and a factions are forming – who’s going to win the ubiquity prize? If you are a Flash developer, are you a silverlight developer? what skills are common, what will go ‘extinct’ if you switch, or if HTML5 comes along and finishes off both delivery mechanisms?

It’s pretty damn confusing when you have to bet your skillset on the matter.

Speaking to a technical lead from Magmic at the Game Day conference this weekend, they see the sharp end of this problem every day – and take it in stride – mobile platforms reintroducing the browser/plugin/standards war and add into the mix issues with screen size, screen resolution, and processing power, as well as territoriality (i.e. no Flash on certain platforms). Their solution is on the industrial side – they learn to analyze, port, cross compile, refactor as needed, and automate as much of that process as possible.

I think more and more development tools will allow this as well. Flash IDE has had the FlashLite emulators for some time, and various versions of Flash could be considered different compilation targets. It was not a big stretch to see them implementing the iPhone target, and most likely they will have to continue this trend to stay relevant as a platform and an IDE.

The Flash Player was and is the promise of a good middleware layer that hid the hardware/OS/Browser  incompatibilities from the developer, but now it is looking like the IDE will have to do this at compile time as well.

This is primarily due to Apple – not just their refusal to allow Flash in mobile Safari, but because of the success of the App Store model. In the mobile space, Flash and similar rich media players could really shine, but it is true that locating them within browser chrome in an already cramped screen does not do the platform or the developer justice. Adobe is already aware of this, and Air was the answer to a desktop ‘App’.

HTML5? It may just become another Compile target for Flash Platform IDE and Expression Studio and Eclipse. Microsoft had the right idea with Visual Studio and .net – write in your favorite language. The other end of this equation is: compile to your favorite target.

Put these two together and make it transparent to the developer and everyone benefits.

Interesting Article at Anthony Franco’s Blog on the pace of change in this space, and singles out Unity3D for taking the most pragmatic approach and showing what is possible – most likely since they have nothing to lose on hardware, app stores, or prior install base – and everything to gain.

We’re in a fragmentation cycle and as developers we have to rely on software architecture and UX skills more than ever, with the platform-dependent issues making these step even more critical to a successful outcome. What hurts everyone is closing a platform with legal means – it does no credit to your platform to refuse talented people from taking advantage of it without committing to your proprietary development tool chain and language; the time for that is never again, thanks!

Enabled by technologies in image processing such as optical flow, a company in Ottawa has been releasing mass-interaction games under the CrowdWave brand. Check out some demos here.

How do they do it?

One method is Optical Flow detection using a natural feature identification system like SIFT or SURF. Here’s a demo video of on person being tracked realtime.

Aside from the technicals, what is unique here is that the technology matches the venue so well. Crowd unity is what it’s all about; this catalyzes the crowd and captures that classic impression that fans influences the game by making it really tangible. Nintendo did the same thing with Wii control – all it took was for someone to notice the movements people make when holding a controller are arm movements, not just fine thumb/finder movements. Scaling the interface to match the audience is always good practice.

The web is not TV: Avatars break the web contract unless used very carefully.

Why is the web different from TV in this case? The TV contract of talking heads, sound, voice is signed when the ON button is pressed. Not so with the Web. What is the Web contract?

- No talking unless I say so – you should be able to articulate your idea without sound initially
- I start the interaction, you can prompt me with animation and some sound effects or an introductory story, but not a small talking person.

- Avatars are typically Cheesy – which is the term used when something was used in the past strictly because it had wow factor, not inherent usability value. Having a greenscreen character walk or beam onto a portion of the site restricts site layout and simply does not have the payoff that a dedicated video window has. If the whole site is video, that fine, but combining a CSS-typ layout with an Avatar is a kludge trying to bridge two different media.

What is the Avatar’s contribution? Are they interactive with a branching script line based on interactivity? Are they familiar from other media in the marketing or content (ie. Do they have star power or tie-in) ? Are they part of the product itself?

An avatar has to have a very good reason to be included on a site, and has to be executed as a focus of attention and not a Christmas decoration in the corner of the site. People expect the Avatar to be different that TV – it has to respond or be interactive, moreso that Clippy!

[image from whirlingturban.com]

The diagram here is an engineering schematic of a feedback loop. The triangle is an amplifier or signal generator, like your stereo, or your creative or coding output. Engineers have learned since the 1840s that the output of any signal source is best controlled and targeted and refined through the use of feedback – in this case the wire going from the output of the triangle back to its input via a black box. You use this every day when you move a mouse around the screen – visual feedback- try closing your eyes and clicking a button in Photoshop to get a feel for a world without feedback.

Now, why the black box? What is it doing to the creative output before sending it back into the creative input?

It could be a creative director, a UX designer, a focus group, or a client. Often, though, it is simpler than that.

A 1 minute conversation about your project with anyone (doesn’t have to be a potential user of the content, nor a fellow UX media developer) is a good thing. In fact, the more differentiation, the better. They can be the black box.

Blinding common sense or inspiration are both products of thinking along a different track. By definition, you are too close to the project to see things obvious to those outside it. If you need a different take on things, it’s not going to come from thinking harder. A new perspective comes from new people much more easily than it will come from you.

Self Limiting Realism

During implementation and execution, you typically find the devils in the details that threaten to throw an initial creative direction off track. Solving the details tends to close the mind a little to the big picture and possibly better solutions. You can also become protective of work already invested in a direction that may be better put aside for a fresh approach. It takes someone outside looking in to make these tough decisions sometimes and to let you know when you are spinning your wheels with a small detail when the effort could have more impact elsewhere.

Have you ever worked on a detrail of a design or implementation, and then had someone have a look at the project and be wowed by the simplest element of it? The one you put in in 5 minutes, and not the one you spent 5 hours on? That’s perspective, and in this line of work (creative media and UX deisgn) the person looking over your shoulder should be listened to, as they are ultimately more like the end user of your product than you may be.

So, call your mom, have her look at the design. Find someone unlikely, find someone without a peice of their time or pride on the line, who can offer you the very valuable design tool of First Impression.

2016. Read more here . Originally from a Slashdot submission)

A good overview of the situation can be found here. Worth a read if you are encoding video for flash:

http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/h264-royalties-what-you-need-to-know.html

(I don’t know if they are affiliated with any of the organizations or license holders)

Adobe’s Q&A on the subject as it pertains to Flash. The language is a bit ominous, and this might affect any sites you work on after 2010, and possibly retroactively. The trouble is, noone knows what the license holder of H.264 has in mind, and how they will deal with vendors such as Adobe:

http://labs.adobe.com

Wikipedia has a good overview of Flash Video technologies as well, including Sorenson and On2:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Video

Zoomify, Deepzoom have an OSS counterpart : openZoom. Check it out here for code and implementation details:

http://openzoom.org/

A good demo is here:

http://www.deuterror.org/dtr.html

fitc.ca/media

I found was that my current macbook pro has only the 9400m graphics card – this has the side effect of reducing power consumption in win 7, as it has been anecdotally said that win 7 under bootcamp will run the high performance 9600gt flat out without adequate power management. For what I do, primarily Adobe and light 3D, and not Crysis, the 9600 had no real advantage or necessity.

Battery Life? In power saver mode for win7 and 50% screen brightness on a 15″ chassis, it is looking much better than the 1-2 hours some people have mentioned. After an hour, the battery is showing 70%

Photography could be considered a design tool. It is a lot more interactive than you might think at first; thinking of it like an instantaneous recording device is like thinking of Photoshop as a mouse movement recorder.  And unlike Photoshop, your own photography has features such as:

• Photo-realism (hooray)
• 3D perspective and lighting changes
• Interactive subject  and background repositioning
• Re-positionable and fully rigged 3D characters with realistic shaders
• Custom fill textures
• Rapid prototyping with production quality and print resolution
• No licensing issues (compared to stock).

Prototyping a site around a photo or photo style can be liberating compared to grids; let the photos out of the box, literally. The form and composition of a photo or photo style can in turn inform the design of a site and even its interactivity.

Humans are visual first, and the web is a visual medium. By thinking about a site as imagery first, and not imagery last, one can push past convention into something unique and different. And best of all, you won’t get stuck in stock photo hunting purgatory!

check it out from developmentarc.com

A JSX script file written for use in Photoshop to get back one part of the functionality lost when Image Ready went away. There is no other way in the CS3 workflow that I can find to export many layers of a file to transparent PNG24s: not in Fireworks, not by importing the PSD into Flash (there are matte/edge artifacts) and not in the default Photoshop scripts (the closest they come is TIFF with no transparency). Considering how often this comes up in the Flash workflow, I thought the link above was a big time saver. Just remember to reload Photoshop once the script is installed in [program path]\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS3\Presets\Scripts

Sidenote: Of course nothing is easy: the transparency attribute of the PNGFileOptions object for PSD+JSX doesn’t do what you’d think, not without extra JavaScript, which fortunately is in this JSX file.

I’ll be installing PS CS4 shortly and we’ll see how the Photoshop->Flash workflow is for that system.  Thanks to Jeffrey Tranberry for writing it.

Flash demand comparison

One graph says a lot! Good thing iPhone SDK and Flash IDE will become a low barrier jump (soon)

Unity 3D is a lightweight browser plug-in/activeX control and a very capable IDE. It is 3D-centric, meaning the IDE looks almost like a single-pane 3D editor with a scene builder area and a behavior (code) editor….Code is assigned to 3D objects and can be written in C#, javascript and other languages. I’ve tested it with 10,000 polygon models with shading and it is perfectly smooth. Simply put, none of the 3D performance issues we run into with Flash are present in this plugin and the optimizations going from your 3D creation to game/world  implementation are minimized – things simply look great and chomp at the bit to run at 60fps. Sounds, buttons, and video integration are in the latest version, which features an IDE for both Mac and Windows. The Indie version goes for around $400-$500 with a fixed pre-load screen as it’s only branding, and the 30-day trial is fully functional. Applications can be released as standalone mac/win or for the browser plugin.

Overall it is a very straightforward and empowering tool to work with – the usual limits have been removed without the introduction of more complexity.

Details are still pending, but it opens up that platform to a lot of talented developers who didn’t need to learn yet another platform and IDE, and it’s not at all a bad compromise if the Apps have a good web, system, and GUI connect API (and it seems they will). This meshes with the announcement that 10.1 will also support multi-touch. Exciting stuff: here’s a quick link

More: Adobe Labs Link

The idea of a SM comes into play when you have even a slightly complex application, in which there are sequences of screens, game pause and play, pop-ups, leveling events and so on. Managing how the app responds and keeping track of where it is at can get messy in a hurry. Using the Model-View-Controller patterns, you can manage this complexity, maybe saving a few hours of debugging (or days).

This simple state matching code snip shows how you can change game states using a ‘jump table’ effectively a simple object array that leverages the .call() method of function, allowing us to call a function from a string of its name.

A full example is on its way, but for now I wanted to get the idea out there:

private function sm(s1:Number){
	jtrace("SM -> s0:"+gameState+" s1:"+s1);
	//uses currState, changes is, calls appropriate transition function
	var tbl=[
                {s0:INTRO,		s1:VIEW_HELP,		f1:"showHelp"},
	        {s0:VIEW_HELP,		s1:INTRO,		f1:"hideHelp"},
		{s0:ENTER_HISCORE,	s1:INTRO,		f1:"updateHiscores",		f2:"closeHiscores"},
		{s0:PRELOADING,	        s1:INTRO,		f1:"setupIntroScreen"},
		{s0:LEVEL_STARTING,     s1:INTRO,		f1:"abortLevel",			f2:"setupIntroScreen"},
		{s0:INTRO,		s1:LEVEL_STARTING,	f1:"startNewLevel",		f2:"hideIntro"},
		{s0:LEVEL_STARTING,     s1:LEVEL_PLAYING,	f1:"resumeGame"},
		{s0:LEVEL_PLAYING,	s1:GAME_END,		f1:"setupGameFinish"},
		{s0:GAME_END,		s1:INTRO,		f1:"startGame"},
		{s0:GAME_END,		s1:ENTER_HISCORE,	f1:"setupIntroScreen",		f2:"showHiscore"},
		{s0:LEVEL_PLAYING,	s1:LEVEL_PAUSED,  	f1:"pauseGame",			f2:"setupIntroScreen"},
		{s0:LEVEL_PAUSED,	s1:LEVEL_PLAYING,	f1:"resumeGame",			f2:"hideIntro"},
		{s0:LEVEL_PLAYING,	s1:LEVEL_END,		f1:"showLevelling",		f2:"doTallies"},
		{s0:LEVEL_END,		s1:LEVEL_STARTING,	f1:"startNewLevel"}
		];

	var i:Number;
	var j:Number;
	var func:Boolean=true;
	for(j=0;j s0:"+gameState+" s1:"+s1+" found at index:"+j);
			if( tbl[j].f1!=null ) this[tbl[j].f1].call();
			if( tbl[j].f2!=null ) this[tbl[j].f2].call();
			if( tbl[j].f3!=null ) this[tbl[j].f3].call();
			if( tbl[j].f4!=null ) this[tbl[j].f4].call();
			if( tbl[j].f5!=null ) this[tbl[j].f5].call();
			gameState=s1;
			return;
		}//if
	}//for
	jtrace("no SM action found on s0:"+gameState+" s1:"+s1);
}//func

This is essentially a hard-coded implementation, and a really nice implementation of a State Machine library was pointed out to me by its author, Cassio, at

http://github.com/cassiozen/AS3-State-Machine

• The Opera Wii API for tilit detection and other Wii specific input modes
• Flash upgrade from 7 to Lite 3 (effectively Flash 9 minus AS3 VM)
• Multiple player input via wii controllers (up to 4)

Here is a demo of the tilt API using the canvas object in Opera:

http://devfiles.myopera.com/articles/149/wiicanvasgame.html

Info on the Opera Wii API (requires Opera dev user account):
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/the-wii-remote-api/

Information on Flash Lite 3
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashlite/

3D Flash and Wii

I would put this on the backburner for now because:

• Wii processor is only a PPC chip clocked at ~730MHz, no harware acceleration available for flash
• Flash Lite is limited to AS2 and while there are legacy 3D engines written in AS2, their performance is typically not adequate.

Writing Flash games for Wii (in progress, details subject to change!)

API Javascript call back tie in’s
So far, it looks like a standard ExternalInterface tie-in will work. Specific details to follow

game dimensions – Opera/Wii screen dimensions – Wii is not HD, is interlaced, so assuming widescreen anamorphic and some Opera browser chrome, we are looking at around 640*448 or less

frame rates – since this is interlace, there are 60 fields per second output. If the game runs at 60 fps (which may tax the Wii) that should be the max noticable.

server connectivity and security – Server connectivity works as a standard browser. SharedObject status is not determined at this point.

http://hubflanger.com/stage-resize-and-the-stagewidth-and-stageheight-properties/

FITC Edmonton Runs Oct 16-18th with a great line-up of speakers. Conference is on 17-18th with a “what’s new in CS4″ workshop by Lee Brimelow on the 16th or a Papervision 3D workshop.

A few days here is worth a few weeks with a bunch of (excellent) O’Reilly manuals when it comes to being pulled (not pushed) into new and exciting territory, and the speakers, of course, are the best.

Here are the event and ticket details.

See you there.

Check out the tutorial here

Photosynth is a microsoft project that merges many 2D photos by calculating the position, orientation, and camera charactereistics of each photo relative to other, overlapping photos. Images are matched by finding common features in two overlapping images, much like panoramic stitching software – the difference is the plug-in viewer, which has an intuitive exploration mode and also maps out a sparse 3D image of the total scene by depositing pixels in 3D space where significant image features are found.  The key to this is Feature Detection that is scale, rotation, illumination, and perspective independent, so that an image of, say, a statue, can be found in multiple photos, regardless of the time of day, position, relative size, and rotation of the camera. It’s of course not perfect, but it is quite robust, with the one ‘disadvantage’ being the initial time it takes to create a photosynth environment from the initial photos. This fortunately does not impact download or playback performance as it is a one-time computation.

Reality is much different. And for you, that is a good thing.

The golden rule is: expect to contribute more, do more, and give more. In the end, you will get more. Here’s why:

+ You will have to be creative, coming up with answers because no one can know all the question in advance. If you have a question, chances are you can offer at least part of the answer or solution, so don’t just stop when something isn’t crystal clear – often the person that finds the issue is best qualified to solve it!

+ You will have to be ready to sit with the end client and communicate clearly and concisely as part of the team, even if you are ‘just’ a freelancer whose client is technically the agency

+ You will have to manage people you don’t “own” – if you are contracted as a technical expert in a specific field, the reality is that you be much more useful to yourself and the project if you know how to manage people and in turn, be managed. Remember that the Agency is not just hiring a technical expert, but a team member, and you should be acting as such from the start.

+ Know the process and if you see holes, fill them in – sometimes an agency has to quickly assemble a team for a project and the leadership, creative direction, or some other role is not embodied in one person, but as ‘a little bit from everyone’  Not ideal, but it is often the reality. Be ready to contribute to the Project, not just the deliverable by understanding that Step One is assuring there are no gaps in the creative or technical process. This is as big a part of your value as the actual technical skill you bring to the table – as a freelancer, you have seen many processes and know when something is missing!

Above all, remember that the Agency’s client is your client, too. If you are meeting your role exactly 100% and no more, chances are that someone else hasn’t lined up the next person’s role to start exactly where yours has stopped. Be prepared to offer overlap to make sure things go smoothly.

Finally, provide the client with a post-mortem of the project – where you had additional ideas for a phase II, where you thought communication or process could be improved, where you saw innovative ideas and solid perfomrnace. This is as much a part of your deliverable as the final product itself. Don’t just be “technically” right, help everyone get it right. If you find yourself getting stretched, well, that’s how you grow.

Click to launch

I built this while at FITC Toronto.  The Speakers were quite motivating, I guess!

Click to load, once loaded, click to start. Mouse control only (maybe the control is a bit too realistic, in that it takes some time to master the roll and pitch)

The goal is to flyby all the red markers in minimum time. The fighter uses realistic elevator and aileron controls, so it is tricky to fly at first and gives an appreciation of what pilots have to master. Of course, flying in 3rd person rather than first person adds to the issue!

Details on implementation:

This is a quick minigame I put together using a low poly CF-18 hornet (about 250 polys and 3 textures). It uses a few tricks available in Away3D (and of course papervision):

1) Skybox 6 – a few lines of code to generate an environment – this is not an interactive, but rather a good way to provide a player with orientation information with a relatively low CPU overhead.Just make sure to not enable skybox.quarterFaces(), as the extra overhead of perspective correction slows things down significantly

2) using Max3DS.load to load a file generated in 3DSMax. Collada works, too, but this is legitimate workflow as many 3D artists work in MAX and debugging a Collada export is one additional step that can be eliminated.

3) Use simple lighting – a single light source affects a a single texture in the rendering: specifically the black engine nozzles – this gives some illusion of full lighting and environment without the overhead.

4) Use the springcam class in away3D – it is necessary to set the spring constant very low and mass constant high in order to make the camera really lag behind the fighter. The goal was to see the fighter in as many angles as possible. Very useful class that sames a lot of chase cam coding. It does have some issues with “gyro tumbling” in full 3D motion.

5) Using object3D control relative to the frame of reference of the controlled Object – all this means is that we use MoveForward() to incrementally move the fighter forward, and fighter.pitch() and fighter.yaw(), rather than universal frame of reference motion controls. This saves alot of matrix math.

6) Keep collision detections to a minimum – in this case there are 10 per frame, but it can escalate quickly. Fortunately the Away3D algorithm uses threshold radius from centroid of objects, rather than bounding boxes.

There are alot of directions this can go with flash. Just knowing that 1000 polygones and a skybox is possible at this resolution opens up quite a few possibilities.

Check it out at NASA

check it out

A List Apart

Recently in a meeting with clients and an marcomm agency, the agency salesperson mentioned that “our flash guy can fill this whole section with some eye candy”, which is not the best way to encourage a client to invest sums of money in an engaging flash peice on the front end of their site. Ensuring impact, ROI etc. became necessary in the subsequent quotation process.

ALA’s article “In Defence of Eye Candy jumps into the fray not by justifying the flash as ‘useful, enticing, encouraging the user to engage fully”, but instead takes the position that the essentially human qualities must be addressed in any interface to promote use, not just meet usability requirements.

The interface is a human experience, generated by humans via code, and really, there is no reason to take efficiency as an ends if it does not prompt the right emotions in a user. It is called User Experience for a reason after all, and is not always a race to see what interface gets the user to the desird target content or activity in the least clicks or least time (a usual way of getting quant metrics of website UX)

Check it out, and get their take on “Aesthetics and affect”

People prefer to work collaboratively through kiosk content. The sales expert and client both benefit from a shared experience in navigation. The expert can drive the application confidently, much like a good performer with her favorite, say, viola, while the customer benefits from the queued interaction, the multimedia mixed with a personal experience, and the opporunity to explore sub-areas of the interactive. Used here in a luxury environment to sell something that is certainly not a necessity, but really, really nice. In this niche, the purchasing experience is very much a part of the overall product image and ownership experience, not just a compare and select excercise. 

This video and supporting article were posted to the fascinating ablogtoread watch blog run by Ariel Adams

Union is a development platform for creating multiuser applications. It includes the Union Server, a multiuser communications server, and Reactor, a framework for creating Adobe Flash client applications.

There is a great introduction and coding tutorial as well.

Thanks to James Ward!

Ryan Coleman's Talk - excerpt

Ryan Coleman’s presentation at FITC Toronto this year is really interesting.

Check it out here at the Centennial of Flight Website. Air Force commission to present highlights of the last 100 years of Canadian aviation as a flash piece. The result was very received by Air Force, and we hope to add more content top the timeline throughout 2009! Check out some details in the project section.

Includes some well-worn-in favorites, like the wbk.ca website. Have a look and let me know if you have any questions about the Flash implementation,

interlace effects

Interlacing smooths out motion (perceptually) by showing your eye alternate horizontal lines offset from eachother by one line. What we see here is the a frame grab from an interlaced video, and two possible deinterlaced interpretations of it. These are created by taking every second horizontal  line and duplicating it offset by one line vertically. If you start on line 0, we are deinterlacing on the even fields, and if you start on line 1, we are deinterlaing on the odd fields. Either way, it prevents that ghosting on web video but reduces resolution somewhat. This shouldn’t matter too much to us since we typically downsize web video anyways.

What works for me, anyways is to produce and edit the video in native resolttion, and if interlaced, keep it that way. This applies to after effects and premiere pro etc.

Make sure the motion graphics mixed in with the footage are interlaced if the fotage is, otherwise the downstream deinterlacer on Flash Media Encoder (or whatever) will try to deinterlace what is effectively progressive video, which does not look nice.

As a flash developer, you get asked to encode a heap of video files, and the best assurance of quality is to be aware of the problems that might affect quality and test, test, test. And test.

For example:

Using On2′s compression, it is desirable to meet a few criteria:

1) Make sure the dimensions of your final flv are all multiples of 16 pixels

2) Don’t squish or stretch the video while doing this. (well, noticeable, mostly when dealing with talking heads, its visually better to squish a little horizontally than stretch)

If your input is:
720×480 (old fashioned DV or DVD 4:3): Check what the pixel ratio is: if it’s 0.9 – its 4:3, if it’s 1.2, it’s widescreen

Some good flv sizes for old 4:3 are:
640×480
512×384
480×320
320×240

If your input is:
1920×1080 (16:9 wide-screen/HD)

Some good flv sizes are:
1280×720 (also another source video size)

854×480
768×432
640×360
512×288
320×180
256×144 (why so small?)

It is important too that your FLV player matches these dimensions or fits one of them (bigger or smaller) to look good. If you are not playing a video back at native resolution (and usually you are not due to BW constraints), test out video smoothing to see if the result is worth the extra CPU load. I usually drop from 30fps to 24fps for a film look and use the same bandwidth to get more detail into each frame (or interframe etc)

As for non square pixels? This is assuming square pixels, simple as that. Many HD cams and formats meet the letter of the law by having 1080p or or some other marketing number in the specs, but then skimp on the number of horizontal pixels (say 1440), so put simply, do a few second test render in your pipeline when dealing with new footage before commiting a bunch of video to rendering and compression and committing yourself to waiting….and waiting only to see things are not as you would have hoped.

More on video formats like h.264, On2, and Sorrenson can be found in this post

http://www.mail-archive.com/away3d-dev@googlegroups.com/msg00323.html

Working on a Thesis for wind tunnel flow visualization with pressure sensitive paints and reconstructed 3D has had me thinking about the role of of organic procedural generation in interactivity. Without a specific game goal except change, simple physical rules and subcomponments can be assembled by the player in a kinetic interface (i.e. on that moves and evolves in an animated fashion, conserving energy and momentum in an intuitive, physical way).

Jenova Chen’s Masters thesis flOw is a perfect and now classic example of interactive procedural generation. Check it out, and read the instructions,

The mechanics of the execution can be composed of:

1. Mouse follower algorithm with segment trailing
2. animation loops for atomic components (individual “cells”)
3. collision behavior for each cell (i.e. mouth component with any other cell)
4. Rendering of current depth level and lower level (separated by guassian blur)
5. organism behavior rules (i.e. chase food, random walk)

The exploration aspect of the game is very interesting:

1. how will my organism evolve as it eats and interacts?
2. How will the variety of new cellular components and oranisms change as I explore deeper?

Often these two aspects of an interactive are found together – exploration and growth through environmental interaction. This is effectively a plot line, in this case procedurally generated, meaning no two game sessions will be exactly the same – this makes replay value high.

This was for fun as a client thank you email header – procedural generation of a snowflake. Each one will be unique with constraints based on wind shear, growth temperature and growth time – all user controllable. The algorithm uses a vector shape as a seed and an initially ‘perfect’ snowflake edge that is recursively randomized, then mirrored and rotated to make a 6-point symmetry. If you are interested I can post the algorithm.

Try it out

My Aircraft Bio for Canada’s Air Force. Had a great time with this one. Most interesting part was mapping our interior photos to the interior texture maps of the model. Great work AL!

Check it out, especially if you wonder how Canada gets freight trains worth of humanitarian and mil equipment around the world:

Check out the project page

The crews loved it for its accuracy. “Fantastic”

IDEO’s David Kelly (or is it his?)  has some great examples in his TED appearance. Entertaining? A talk about human centered design should be anything but dry.

Human-machine communication and interaction that is intuitive means experiencing the machines and information the same way we use our hands and our senses – a lower learning curve results since the same skills you used in real life apply to the interface and to control. It sees only recently that processing power can do this. We even see this in Flash with with rhe port of openCV with FLAR toolkit.

It can be more than that, though. Cleverness and good designgo hand in hand, and applying common sense usability can pay dividends – in fact it seems the common sense is what defines usability.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXndL3TNCmo

Once you start working in a 3D environment, it is hard to go back. It is also hard to get started sometimes. Papervision 1.5, Papervision 2.0, and Away3D have all been tried for client projects, and for now, I like the stability and ease-fo-use of Away 3D. The projects are in the process of merging, at least in terms of the API, and new native 3D rendering capabilities of Flash 10 are being incorporated, overall it is a pretty exciting time.

I thought I’d write a simple demo of a coverflow type engine using Away3D for rendering and Caurina’s Tweener for transitions. You’ll need both libraries if you want to compile the source files.

Play around with some of the Tween and camera parameters to get a feel for the flexibility of this system. Also, click and drag any area outside of the images to rotate the whole scene to get a feel for the relatice postioning. What is interesting here is that no images are scaled – all relative sizes are due to distance from the camera. Try a differen camera focal lengths to get some fairly radical perspective (especially a shorter focal length).

I have implmented an XML version and am looking at some of the video-as-material possibilities so it can be a full 3D multimedia interface. I think that may be pushing it (‘it’ being processor hogging), though!

Demo Source:
http://jufaintermedia.com/demos/cf01/cfgallerydemo01.zip

Tweener:
http://code.google.com/p/tweener/ 

Away3D:
http://away3d.com/

All Images courtesy of Canada’s Airforce library at:

http://www.airforce.forces.gc.ca/site/equip/index_e.asp

Yes:

so.addParam("allowFullScreen", "true");
so.addParam("allowScriptAccess", "sameDomain");

These are equivalent to object/embed parameters like

<param name="quality" value="high" />

Conversely:

so.addVariable("xmlpath", "playlist.xml");
so.addVariable("application", "mediaplayer.swf");

These are equivalent to flashvars like myFlashApp.swf?xmlpath=playlist.xml&application=mediaplayer.swf

SWFObject 1.5 is used quite a bit. I like the simplicity. Stephen Sulzberger’s Blog compares SWFObject to Adobe’s default plugin detect and embed script AC_RunActiveContent.js and goes over some advantages of the former.

Resource»

Adobe has a Technote that acts as a crib sheet for all object/embed parameters:
Technote

SWF Object 2 has been available for some time and is the currently supported version.

SWFAddress is a great way to assist in deep linking a Flash site and doing browser back-button integration. Javascript+Actionscript.

A PDF from On2 (so no guarantee of objectivity, as one of the codecs is theirs) compares the two formats and is worth a read the next time you have 5 minutes away from AS3:

http://support.on2.com/files/h264_and_flash_faq.pdf

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/apps/flv_bitrate_calculator/

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashmediaserver/articles/h264_encoding_02.html

When you are trying to decide what video BW best suits a project, it pays to know the variables and their effects!

http://blog.pixelbreaker.com/flash/as30-mousewheel-on-mac-os-x/

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/skins_styles_02.html

http://www.dontclick.it/

1. Big ass Laptop with 1920px screen and two hard drives – semi mobile is necessary – at some point you are going for photoshoots, working at client locations, or presenting in a place where there is no presentation equipment (and you were promised there was). Why two hardrives? swap and scratch drive being a physically separate drive increases performance in video and photoshop. I currently use a Dell Studio 17, as it fits this description and is highly customizable. has Firewire and 5 USB and HDMI, but missing an esata port, but that can be compensated throught the Express card slot.
2. Adobe Master Collection – for the price it is a great deal, you never have to worry about that $200 you saved when you really need some part of the adobe/macromedia toolchain. Make sure to keep Adobe CS2 around if for nothing else than the great multitrack sound editor that was (is)  audition
3. XML notepad (free) – if you are doing flash, you will have to access and write large XML texts. This Tree-view utility is intuitive and removes the possibility of tag closure and other syntax errors,
4. Notepad++ (free) – the best multipurpose text editor for windows (so far that I have found). It keeps the Mac envy of e-text editor to a minimum
5. 3D studio MAX – necessary evil, liberating once you get the hang of it, and necessary if you sub out your 3D work, then need to tweek some renders at the 11th hour.
6. As many browsers as possible – you have to virtualize to test on ie6 (fortunately I stick to Flash so this is not a big issue) but there are quirks. Keep at least a webkit browser, a version of IE, and a Mozilla Browser handy. I use Chrome, FF, and IE
7. Flash Video Encoder – still the better batch program, though it doesnt do mp4 H.264 until CS4
8. Magic DVD ripper – great for when clients supply video DVDs they want you to drop into the flash project (and they always do)
9. VLC media player – when dealing with infeed video from many sources, clients manage to find a huge variety of codecs. I have not seen a codec VLC can’t play (well i have, but it doesn’t feel like it), and it does do a good subset of codec conversions. Especially handy if you have infeeds of 1080i or p video from clients and need to do quick conversions
10. Filezilla (free) – The best FTP client I have used so far. I don’t see the need to lok for another
11. Teracopy (version 1.5, free) – I use this for all backups – it is fast, has good error recovery and has the magically, obvious -in-hind-sight ability to “replace only older files” allowing a quick backup of project directories where maybe 5 files out of 5GB of files have been changed.
12. SWFTools – good command line and batch program for handy actions like PDF to SWF or PNG to SWF. it does have some limitations, but can be very handy when the alternative is tedious conversion
13. SpaceMonger – when the HDDs start getting full, it is nice to have a ‘drive crawler’ that graphically displays big files as big, the realestate of your HDD is laid out like a city and you immediately see the space hogs. nice.
14. TortoiseSVN – most flash libraries are in SVN repositories, and this handy tool empowers your right-click to access them.
15. Image Rescue (free from manufacturer if you look around online) – great for revoery of CF and SD card files. Client (and me) often accidentally wipe a card thinking the images have been downloaded. This will ressurrect them if they have not been overwritten.
16. ESET antivirus. With a dev machine, I don’t want a big “Total Safety System” type of suite using up my CPU and scanning every file I change. ESET can be set up to be very fast and lean and unnoticable, just like AV should be.

Any suggestions? I would love to hear them!

A good overview of the latest branches and truck of the papervision project.

http://www.swftools.org/changelog.html

pdf2swf is also very handy and can make logitically impractical projects into a quick conversion

Update, having used this in my last project quite a bit, I noticed the alpha channel is clipped for anything below about 25% alpha. Not really acceptable if you are dealing with semi-transparent areas!

These had a class associated with them and part of the class behavior was to set the depth of a clicked smart image to the highest level in that frame. Although these images were defined in the timeline at only one frame, with blank keyframes on either side, the act of setting the depth index would effectively put the smartimage DisplayObject on every frame of the containing movie clip!

Keep and eye out for this when doing development that shares timeline and script in AS3.

An excellent (as always) discussion of AS3 depth management can be found at kirupa.com forums

target.addChild ( new Bitmap ( new ( getDefinitionByName(“exportForASbitmapNameInLibrary”) ) ) (0,0) ) );

var targetClass:Class = Object(displayObjectToClone).constructor;
var duplicate:DisplayObject = new targetClass();
this.addChild(duplicate);

More on this at:

http://actionscript-blog.imaginationdev.com/3/duplicate-movie-clip-flash-action-script-2-vs-action-script-3/

        public function Constructor() {
            if (stage == null)        {
                addEventListener(Event.ADDED_TO_STAGE, onAddedToStage);
            }else{
                onAddedToStage();
            }
        }

        private function onAddedToStage(event:Event = null):void{
            init();
        }

private function init(){
//typical constructor code
}

The problem with putting some types of code in the constructor is that the SWF may not yet be added to the Display tree, and stage-aware code will return nulls and errors. So, if an application works on the desktop but not on the test server when loading nested SWFs, have a look at this possibility.

A good description is here:

http://www.markledford.com/blog/2008/08/13/why-some-as3-swfs-work-stand-alone-but-fail-to-load-into-other-swfs/

computer\HKEY_USERS\[identity string of long numbers]\Software\Adobe\Flash9\TextFontPanel

The key “Font Name” was set to some long string with likely illegal characters. Changine it to a default of “_sans” allowed flash to boot normally. Hope this helps someone!

Social media applications rely on a critical mass audience. Not just a static audience, but one willing to generate content that other members find interesting. Social media web sites cannot exist in a vacuum. Like cities, they need in roads from exisitng high-traffic areas. For this reason social media websites will fail without a critical mass audience to drive more new members to the site. There is only so much space in the social media structure, since everyone wants to have access to everyone else. It is arguable that niche markets exist and that smaller players will always have a spot to grow and develop via specialization, however the open APIs and community generation tools of existing sites like Facebook have created a meta social network, in which members can create their own subsites with full access to the community.

A cartoonist and engineer with a nice dry sense of humour and belief that play is for all ages and hands-on, 

http://www.timhunkin.com/a136_zoo-clock.htm

A notable quote, ” Waht ARE the bare essentials?”

..a very legitimate guy for sure,

Check it out at:
http://www.cbc.ca/q/ 

…podcast should be up in a day or so

Survivorman:
http://www.survivorman.ca/

Even in a shop where no one thing goes wrong 99% of the time, you may be looking at close to 99% of projects not working out as expected. Thank you statistics. Here’s a quick example:

Ye Olde Design Shoppe:
15% chance that client will desire extra design revisions
5% chance each of your three designers and programmers will be ill at some point
1% chance of hardware failure (usually dropped laptops these days)
5% chance a client will be delayed in getting back to you for their own emerg
10% chance that another project will overlap this one and sap resources

The chances of your project not encountering *any* problems is then
0.85*(0.95* 0.95* 0.95)*0.99*0.95*0.90 =  0.62 =62%

This means that there is a 62% chance of your project not encountering any of these problems.

There is a role for pessimism, though on its own, it’s pretty grim indeed. In the context of creative projects the Goldilocks Triple could apply:

Not enough pessimism:
Unrealistic deadlines, scope, promises

Too much pessimism:
Creativity and new capbility traded for what’s known and safe. Lack of innovation and missed opportunities.

Pessimism Level just right:
Double checking, due dilligence, backups, contingency plans, goals met

Realism and healthy skeptisim have to be mixed with taking the right risks and always pushing for something innovative and inspiring to the team. Even in a project planning phase, when every step is Ghanted to the half-day, some pessimism has to applied: what about competing projects, illness in the team, clieents-side personnel changes? Hardware failures? It’s all happenned before, and to build a plan around absense of failure at any point is a gamble that loses much more often as risk factors are ignored.

In real life it is hard to assign probabilities or account for all eventualities, but the rough idea is that alot of 1% risks that all affect a project can suddenly make success and on-time delivery an unlikely outcome. Quantitatively pessimism is the excercise of reviewing these risks and looking at some of the worse possible outcomes. The result? you can address the worst risks through timeline padding, staffing plans, hardware backups, flushots, and contract clauses. Boring like a seatbelt is better than exciting like the Titanic.

Questions to ask your team:

• How are risk and opportunity are perceived, pursued and planned for?
• At what point in the project is appropriate pessimism applied?  

I suppose this could be a note about optimism’s or risk’s role instead, but that is another topic: team and individual perspective!

It is common sense to think that the more you concentrate effort, the more successful you will be at a given task – otherwise there would not be colloquialisms like ‘spread yourself too thin’ or ‘focus on core competencies’. The downside, as a business to nichifying your offering (“NYO”) is loss of potential customers, alienation, or picking the wrong kind of niche. it also can potentially increase the risk of the demand moving out of your scope of offering, since it is narrow.

Is there a way of quantifying this level of focus or generality? is there a method of determining the statistical risk “what focus where”?

This may be a problem in a small market or in a market with small margins. In any market there is a certain demand over a spectrum of subcategories – an example is the digital camera market, which has everything from point-and-shoot to $10,000 SLRs, waterproofing, movie modes and any number of variables. Reduce that for arguments sake to a two dimensional spectrum: demand versus niche:

Digital Camera manufacturers face a landscape like this. although the variables would make this landscape more than a spectrum (more like a hyperspace), an example simplification could be:

There are three areas of obvious demand, based on, say sales figures. But what may be misleading is that demand spikes and troughs are inherently affected by availability. Take the trough between compact point-and-shoots and superzooms. There is indication of very little demand. However, there are no offerings in this area. That is where user testing, prototyping, polls, and marketing decisions of risk vs. pay-off all come in. This is where a gamble comes in. The true demand curve may actually be:

(pngs work much better in worpress!)

There is no visibility into this area without a product to occupy it and generate sales numbers, but there vould be a large latent demand for a new niche of “compact superzooms” and in fact, this was the case – the niche is now being aggressively filled by most major manufacturers.

However, those major manufactures have effectively unlimited capacity to explore new niches – if demand is there to be found, it will eventually be detected and “mined”.

What about a small organization that would have to remove resource from ‘known good’ areas of business demand to take a risk on another peak or even a trough? The advantage of another peak may be that it is higher, meaning high demand. A wide plateau is a broad area of demand for similar services. a deep trough may be a total lack of demand (the Homermobile) or an unexploited peak. Where a trough turns out to in fact be an undetected peak, there is a huge opportunity for the first business to offer services in this area.

Pilot projects. Skunk Works. [Cute Software Name] Betas. These are all manifestations of this exploration for new niches. But which are successful and who are successful, are there general rules that can be applied to any niche exploration?

The short answer is yes, and these are gleaned from engineering principles related to control systems. If you can tune a radio, you’ve already mastered the fundamentals.

Think of the niche spectrums above as the FM dial. Think of popular niches (spike of demand) as radio stations, and troughs as dead air.

Consumers, customers, and clients are like listeners. Some love their one favorite station and keep it locked. Others have worn out the Scan button on their car stereos in the hope of catching a sing, interview, or traffic report that fits their immediate needs. Some have one station for music, one for news, and one for traffic.

Now suppose you are the new radio station/niche service on the block and you have to pick a place on the spectrum. Here are some options for success, assuming you have a fixed budget:

1. put in a whole bunch of low power power transmitters across a broad frequency range. This minimizes interference from other stations, and makes it more likely that someone scanning the dial will land at your station. Think of this as spreading your efforts over a wide spectrum. The disadvantage is that any listeners have relatively low power to listen in on, and so you reach only nearby people
2. put all your power into a single transmitter right at the same frequency as a popular station. For some if not all listeners, you can overpower  the incumbent station and their favorite radio preset now belongs to you. of course, the incumbent could just ramp up their power, and you are now in a race over the same group of listeners and may alienate them all with the infighting.
3. focus all your power into a very narrow but powerful station between two other popular stations. This minimizes interference, however new listeners will have to actively find you, and stand less chance of doing so since your frequency band is so narrow. However, there is no interference from other station, and you have lots of power, so your signal could potentially reach far more listeners, if only they would tune in.

This is the same radio station, with several options and a multitude of variations. They are all valid. Option 1 has the best chance of finding new listeners that are unaddressed by other stations. Option 2 has the lowest chance of failure due to lack of demand because it is attempting to exploit a known group of listeners, and option 3 has the highest potential to become dominant in a new niche (if it exists).

The engineering concepts here that can be applied are Signal-to-Noise, and Q-factor.

Signal-to-noise is simply how well your offering is heard. Option 3 has the biggest signal power, with no surrounding stations (noise). It also has a very high Q-Factor, which is the measure of how pointy the spike is. Option 1 has the lowest Signal-to-noise (SNR) and the lowest Q, since it’s point is more of a plateau. Option 2 has a high Q, but since it is overlapping another station (noise) it has a low SNR. The colloquialism “making a point” has a lot  in common with this – you have to be loud enough to be heard above everyone else in the room, and specific enough to be understood clearly.

As a business exploring new niches, you may want to use this analogy the way engineers exploit new spectrum. look for a quiet are of the spectrum surrounded by large spikes. the surrounding spikes tell you that there is likely latent demand between, and the quiet area allows you to have a high SNR without a lot of power. If there is lots of noise everywhere, you must get your signal above the noise, and with fixed signal power, you can only do this by increasing the Q-factor – i.e. sharpening the spike. The analogy is that if you want to be heard by customers, you have to narrow your niche. You will lose listeners who are roughly tuned into you, but gain more where you have focused your power, assuming they are there.  may wish to start with a lower Q-factor (i.e. spread out your signal) to cast your net wide, then once listeners have tuned in, you can narrow and specify and boost power. we’ll call this “sweep and lock” – it is what your car stereo does to find stations when on scan mode.

So the methodology can be summed up as:

1. Explore the spectrum of products and categorize them along a niche spectrum
2. choose a quiet area of the niche spectrum between areas of high demand
3. position your offering in this quiet area
4. make the offering general enough to fully exploit the niche and catch as many unaddressed customers as possible
5. using feedback from these customers, determine where in this broad area there is a spike of demand
6. narrow your efforts to this niche.

In the web world, where it seems there are infinite users and infinite products, step 4 becomes counterproductive. In this model, there is always demand for a product that is specific enough, it is just a matter of reaching the people that want it. This indicates that step 4 should be essentially scaled back so that more effort can be put into making a big impact within your niche.

<http://www.lesmachines-nantes.fr/english/media.php

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/07/views_of_jupiter.html

1. Instruct and Evoke rather than inform
2. Examples to back up every statement
3. Show and understanding of their issues and perspective
4. Be plainly honest
5. Use diagrams, images, anything but words. Use words as a last recourse when an idea can be presented no other way
6. Make the presentation available online for the client immediately after meeting
7. Tell a story, don’t just show the end result

Try this NASA video which visualizes magnetic fields (via gizmodo)

What?

Consider interactive learning in the very traditional sense: Multiple choice creating branch points in the unfolding of a plot line or event. The decision points, outcome are controlled. This is not a continuous system though, it is discrete: true or false, A,B,C, or D: all of the above etc etc

Continuous systems involve physics and simulations. learning about trajectories or the formation of snowflakes, or how a city can reduce its net energy consumption. These types of games or more engaging because their replay value is higher. The outcome of any game can have effectively unlimited possibilities.

The downside is that parameters must be tuned. In a physics simulation, this may be straightforward – a trajectory of a cannon ball is determined by air resistance and gravity

But what about “The Carbon Neutral City” ?

Interactive games are taking their place on major policy websites. These games, by virtue of their attraction, novelty, and portability (redeployed throughout the web) represent much of the message in a policy website. Take, for example, a game in which the user attempts to make a city have a carbon neutral footprint. They can install wind turbines, or mandate ethanol fuel for vehicles. The game/simulation designer simply factors the user’s changes into a net Carbon tally variable – but how do you assign something as controversial as “net” environmental impact in an open system?

This is where the policy of the client may unintentionally (or intentionally) show up as ‘fact’ within the simulation. Suppose you reuse the same simulation for three different clients – an agricultural client that wants to show the environmental advantage of Corn Ethanol, a producer of wind turbines, and a nuclear energy provider. Would the parameters associated with, say, installing wind turbines or re-tasking farmland to corn Ethanol production change?

The semantic web, and before it, ‘classic’ AI researchers from the 60′s onward struggled with semantics – the ambiguity of language and meaning that is so easily resolved by us but so difficult to pin down when making natural language interfaces and more generally, organizing information in a way that bridges the gap between humans and machines. This is to say nothing of language barriers and differences between individuals.

An article in Science online is outlined at Ars Technica - research that has taken advantage of functional MRI and it’s ability to monitor real-time brain activity to find common brain patterns associated with word meanings. The implied goal would be to find a common brain pattern ‘print’ for every meaning, which would then lead to the ability to categorize the semantics based not on ontologies (which themselves are debated and subject to semantics) but on an ‘absolute’.

This may be doomed from the outset if the same word creates different patterns in the tangle of sentence context, or if there are variation between individuals, or languages or for that matter, moods and distraction. Research is just beginning, but this is a unique and brave attempt to pin down an aspect of human interaction and analyze it in a truly new way.

http://www.kaourantin.net

A private members’ Bill from the NDP camp is short and sweet. An amendment to the Telecommunications act that would, “prohibit network operators from engaging in network management practices that favour, degrade or prioritize any content, application or service transmitted over a broadband network based on its source, ownership or destination, subject to certain exceptions.”

“The creative individual thinks of failure as a new opportunity: “Okay, why did I fail? What was wrong? Let me try to do something else. Let me go forward with it.” “

…check it out…

Nothing quite as exciting as systemizing something that is considered inspirationational, and transcendant of whatever you currently have in your mind. This seems to adhere to the critical-mass model. enough raw data crystalizes into new patterns when a critical number of interconnections are formed. Similar to Stuart Kauffman’s ‘Buttons and Threads” model of complex systems.

The thing to take away from this article is simply this: You have to try, and not just think. That means you have to fail, something that 105% of us really don’t like doing. Not only fail, but fail often. I can only assume that this does not include financial collapse or misc. catastrophe, so limit the scope of these experiments somewhat – the first test flight of your a-grav Alero should not be off a quarry ledge. The mythbuster’s model of making a model first is probably a safe bet there.