Sunil's Blog

It’s hard to present a completed portfolio while working on final year projects!

Here’s a quick and dirty list of some of the stuff I’ve been working on this past year in the Interactive Multimedia post-graduate program at Sheridan College.

Current Portfolio – work in progress

Projects:

Rock Revolution

- i made this game with Nick Poisson, a classmate from Interactive Multimedia at Sheridan

- motion capture game, with game play that is similar to Guitar Hero; a webcam is required, 3D glasses are optional!

Paper Robo Flash Application

- builder

- papervision3d, flash

- Paper-Robo is Flash application that allows users to design and build their own action figures. They are made from paper and have joints at the hips, knees, wrists and ankles.

Paper Robo Game

- Paper-Robo Game is Flash game. Jetfire has suffered major battle damage. Help him collect glue bottles for repairs, before his creator sends him to the recycling bin.

Starlight

- Flashlite, mobile prototype

- At arena concerts these days, holding up a lighter during slow songs has been replaced by glowing cell phone displays. How about turning a random sea of blue display lights from phones into something more meaningful like text or animations?

Sheridan College Library

- papervision3d, flash

- Interactive library tours and tutorials for the Sheridan Institute of Advanced Learning and Technology.

The Colbert Desktop – Adobe Air Application

- Marketing widget for “The Colbert Report.” The application aggregates rss feeds about recent clips and upcoming guests, has a shout box for users to post comments, and uses video with alpha channels to simulate a green screen mashup.

Social Media is media that encourages conversation, community, and collaborative content creation. This fits IMM’s mandate, which is to create interactive content beyond navigation.

Wayne MacPhail, is a social media consultant who gave a talk on Mashing Up Social Media and the DIY Community.

He presented Web 2.0 as a marketing term, which encompasses: community collaboration, shared content, single tasks, clean clear interface, tagging and social bookmarking.

Web 2.0 has also been referred to as the second bubble (the first being the Dot-Com bubble era of 1995-2001), where too many companies attempt to develop the same product without a business model.
I found this funny parody while researching Web 2.0: Here comes another bubble.

What is the target audience is of Twitter? I consider myself a tech geek, and I seem to have missed the Twitter bandwagon. I correlate Tweets to things like MSN personal messages or Facebook status updates, neither of which I have time to update.

You don’t use a social network, you become part of it:
A company can’t use a site like DIGG.com to promote their products. In order to get your content Dugg you must have a lot of Digg power, which comes from a high percentage of popular submissions. If a user tries to submit their own content, it’s usually buried by the community and labeled as blog spam.

Wayne presented us with a barrage of new Social Media services.

A global visualization of tweets using Google Maps.
http://twittervision.com/

Aggregates flakes of your existence from a variety of personal RSS feeds. It is a social life RSS feed that projects your footprint on the web.
http://jaiku.com/

Start your own live broadcast using content from around the web or your own webcam, and assemble a dream team of producers.
http://www.mogulus.com/

Sprout is the quick and easy way to build sophisticated multimedia content, including mini-sites, widgets, mashups…
http://sproutbuilder.com/

Share and discuss your news instantly.
http://www.utterz.com/

Stream live video fast to the world. Right from your phone.
http://qik.com/

Our field trip to the ROM brought back memories from grade 6, when our ancient civilizations class went on a field trip to look at various skulls of early humans. Clearly the ROM has changed a lot since grade school, the most dramatic of which is the addition of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal . It’s somewhat sad to see that the shuttered McLaughlin Planetarium which has been slated for demolition, is currently being used to store furniture.

I expected to see some cool interactive displays not unlike ones we’ve see in class before by Zach Booth Simpson, where kids play with virtual butterflies or virtual calders. While the dinosaur exhibits did have some “touch” displays to present content, they were by no means pioneering. I understand the challenges the ROM faces when it comes to keeping up with changing needs of new media.

Our class met with Brian Porter, who is the senior director of new media at the ROM. He came to the ROM in 1999 with a journalism background, and helped transition the museum from analog to digital.

The ROM is a charity that receives funding from the government and private donations. The work environment is “cultural” as opposed to “corporate”.

Obstacles to developing leading edge interactive content:

- debt of the Crystal outweighs the support for the New Media Department

- no room or resources for research and development

- hard to do “cool” things with old technology

One of the ROM’s current projects is to create a digital photographic archive of their over 6 million specimens. Proposed business models would be licensing the photos like stock photography or using the archive for an e-learning extension where teachers to find curriculum materials.

After the ROM, we visited Steve Mann‘s workshop. While I had heard of him being billed as the “human cyborg,” it didn’t register with me until he open the door with his head gear on.

I was interested to hear him explain what he was seeing/recording/filtering with his head gear, but it appears as though his current research focus is away from cyborgism.

Steve presented Nesse, a interactive multimedia flute that uses water instead of air. You get wet while playing and listening to this instrument!

Pachelbel’s canon

The tone of the instrument shifts when the user blocks one or more of the jets. The “soft” keys can be pressed in a multitude of different ways to produces subtle changes in volume, tone and timbre.

The largest of these installations can be found at the Ontario Science Centre:

FUNtain

After polling the class, I’ve come to recognize a lot of the obstacles that arise in developing a mobile applications. A majority of the class don’t have Flash Lite capable mobile devices, and the few that do don’t use flash lite applications because data plans are too expensive.

If we tech geeks aren’t using these applications, what are the chances of the general population adopting them? I guess that’s the challenge we as developers must face, if Flash Lite applications are to EVER become popular.

James Eberhardt the Technical Director of “Insert Company Name Here,” came to speak to the IMM class about developing applications for a mobile platform. He demonstrated a few mobile applications (Flickr Upload, QR Codes) using a wifi enabled cell phone.

He’s done work for “The Border” television series on the CBC, which uses QR codes as part of a mobile scavenger hunt – theborder.ca .

QR codes – save time typing; seen on tourist locations, wine bottles, ads http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_Code.

There are some major obstacles for creating mobile content.

• In Canada to download 1 megabyte of data outside of a data plan costs $20. An average mp3 download would cost $80! The CRTC has recently opened up a new spectrum of radio waves that will allow for new carriers to enter the market http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/12/24/tech-yearahead.html?ref=rss . More companies would allow for competitive pricing. Another option for developer’s is to create content that is “on deck” with carrier. “On deck” content is treated separately from regular data, and billed at a discounted rate.
• Flash Lite – doesn’t support AS3!! Only As2. This is a major gotcha for me, because in IMM we’ve being programming all our projects in AS3. If Flash Lite 3 (recently released) isnt’ capable of AS3, it would be a couple years before hardware and software for phones catches up. James showed us an example of the Flash Lite 3 that supports alpha tweens and transformed video.
• GPRS not available on Flash Lite.
• 100′s of different devices with varying interfaces

In order to bring GPS-like capabilities to non-GPS type phones, there is WPS – Wi-Fi Positioning System from Skyhook Wireless. WPS uses terrestrial based Wi-Fi access points to determine location. The iPhone uses this network to triangulate 20 meter position accuracy, in conjuction with cellular network towers.

http://www.skyhookwireless.com

Murmer is a project that allows users to retrieve oral historical accounts about specific geographic locations from their cell phones.

http://murmurtoronto.ca

Our guest speaker today was Simon Conlin. He works as a consultant and acts as a liason for companies who wish to branch out into interactive multimedia. He is connected to a talented pool of designers, and is co-founder of FlashintheCan, one of the largest Flash developer globally held events in North America.

The multimedia industry is trending towards to more interactive content. Users are spending more time interacting and having fun with content, rather than being “sold” a specific brand or message.When a need arises for a certain application, then the technology becomes mainstream.

Adobe Interactive Installation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-NRdyUx8Lc

This installation allows multiple users to create musical content using a multi touch music wall: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qmmdGonQW4

MESO is a design team comprised of four designers and one computer engineer. They tout themselves as torn between art and technology, which allows them to bring innovative solution for clients. They do commercial work, while maintaining an artistic base. George Michael used massive interactive stage sets with realtime audio analysis and position tracking in his last Live25 world tour. http://meso.net/GMI25Live

Alexander Calder was an artist that employed the use of balance and motion in his world renown mobile installations. One of Zach Booth Simpon’s complaints is that when museums display these works of art, they don’t allow patrons to touch or blow on these works of art, interaction which Calder had originally intended. This frustration, led to Simpson’s virtual Calder’s: http://www.mine-control.com/zack/balance/balance.html

Webcamtastic is similar to the Photo Booth that come preinstalled on a Mac. It is a Flash web application that accesses your webcam, allowing you to manipulate photos by using distortion and blur filters. http://www.webcamtastic.com/

Potential applications:

Imagine going to a Japanese restaurant, and being able to order sushi from an interactive menu. This would eliminate the need for wait staff and give patrons and detailed description of the menu items.