Will Knott

I said that there are competing standards in 3D TV. Hatchai Full Parallax 3D Display seems to be up and running (I assume the Hitchai is the phonetic spelling in Japanese) and showed off their screen at the Ceatec Japan 2009 show. The news is via Gigazine and SDR News.

As you can see from the above video, you get a 3D parallax view, something you don’t get from the cinema, giving a holographic view. You also see that its working great for still objects, just like holograms. No details on how it works with moving objects, or indeed if it can work on a landscape. The secret (I’m working off a machine translation here) seems to be using multiple projectors, more projectors mean more 3D objects; which implies you could have a 3D newsreader in your living room, but a panel might not be possible.

Early days yet.

Tony on TechTV101 complained that 3D in movies are currently a waste of time will never take off (see correction in the comments). I don’t think so.

Lets get the cynical bit out of the way first. Studios and cinemas love 3D as its impossible to do the “camera in the theatre” pirating trick with them. Just try watching a movie without the polarising glasses and you’ll see what I mean.

At the moment there are no movies that are greatly improved by the use of 3D. Just as the Jazz Singer was a gimmick where there was only 5 minutes of sound tacked in to a silent movie in 1927.

Try to imagine a modern movie done as a silent now? How much dialogue could be removed to work with those cards with the few lines? Exposition would need to be simpler in order to cope… etc.
Sound, widescreen and colour were all gimmicks once.

The entire production in photography would have to change in order to make the most of 3d. Since all movies have to be capable of being displayed on a 2d screen (DVD sales, Sales for tv broadcast, legal download) there isn’t going to be much use made of 3d, just as there isn’t much use made of IMAX.

So keeping that part of the market in mind, what is needed for 3d to take off?

The first big leap will be 3d home displays or 3D computer monitors. Then 3d still digital photography displayed on these home screens, and 3D games and interfaces on computers and consoles.
The still experiments will be what teaches the photographic and lighting requirements to the DPs (remember that lighting a black and white movie is a completely different technique to lighting a colour one. Something taken for granted today, but hard learned when it came in).  The gaming and interface side will show what can be avoided an what people do and don’t notice.

Just place your bets on a 3D chess game being an early release… slow rendering is possible as most of the pieces can be pre-rendered. A slow moving game like this, well slow moving when compared to a first person shooter should be fairly easy… at most 2 pieces move at once. Then things can get faster.

Then, live action 3D comes to play… (at the moment it is limited to CG and stop motion animation).

Suddenly 3d editing becomes a desirable (and probably new found skill).  Set budgets will soar (as the limited field of view is killed, as will be digital matt painting, unless they go 3d too.

Expect “AR” style commentaries on home released by that time too.

At the moment there are competing standards for home 3d, just as there were competing standards for sound in the 30s. And technicolor fought with de luxe for years. Give it time, and remember that the technical best does not always beat the good enough.

Tony points out that HD is still not ubiquitous. Well, the  HD argument is flawed because of “good enough”. Few broadcasters use it, and its coming out at a time when the low definition YouTube channel is the most successful one at the moment. In other words its not being used. It may look great, but its not being used.

However, would one second of 3d and one second of HD have the same bandwidth/spectrum cost? The HD broadcast protocols might just be useful yet.

Yup, its a video (you may need to click through to see them). An advertisement for Carlton Beer where they take the proverbial out of advertising. Similar to a British Airways one from 1989.

I wonder is an ad maker somewhere is feeling nostalgic.

take care,
Will

and nearly took mum with it.

While in the queue for the car park to go to the Cork City part of the World Wide photowalk I got a phone call.

It was Mum’s neighbours.

The television at Mum’s had caught fire and she wanted me to get home as fast as I could. I did.

No one died, the damage isn’t that bad, but she’s declaring that she doesn’t want a replacement television (I expect that to last a week when soaps withdrawal kick in). After all, the electronic babysitter, the smiling entertainer in the corner had attacked.

On Saturday afternoon she plugged it in. And there was a crackle and  little puff of smoke, like a cigarette in the corner. She plugged it out. Still smoke.

She left the room to ring the neighbours and open the front door. When she returned there was a plume of black smoke rising.

Highly toxic black smoke.

I think at this point one of the neighbours rush in, fortunately wearing fireproof gloves (he has no memory of putting them on, on moment he got the phone call, the next he was coming in Mums door wearing them). He picked up the TV and tried to run out of the house with it. He would have succeeded if Mum (who I should point out is on crutches) decided to lead the way.

Slowly lead the way while a lump of toxic materials plumed and melted behind her.

At the doorway the neighbour manager to get her to turn towards the stairs, and get the TV out of the house just as it got past the smoking part and decided to head straight for the flaming finale.

A second or two later it was flaming on the front lawn.

Then he turned back. You see, melting plastic was igniting the papers Mum had around the TV. And the table it was sitting on was starting to go up. And the smoke (at least) has licking the gas boiler directly above the television.

Anyway, he put put the papers and books. There melting discs (the DVD player looks OK, but we can’t tell hat the heat did to it yet), a smoldering radio and darkened walls show how localised and high the heat was for a little while.

Scorched curtains are dumped, and the coats with melted holes at the end of the stairs are awaiting assessment.

The house still has a twinge of toxic black smoke in the air. Lumps of melted black plastic show the progress of the equipment out of the house.

Under the tree sits a partially melted TV surrounded most of the desk it once sat on.

So Mum is alive and as well as she was on Friday. Except for a little come down from the adrenaline. And she has a new lease of tidying up. Five bags of newspapers and magazines went to the recycle centre on Sunday.

One small bag of books came back. (Shouldn’t have looked, but a cookbook and a book on censorship in Ireland returned from the dump along with a USB extension cable. Well it is recycling).

I’m unplugging a lot more equipment now. And I’m spared from the soaps.

I’ll give it a week until she starts looking for a replacement. I just wonder if I can talk her in to making a wheelchair friendly kitchen for herself.

take care,
Will

This is a cross-post to Culch.ie but I’ve embedded the video mentioned below.

Once I loved Big Brother . Note, there is no number following that title.

The first Big Brother .

The most interesting thing about the first Big Brother was how different the contestants were when compared to the crop over the last eight years. Few of the contestants were fame hungry. No one really knew if it would work… it was a very expensive experiment.

As a group it seems that many of the first contestants are, well, not working. Some are still working somewhere in media (usually quietly behind the scenes now). True, none of them found the dizzying heights of fame as the most famous looser of Big Brother, Jade Goody , but few people let alone reality show contestants have.

Then again, one the the first contestants, Mel is responsible for the Big Brother “eye” logo . Its her eye.

If the first year was a test, the second year was a fine tuning exercise and the third year seems to be the brass ring that Channel 4 have been searching for ever since.

The problem with Big Brother is… its boring. Nothing can really happen. Its mostly people sleeping (along the way Big Brother introduced a “no sleeping during daylight hours” rule and will play alarm clock noises at dosing contestants. Yes folks, it eventually got that bad) and talking. True, occasionally bickering and insulting each other. Add in a bit of metaphorical back stabbing and you have the basis of a soap. But a soap is better acted and paced.

Which is funny if you think about it. The contestants are usually those that want to be famous. Every contestant now knows what is going to happen, but they still line up and go for it. Big Brother isn’t a talent show (so no dreams and or surprise performances) but a group of people (supposedly) being themselves for a number of weeks.

But a funny thing happened along the way. It started to get ignored.

The explosion of racism on Celebrity Big Brother 5 in 2007 meant that the TV show was being played out on international headlines. That summer’s show (Big Brother 8 ) was a quieter affair. You know how big a TV show is from the amount of coverage it gets off the TV. Susan Boyle made this year’s Britain’s Got Talent a “must watch” show, if for nothing else but the the ability to talk about it afterward. Who wants to talk about Big Brother, until there is an explosion anyway. Not literally. There have already been too many bomb scares in that house.

The biggest thing about Big Brother 9 was not Big Brother 9 but the Big Brother zombie based TV series Dead Set , parts of which were filmed at a Big Brother 9 eviction. No doubt there are jokes to be made about Davina McCall being a great zombie.

And Big Brother 10 is about to burst on to our screens.

Whoop-de-doodle-do.

The first, opening night, show will generate media coverage. It always does. However how much of that coverage will still be there the following week. If on July 1 you approached a random man or woman on the street and asked them to name one of this years contestants, (barring an Irish contestant, Ray Shah got his local radio show partly from Big Brother) I’m sure they wouldn’t be able to tell you their name. Ratings are down for Reality shows in general at the moment, and the series mean ratings for Big Brother are on a decline .

Regardless of that Channel 4 does to the show, unless the contestants themselves are appealing, I don’t see a hugh surge in ratings yet.

As for the title, its actually from the “Literally” series of spoof videos for “Total Eclipse of the Heart”. But it applies. The series has slowly turned. I’m not too sure its turned for the better.

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• Will enough people watch Big Brother? (guardian.co.uk)

Want to buy a 30-foot Raptor fighter craft from Battlestar Galactica?

The full sized prop / set used on the show? Well because the reserve price wasn’t reached in the Ebay auction, on May 8th you can.

Seems that the production company is selling off lots of the props and costumes.

That is all.

OK, there might be a Cylon fighter on sale too.

Update : The props and costumes were created by Propworx who have theor own E-bay auction account to sell off used props.

Pat Phelan of MaxRoam is still playing Santa. Or is it a New Year’s blowout? He is offering a Nokia N79 and a 37 inch LCD HDTV. All you have to do is drop over and leave a comment and wait for the courier.

Maybe not wait. There are no rules or regulations or any thing like that, but they will be given away on the evening of the first of January.

Just remember if you got a phone for Christmas send your old one to The Jack & Jill Foundation

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• The Nokia N79: Full of toys for the mainstream

A forum posting leaked across the interweb to reveal that Version 3 public beta of the South Park studios site. The TV show South Park not only has an official site, but you can stream (almost) every episode of South Park, the entire back catalogue, off the site. The almost bit is that they can stream an episode for 7 days after their première broadcast on Comedy Central in the US (I am hearing about some IP checks), but due to continuing contractual obligations, all new episodes will be unavailable online for 23 days after that. However these episodes will return permanently to the site 30 days after they air.

Source: Wikipedia This beats the usual 6 months it takes for them to legally cross the Atlantic for Broadcast. However it does lead to a few questions. First off are the words “South Park Studios v3 Public Beta”, does this mean that Kenny and crew could suddenly vanish? Yo have to admit it’s possible. Also as a beta, things are likely to suddenly change on the site without much (or any) warning.

The other question is one of censorship. Given the fun and games that Trey Parker and Matt Stone had with the MPAA over the release of “South Park : Bigger Longer & Uncut” means that censorship is a subject dear to the hearts of the pair. By releasing the episodes, presumably uncut means that they neatly side step any such problems. The other thing is, well, the turnaround time. Most animated shows take between 3 (usually 8 ) to twelve months an episode to produce (I’m remembering this figure from The Simpsons) however due to the almost computer animation system (actually Maya) used in the show its possible to make alterations up to a few hours before airtime. That is airtime in the US. By the time it comes over here, it is old news. The streaming means that its a lot more topical by the time the show hits the monitor.

Now excuse me while I track down “The Losing Edge” (season 9 episode 5) to see that Kenny really looks like in the show as opposed to multiple fan sites.

take care,
Will

Stephen D. Levitt of freakonomics fame wants people to wear a freakonomics t-shirt if they are audtioning for Sci Fi’s “Brain Trust” reality TV show. When did they show showing sci-fi and start showing reality TV?

It seems that the thrust of the show is to solve previously unsolvable everyday problems. So far so pointless.

But since they want applicants to solve a single everyday problem of no major social importance what would it be? And what out of the box approach would you use to solve it?

So I thought about it…

I would like to get a training programme running for people leaving phone messages. Teach them to slow down when leaving a reply number if nothing else.

How to do this… telephone tag.

A phone based contest where a baton “phrase phone number” is passed from one person to another. Cash (or mobiles) for prizes, but the person who drops it looses out. All contestants must be pre-registered.

Sorry about the “his”, its being used for ease, pretend its his/her or her…

A contestant gets a recorded message on his voice-mail with the phrase number and a number to call. The contestant must pass a message and the phrase number and the number he is calling to the number in the message.
This message is recorded, and passed another contestant.

If a contestant does not call before a certain both the contestant and the person before him are deemed to have dropped the baton.

Both are dropped, and the “telephone tag” continues with the rest of the contestants. Continue until you have the required number of winners.

Now could I get Nokia or Apple to sponsor it… (or a launch idea for MaxRoam?)

take care,
Will

tags : Stephen Levitt, freakonomics, Brain Trust, reality TV, telephone, telephone tag, contest

The leaving certificate results came out with a crisis. Too many people are not choosing honours maths.
The CAO / CAS results came out with a crisis. Too few people are choosing science and engineering courses.

If only we could make science sexy…

Well, we can’t. We can however make science a little more accessible. When I was young, computers were these strange untouchable standalone machines. Now… well the playstation generation is all grown up. No,it’s the Wii ones I’m wondering about. The intrigue of the machines has gone. The stories of new inventions are laid out in the papers.

That go unread by the target… kids.

Which is why I’m glad to hear that Tomorrow’s World is coming back to the BBC. The programme showcased pioneering science as well as inventions that never came into commercial use. It was a Top Gear for science, full of cool stuff and the vaguely silly.

However I think it inspired techie people in these islands. And I’m wondering if Irish TV (yes, sorry mass market and all that) should be showing more of this type of thing.

For example, ready to roll and already broadcasting is The Lab with Leo LaPorte (responsible for so many good (sometimes) tech podcasts) and the Labrats spinoff.

And for all thing Irish, I’ve already mentioned Intruders TV Ireland brought to us by Edgecast Media. Expand these interviews (or include them in a larger tech themed regular night and…

Would that help increase the size tech generation?

Just wondering,
Will

tags : leaving certificate, maths, mathematics, CAO, science, engineering, Tomorrow’s World, BBC, Irish, TV, televison, The Lab, Leo LaPorte, Labrats, Intruders TV, Intruders TV Ireland, Edgecast, TV3