Thus, the Kinect Korner project was a personal one, as I was interested in understanding the limits and capabilities of Apple’s Quartz Composer, as well as exploring what was possible with the Microsoft Kinect for submission to the annual Portfolio Show. Here’s a video I shot during development that explains a bit of how the interaction works.

The Kinect data is interpreted using some middleware to create skeletal points of your body in 3D space. Using the tryplex toolkit for Quartz Composer, a skeleton view of your body is easily displayable. From there, the software can check to see if your arm is moving through pre-designated boxes. If it does, it will send the signal to a separate composition that displays the Film Strip viewer to move forward or backwards on the film strip. If no person is available to play, the film strip will recognize this and advance by itself.

For the installation we had both a local Film Strip display on an LCD TV, and a second computer running view-only on the grid to a projector. At times they were out of sync, but each were controlled using simple OSC commands without any video signals being sent between the two. Cool!

Be sure to check out Kinect Korner, a set on Flickr.

Wave is an interactive installation project with the goal of encouraging inter-departmental and inter-disciplinary involvement, as well as to celebrate the centennial of Marshall McLuhan‘s birth, a Canadian communication scholar who was born in Edmonton 100 years ago. The final project will be unveiled on June 23 at noon in the atrium of the Enterprise Square (old Bay building) downtown as part of the Media Ecology Convention 2011.

The final design is still under heavy development, something I’m very excited to be a part of. I’ve been working with Cezary Gajewski in the past few days, setting up our shipment of equipment and new toys in our development lab. Here’s a few images and stats on the project.

Equipment:

• 1x Mac Pro (8 Core)
• 1x Mac Mini
• 1x MacBook Pro (mine)
• 2x Sharp 60″ LCD TVs
• 2x Acer monitors
• 8x KRK Studio Monitors
• 1x M-Audio ProFire 610 audio interface

University Departments involved: Drama (Tech), MACT/Extension, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Industrial Design, Music, English

Number of alphanumeric displays to be manufactured: 300 (by hand)

Video after the jump.

Shown here is our development environment for the next Wave Interactive Installation project. I’m using Quartz Composer Visualizer to run a simple ball-moving visualization across three different computers with a number of different video devices attached, all through a simple network cable.

Sent from my iPod

Posted via email from jole posterous

The iPad is finally here, in all its glory.

There is no Gap

There’s no end to the amount of coverage and speculation about this product, which can be found here, and here most notably. But my anticipation is mostly in the “surprise” to come since at the moment I’m not excited for this product really. Current offerings out there have some problems with input methods, power, and well… functionality. It seems to me that the gap that the Kindle, eReaders, and these proposed media tablets are trying to fill does not really exist.
I would describe my day as having three “levels of mobility.”

• Home: At my desk with a 23″ display or two, running a Quad core processor. My computer keeps up with my workflow, it never lags behind. Video is large, clear, and stutter-free, and since I’m at my desk, that’s the only thing I would tolerate.
• Portable: I have my MacBook with me, and I’m setup somewhere other than my desk. Perhaps I’m on my bed, downstairs, outside, or in the library. I’m in class or at work somewhere, but I’m still computing. In this case, I tolerate some mild lag in my computing environment, since there isn’t really a laptop that is as powerful as my desktop and still within budget both money-wise and battery-life wise.
• Mobile: I am likely physically moving, whether on the bus, in the car, or simply walking around. I can still receive content and view it, although I don’t expect to perform a lot of input, it still is effective when it needs to happen. Loading times are much slower (or not available at all on my iPod Touch), but I can look out the window of the train or put it in my pocket for a few moments while it does its thing, and I’m not irritated.

At each of these stages, I feel that all my needs are fulfilled despite having limitations at each of these mobility levels. Most of my tasks can be performed at all levels.

So at which point would the tablet enter my workflow? Naturally it would be somewhere in between Portable and Mobile. I’m lying down or on the bus for more than a minute or two, and I’d like to read a book, watch a video, or take a note. Yet, a tablet would not fit in any pocket, and would likely need to be extracted from a bag, and thus somewhat of a hassle for that extra few inches of reading room. Why not hit up the iPhone/iPod Touch? Assuming that this Apple Tablet would be equipped with a nearly identical Operating System to that of my iPhone/iPod, what advantage in terms of functionality would really be present?

(The HP slate, a lamefest. Probably the closest thing to the iTablet that I can imagine, but maybe my imagination is simply too small for the likes of Steve.)

Put simply, the Apple Tablet seems to be far too close in functionality to the iPhone/iPod to be advantageous over it, and yet remains less pocketable and more of a pain to whip out, so any advantage is nullified.

An Industry Shift

Despite all this, and the terrible mystery of input method which I won’t address except to predict: there won’t be any, I still think that tomorrow will be revolutionary in a market sense, and here’s why.

If you look at Apple products of years past, you’ll see a common theme to emerge: changing the industry. Steve Jobs and his followers really aren’t interested in doing something unless it’s going to change the way we think about an industry entirely. While the slogan is now gone, “Think Different” remains Apple’s philosophy. They took a boring business machine and turned it into the Mac: the computer we all wanted in our homes. They took the MP3 player and changed the way we think and listen to music. In just 2.5 short years, they turned the cell phone on its head and is only now having to watch out for competition with the arrival of Android. The Amazon Kindle hoped to be the iPod of eReaders, but most of us just groaned the moment we saw the bland grayscale display. Amazon didn’t do anything to change the book industry. They simply put a book into binary.

So as I sound more and more like a ridiculous Apple fanboy, here is my prediction. The Apple Tablet will be about engaging the user in their content. YouTube, Blogs, Twitter are already social, but books on the other hand, are not. Yesterday, I went to the library and took a look at the Edmonton Public Library’s fairly recent database switch to Bibliocommons. I could look up a book in the catalog and see a review from libraries patrons in other cities all over the world, all within a mouse click of requesting the book be brought to me. Take that one step further, and imagine seeing everything your friends are reading on your tablet. One tap: you have the book in your hands. One tap: you’re in the first chapter. But then when you get to Chapter 3, you see comments from other readers about the shallow character development in this chapter, and they provide a synopsis for you to skip to the next chapter. It’s book-reading on Shuffle.

Perhaps this idea is way too far-fetched and old fashioned, since we all know that according to Steve, “people don’t read anymore.” I doubt that the killer app will be social book annotation, and perhaps I’ve just spent too much time in English class, but the fact is that this mind-melding new tablet is going to need some sort of killer app that makes it a truly useful product. It needs to find the period in between Portable and Mobile where I say “Yes, this solves a problem,” but if this whole iPad thing is going to be nothing but a 9″ iPhone sans-phone, I’m not sure I’m interested.

New Apple products came out this morning. Here’s an overview of the updates, and some of my thoughts.

• MacBook (Starting at the usual)
  • Unibody plastic case
  • No SD card reader
  • FireWire dropped
  • Single Audio port (dual in/out functionality)
  • No Trackpad button
  • Shinier!
  • Rounder!
  • Worse heat dissipation! (See: http://www.engadget.com/photos/new-macbook-unboxing-and-hands-on/2378308/) It now has a slip resistant bottom, but what I see is non-heat dissipating bottom. No2feet on your ultra-thin laptop? Yikes!)
  • Conclusions: A modern new look and design should fix certain design flaws with the current MacBooks such as the splintering plastic on bottom right hand of the top case. Not really surprised they dropped a
• Mac Mini (Starting at the usual)
  • More RAM apparently
  • Available sans optical drive and with extra hard drive, marketed as “server” edition, includes OS X Server. Pretty neat, but it’s like $1000 for it.
  • Conclusions: Finally Apple is giving people what they want and acknowledging people use it for random things (see the “The Many Uses of Mac Mini” http://www.apple.com/macmini/design.html )
• iMac (Starting at the usual)
  • Now in 16:9!
  • Randomly 21.5″ and 27″
  • Available with Core2Duo or i5 or i7 (the latter two being Quad Core (!!))
  • SD Card reader
  • Faster processors for your buck
  • Seems to be higher resolution screen
  • 2Conclusions: Notice the abandonment of NVIDIA chipsets/graphics in these machines except on the low end. This is partly because Intel refuses to let NVIDIA build chipsets for i5/i7 processors, but also because apparently NVIDIA is failing in the graphics department. This will be a reflection of what is to come in the notebook arena I suspect.
• Apple Remote ($19)
  • Now in brushed aluminum (thank goodness, the old one always scratched up in your bag)
  • Conclusion: It’s about time, although I’m not sure how many people buy this thing. I only use mine because it was included back when Front Row was a real feature.

Magic Mouse™ ($69, included with any new iMac)

• Seems totally ridiculous
• No buttons or something
• No pinch and zoom
• Shinier
• Looks not very fun to hold
• Conclusion: I have a feeling that, because I do not hold a mouse like Steve Jobs, this isn’t going to work properly for me, despite it’s customizability.

I think overall Apple is continuing it’s purge of esoteric features in favor of optimizing their designs and simplicity. FireWire and separate audio in out are standard features on most computers, yet they have determined that only x% of people use them on the low end so they remove them for simplicity or cost saving or whatever reason they dream up. I don’t really have a problem with this since, as a user of these features, I would probably just buy the higher end anyway, but it’s also frustrating at the same time. I would really like separate audio in/out on a 13″ computer, but that’s not available. I HAVE to buy a 15″ MBP for that functionality, which is a bit depressing considering every other laptop in the world has them.

This has a lot of Apple philosophy implications about weaning us off old technology towards the future. FireWire cameras are pretty much dead now, but that doesn’t mean you need to kill off the whole thing. I’m glad it’s still on the 13″ MBP.

As a Hackintosh user who occasionally feels like pulling my hair out during times of frustration, I’m glad to see that Quad core is finally available without buying a Mac Pro. It’s about time. I can actually see myself buying an iMac in the next few years now.

The Mac Mini remains to be overpriced it seems. I’m not sure the small design is exactly worth the premium, but I’m sure it will continue to be succesful. I find it interesting that it was never really adopted the way Apple had intended: as a way to swap out your Dell tower with a Mac without paying too much money. Obviously their marketing on that has shifted as time goes on.

Bonus: Still working out the prices on this one… (“$XX”)

So lately I've been reading way too much of "43Folders":http://43folders.com and becoming increasingly frustrated with my Axim X51v and my various syncronization methods.

I've noticed that I've been having the need to write things down. I'll be doing something, and I'll have an idea, or realization, and need to write it down right away. No problem, pull out the Axim X51v, hit the note button and away we go.

However there is a problem with this. The screen has been getting a bit scratched or maybe it's just a piece of junk, and the digitizer doesn't align with the screen anymore. Plus the usual problem of "don't let your hand touch the screen or it will blow up the pen stroke." So overall, writing notes is completely inefficient on a stylus touch screen.

But what about when you do get that note in there? Well it will site in my Notes folder or crowd my Documents folder with such descriptive names as "Note1.awd" and "Note2.awd." Of course the reasonable thing to do would be to simply properly name these notes, but isn't the whole point of making a handwritten note so that you don't have to use the ridiculous onscreen keyboard, or worse: the character recognizer?

So what I end up having is a dozen "NoteX"s that I never actually look at other than once a month, and the ideas die off and I usually can't recall what I meant by the note in the first place.

So it comes down to, what do I even use my Axim for? Sometimes I'll use it for checking mail or browsing the web when I don't have my MacBook on me (which is increasingly rare during the school year) or for keeping track of my calendar. The problem is, the calendar doesn't exactly work very well. Because I'm too cheap to buy OggSync Paid, I can't sync more than one calendar. As I get busier, I would like to seperate things like TV shows, School, Church, and Work into different calendars, as usually I end up with an overloaded Agenda that can't even be seen in it's entirety in the calendaring application.

So how do we solve this? We eliminate the Axim. With the soon to arrive iPod (Which is a blog topic in itself), I will have my entire calendar in it's seperated glory in full color. I'll be able to see my events in the future. As for Adding events, I keep a notepad on me at all times. (I happen to have a nice pleather Dell one, so I still feel like I'm carrying my Axim with me.) Every night I write down my agenda for the next day, and leave a space for new events that need to be added that pop up throughout the day.

I can also write down any thoughts I have, draw diagrams, doodle, and it's 100% crash proof. Now that's thinking like Merlin Mann.

Sorry I haven't been keeping up, life's been busy.

I did get my Axim last Monday, and it's great. I wrote a nice post about it already but then I lost it because I closed it by accident. Time to start writing auto-save into joleblog…

Pictures will be soon.