CNN Hologram - Behind the Scenes video

Just in case you haven’t seen it yet on, I imagine, zillions of other blogs, here’s how CNN used “holograms” to “beam in” remote correspondents on Election Night. The short answer: green screens and a whole bunch of computer-controlled cameras, for some real-time “Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope” action. It continues CNN’s apparent campaign to be the TV network most like sci fi movies. (Hello, Minority Report-style gestural screens!)

Of course, it’s notable for some other reasons – somewhat silly reasons:

• It’s probably the only time someone intentionally added blue fringing to a chroma key effect. Yep, that’s right: the blue halo around the participants had to be added intentionally to emphasize what they were doing, even though fringing is usually what you try to avoid.
• It’s mixing sci fi metaphors like no tomorrow. Princess Leia? Beam me up? Holograms? What? “Cap’n, Scott here! I cannu keep the Death Star from blowing up! These damn Cylons!”
• It’s probably the most inaccurate use of the word “hologram” ever. It’s a chroma key effect. The whole point is, it’s the first 3D key effect I’ve seen in real-time on TV – as far as I know – but keying sure isn’t that exciting if you’ve been watching the weather in the last half century. So they add the word “hologram.” They might as well have called it the “Holodeck” or “transporters” or just “magic.”

Technologically, though, it is very impressive. The real irony here isn’t that CNN used silly magical terminology and played terrifying drum sounds. (During the course of the evening, they had other sound effects that sounded like Nintendo platformer power-ups and massive explosions, as though Obama had just attacked North Carolina with an alien invasion.)

No, the real irony is that this impressive, expressive technology winds up becoming yet another way of doing boring talking heads. I can’t wait to see what happens when someone comes up with a more interesting use for this stuff. Stay tuned.

Create Digital Emotion, perhaps?

Beam me up, Wolf! CNN debuts election-night ‘hologram’

Projection consultants Projector People weighs in on the McCain “overhead projector” attack; they’ve got an excellent round-up on the issue and all the coverage it has inspired so far as projection overlaps with politics:

A $3,000,000 Projector? [Projector People Blog]

And yes, as noted in comments, several of our Friends of CDMotion do VJ the planetarium here in NY, the Rose Center at the American Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side.

I realize I actually missed this line from the Adler Planetarium:

“To remain competitive and ensure national security, it is vital that we educate and inspire the next generation of explorers to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math.”

I just enjoy the “national security” bit. I expect what they mean is that kids get inspired by planetariums and go get careers in the Defense industry … I’ll let you make of that what you will. But if you take it literally at face value, maybe the Adler is thinking about teaching kids about space so that we’re ready to push back the massive alien Earth invasion the next generation will have to face. (That is, unless we’re lucky and it’s someone like the Vulcans, like happens in the Star Trek world.)

In other woulds, we should immediately make up “Support a VJ, or the Aliens Win” t-shirts.

I’ll be in Melbourne from tomorrow, presenting CDMo at the “DIY TV: Video, UGC, Mobile and IP TV” edition of the globetrotting think-tank X|Media|Lab.

I’ll be talking to some smart people about where visualists fit in the future of TV, and while my head’s full of my ideas of what’s happening next, I’d love to hear from some CDM readers too. There’s plenty of visualists out there currently working on transitioning their art from hobby to business. We have some ideas on how we can help this process along (more on that next week), but in the meantime: How are you building up your visual business? What opportunities or resources would help you?

And for those who are quite happy to do this just for the fun of it, here’s a little DIY TV I put together last week, a continuation of my quick, single shot “Bridge Sessions” video series.

Edward Guglielmino - Landslide (Bridge Sessions) from Jaymis on Vimeo.

AV technology is progressing rapidly. We now have two DJ/VJ mixers to choose from (Pioneer SVM-1000, Numark AVM02), most VJ apps will now play audio on video clips, and many DJ programs are incorporating video playback in their current or upcoming feature sets. Obviously these moves are following a trend: DVJ is totally hot right now. Our interweb tubes are being filled with youtubes, video mashups and remixes are constant viral video hits… The time for AV to go mainstream is now, and we’re going to see the next generation of performance innovators rise, buoyed up by these new, accessible, and immensely capable tools.

I spent last night a guest of VJ Morph at Brisbane’s Tivoli Theatre, for the last show of the Smirnoff Secret Sessions Australian tour.

Headlining the show: DJ Yoda with a DVJ set. Yoda is obviously a talented DJ, but as a visualist I was entirely underwhelmed by his performance. The source material was uninventive - mostly popular movies and music videos - with low resolution and compression artifacts telling us that much of the content was ripped from youtube. Technical nitpicking aside, the set wasn’t assembled with much regard for editing, visual storytelling, coherence, or even visual interest. There were occasional inventive tricks, nice material selection, and some proficient scratching and sample triggering, but the bulk of the visual set was comprised of clips playing through towards their full length, generally in their original unedited form, and often completely at odds with the accompanying audio. Old black and white movies would be scratched in for their vocal samples, and then continue to play as the audio segued into some unrelated track. Aside from a sprinkling of original content, the videos were solidly uninspiring, and probably overfamiliar to most internet-age, youtube slurping punters.

Despite the hype, the Pioneer SVM-1000 didn’t help matters, its video effects looked cheesy on first appearance, and positively hackneyed by the fourth time the page-spin and tile-shuffle were dropped in. There were some crowd-pleasing pop culture moments - scratching audio and video definitely has the ability to wow an audience - but anyone with a more than rudimentary knowledge of video would have been hard pressed to find “next level” visual performance here, and by the end of the 90 minute set even the crowd was losing focus between the humorous video interludes and old-favorite tracks.

So how can we go about fostering real innovation in AV, “popular”, music performance. The short term solution is obvious: Have a visualist to take care of the video.

Boy, there isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t think how much more productive I could be if every single one of my creative apps ran online.

Wait.

Scratch that. No, I’ve actually never thought that.

Online applications can be fantastic. I’m using one right now. Having Flickr for photos and Vimeo for videos, and so on, can vastly expand the potential of what you can do with media. And I certainly see casual users of those applications preferring online services in some cases. (On the other hand, I also know even a lot of casual photographers who would rather sit in Aperture or Lightroom and tweak their photos than struggle with a Web app — for them, the Web is about uploading and sharing, not editing.)

It’s just really hard to see why pros would need to do everything online. And here’s the fundamental problem: why are we talking about taking applications online rather than taking online to applications? Witness Adobe’s Bruce Chizen making vague predictions about the far-off future — ten years, to be exact. By that point, we might as well start talking about how we’ll all be flooded by global warming and under attack by the Mutant Bug People who have dominated the Earth. But in ten years, says Adobe, their products will be fully online. Why? Uh … haven’t figure that one out yet, evidently.

Kotaku points us to a very odd an interesting looking prototype gaming console. The gist of the system is that it captures real-time data from sensors, such as GPS, a camera system, etc., to mold reality into an immersive gaming environment.

Kotaku puts it rather well :

I don’t come from the future, where everyday people carry s*** like this around in their back pocket. Sadly the device is very much in the prototype stage, and may not even be put into production … at least not until the year 2019, when people’s minds will be ready for it.

However, it did get me thinking of interesting uses for it and similar systems that integrate lots of sensor data with desktop processing power. It seems it would suit itself far more to immersive interactive improvisation, which lines up quite well for what many VJs try to do. Either way, I’d rather use something like this in a club or a concert hall than playing a first person shooter running around the streets of New York. Those 2019 cabs still hurt. I’ll admit this is rather far off, and that I am stretching, but I can imagine doing some really fun and creative things with a device like this.

Via Kotaku : Hewlett-Packard Unveil New Prototype, Vid For Gaming Handheld

Ed.: Far off? I don’t think so. Strap an Arduino or other sensor-to-digital interface to a Nokia N800, and you’re there! (GPS + camera + sensors.) For visualists, too, we have an added edge: you can take a simpler mobile machine as the interface device, wirelessly connected to a computer as a base station for the heavy lifting. Result: a very affordable device ought to work. -PK

Diesel’s latest fashion show featured some 3D holographic projection that is just beyond cool.

Creative Review has the scoop and spoke with a mysterious tech who hinted at some of the inner workings:

“The visuals are projected through a series of ‘foils’ into mid air, so you see the images in mid-air. The models can then interact with them and walk through them. We used plastic foils placed at 45 degree angles so that the projected light from the ceiling goes onto a foil, is reflected on to another and then into the air.

Creative Review has some more information regarding the setup, but the short of it is, 2 HD projectors, pre rendered CGI footage at HD resolution projected down from the ceiling, and a stunned audience (well, they had better be).

An interesting comment at Creative Review suggests that the effect is an updated “Peppers Ghost” setup, which means in theory, some enterprising VJ could set this up today. Either way, it looks incredible.

It’s remarkable what a difference accurate multi-touch can make for interface design, especially when the surface is scaled relative to the human body (sorry, iPhone). Jeff Han’s work, widely spread around the blogosphere, is significant because his team has really rethought the whole interface. Gestures for moving things around in 3D space just make perfect sense. The only bad news is that large-scale back-projected screens take up space, and make possible a number of implementation details that wouldn’t work (for the time being) on smaller displays. The good news is, this kind of work could soon be finding its way into performances. Right now, live visualists still focus on the DJ mixer as their primary performance metaphor — a surprisingly deep resource, to be sure, but likely only scratching the surface of what could be possible.

Via Mac Rumors

Half of you readers right now I think are at NYU, so, ahem, feel free to fill us in. (Or join in a chorus of “Our Dear Old NYU”, if you like. Darnit, CUNY needs a song.)

Cybersonica turns a gallery space into an interactive playground, filled with sound art installations that mine the power of fun in art. Curator Chris O’Shea sends this professionally-produced documentation video from the hip Phonica record store in London:

Cybersonica & Encompass Sonic Art Exhibition [YouTube]

Among the delights inside: suspended disco satellites controlled by Korg Kaoss Pads, motion tracking that translates a performer into a shadow puppet monster (complete with roaring sounds), a liquid, fully-3D interface for making music which shall be known at CDM simply as the hotness, a 3D Etch-a-Sketch for sound, an installation with an interface controlled by torn paper, and even a mechanical contraption that samples visitors onto analog tape (it’s not all digital).

Chris is gradually documenting the works on his blog, Pixelsumo. If you’re in London, don’t miss the programs Friday and Saturday, and do file a report so all the rest of us know how it goes!