Facebook beats Google in U.S.

Unimaginable that any website would be a more visited online destination than the ubiquitous Google. However, in U.S. where the online revolution began, it seems that the social website Facebook, which also contains its own application platform, now attracts more internet traffic than Google.



The rise of Facebook according to the graph, has been spectacular. I've noticed that friends which until recently I found only on other platforms such as Orkut (popular in India) and Yahoo are now to be found in Facebook.

Facebook was launched just in 2004, for just Harvard students, then expanded outwards in later-2006 to anyone holding a valid email address. At that time myspace.com was the leader site in online personal web pages, and the two became rivals. Myspace allowed its users to design their pages in any way they liked, while Facebook kept control on the look and feel. This ended up making myspace a very wild and noisy online space filled with the participants' creativity, but confusing for the casual user. Facebook reduced your design choices, but that made it simpler and recognisable. Myspace has reduced in profile, but still popular among musicians and artists. Now, Facebook has moved far beyond myspace and seems to be competing with status-update micro-blogging site Twitter.

In 2007, Facebook launched a platform, f8 for creating applications that ran on its website. There was also an associated Facebook Markup Language. This allowed developers to create their own games and experiences that user could share with each other on the website. The experience moved beyond simple communication between community members to participating in shared activity. This can be very addictive especially where elements of competition and public achievement are introduced into the application, such as in multi-player games. This is especially helping to keep people locked into the Facebook website.

While Facebook has no hope of beating Google as a way of searching on the web, the shift in traffic share, does mark a change in the way people are now using the Internet - to participate in communication and shared experiences rather than a convenient source of information.

Cooliris Embedded

Popular image and video presentation option Cooliris has come out with a new method of showing their 3D wall of images. Now the gallery can be embedded into a web page as a component. See my example below, showing images from an event some years ago

Top Trends Timeline 2010-50

An Australia/UK based futurist, Richard Watson of Nowandnext.com has, with some collaboration, drawn up a very complex timeline of trends for 2010 and going into the next 40 years.

Though a I enjoy visualization of concepts, this map is not that easy to discern at first glance. It takes a bit of time to spot the pattern, and further to absorb the content. The original full diagram is available here.

Like a Metro/Subway/Underground map, there are lines that trace a certain category or subject such as Healthcare & Medicine or Geopolitics through a minefield of trends, marked as dots/circles. The more important the trend the larger the circle, and is more likely to contain more intersecting lines. Starting from the centre region which corresponds to the 2010-15 period, there are outwardly radiating regions of time up to 2035-50. Perhaps it should be called a time-map.

Many of the trends such as speech-recognition, cloud-storage, and declining fertility are already here in some form, while others further out in the timeline still belong in the domain of science-fiction - DNA repair, invisibility cloaks, Animals suing humans.

Watson invites any comments or suggestions on his blog page here.

Sherlock Holmes for the 21st century

I went to the cinema to expecting to see a different Sherlock Holmes, a character repackaged to cater to a new market, in a crude manner that detracts from his original essence. Didn't happen.

The new Sherlock Holmes, played by Robert Downey Jr., is a much more dynamic character - younger, more adventurous, bit less of the English gentleman than previously depicted. Nevertheless, the core of the character hasn't been lost - the eccentricity, self-assuredness, intense concentration, and even human weaknesses. Jude Law would not have been my choice for Dr. Watson, but he's pulled it off quite well, next to Downey's Holmes. So, if you are a fan of the classic A.C.Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, you probably won't be disappointed.

The marked difference was in the the look of Holmes. The new movie has not shied away from redefining the portrait - gone is the combed back hairstyle, the sharp jawline and chin. Downey doesn't look anything like the classic Holmes, who has been played best by actor Jeremy Brett (see on the right) in the almost complete series by Granada Television. Jeremy Brett was probably the first to capture the full theatrical intensity of the character, watching him was like following the original sketch in the books. In fact, my friend Prasanna aptly remarked that the villain in the movie is a closer look to the classic Holmes. Not commonly known is the story that the look of Holmes didn't come from the author A.C. Doyle but from his first illustrator.

The story of Sherlock Holmes first began in 1887, with the story A Study in Scarlet, published in Strand magazine, London. The Sign of Four was published in 1890, and the series The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes began in 1891 ...

With the stories serialized in The Strand came the first illustrations, and it was Sydney Paget who was to fix the the features of the tall, thin, bony character for generations of enthralled readers. The story is that Sydney was actually commissioned by mistake, instead of his brother Walter, whose work the magazine knew through his illustrations for Rider Haggard and Robert Louis Stevenson. If so, this quirk of fate was balanced by a kind of poetic justice on Sydney's part, for he used his brother's lean features as his model for Holmes. And later after Sydney's death in January 1908, Walter himself illustrated one of the stories, The Adventure of the Dying Detective. What Holmes would have looked like had Walter got there first we can only guess, for, like all the other artists commissioned to continue Sydney Paget's work, Walter did not stray far from the image of himself Sydney had fleshed upon the bones of Conan Doyle's creation.

- Preface, The Complete Illustrated Sherlock Holmes

Holmes has been seen that way ever since. There have been many actors in to play the detective, all bearing resemblance to Sydney Paget's illustration.

However, more than that, the reason Sherlock Holmes has avid followers around the world and across generations is his personality. In a sense he is very much a 20th century man, before his times, even bit of a rebel. His firm foundation in scientific principles led him to be accessible, yet his public performance of a mind-reader and magician is highly entertaining. He's a magician who, in the end, reveals his tricks of the trade, leading all who read the accounts to think that they can follow the indicated lead. He's a fictional character that has inspired creation of countless other similar fictional characters. It becomes more than just a story.

The new movie with all the benefits of modern technology (and big budget) fills in the larger picture as well. The musical score suits the setting. There are panoramic views of the London of the late 19th century, with references to the social, technological and industrial upheavels taking place ..

Arthur Conan Doyle's birth year, 1859, fell 22 years into Queen Victoria's 64-year reign, a time of unparalleled growth and optimism for the British Empire. Resources and labor taken from colonies worldwide had made England prosper, and the time of serious independence struggles lay in the distant future. Business flourished, technology blossomed, and London grew at a great rate - from one million people to six in the space of a century - creating problems of urban overcrowding familiar to us today: poverty, homelessness, drug abuse, crime. While the great divide between rich and poor and the economic and human strain of maintaining the colonies exacerbated social problems that were as yet insoluble, Victorian Britons, led by Victoria's husband Albert, put their faith in technology and science. The contrasts and conundrums of this fascinating time provided Conan Doyle with the raw material and the backdrop for Sherlock Holmes: a man of science, undistracted by the gentler passions, who moved easily through the disquieting urban space, using his wits to solve its moral and practical dilemmas.

- Sherlock Holmes, Victorian Gentleman http://sherlockholmes.stanford.edu/history.html

Come to think of it, there are actually many parallels to the enormous changes taking place in cities of the today's emerging nations. Many of similar patterns and contrasts can be spotted in places such as New Delhi. It could be a new setting for a modern fictional detective.

Tallest building on Earth

The latest tallest building on Earth, Burj Khalifa (formerly Burj Dubai), was inaugurated in Dubai in a glittering ceremony of fireworks, lights, and musical fountains. The building touches the milestone of 828 meters (or 2,717 feet) with 162 floors. Construction started on 21 September 2004, and has been completed on 4 January 2010. The opening ceremony can be seen here

A comparison with some of the existing tallest man-made structures (not counting projects in planning or construction) produces the diagram below. If you want to consider New Zealand's tallest structure, the Auckland Sky Tower at 328 meters, you can put it at approximately the size of the Eiffel Tower on the diagram. India's highest buliding is currently the Imperial towers in Mumbai at 60 floors and 249 meters.

Having the good fortune to have seen almost all the structures in the diagram(except for the Taipei 101 & CN tower), I look forward to seeing this one.

Here's another detailed diagram comparing world edifices reaching above 400 meters benchmark. The current completed buildings are in full representation, while the in-progress constructions are shown as line drawings.

It's probably unlikely that the Burj Khalifa will remain the highest building with so many newly emerging nations and conglomerates also eyeing that coveted title. Burj's predecessor the Taipei 101 (509 meters) only held the title for 6 years, not allowing the Shanghai World Financial Centre (492 meters) to even get a chance. Previous to that the Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur (452 meters) were the highest for 6 years, and the Willis Towers, Chicago (formerly Sears Towers) was the highest for 24 years.

However, it will be difficult to match the longevity of the building that held the title for 3880 years - the Great Pyramid of Khufu (Cheops). Here is an interesting, though very detailed diagram of the tallest buildings of the 'old' world.

Image credits: Wikipedia.org & flickr.com

Denying Darwin

Saw this T-shirt in a mall and loved it. Pity they didn't have my size.

Could have so many interpretations - modern man denying his animal past, ...

Indian Mona Lisa

I saw this magazine cover and was impressed by the artists rendering of an 'Indian' Mona Lisa.


Note the Indian-style jewellery on the neck, wrists, hands, ears, nose and upper forehead. The garments display the rich design work favoured by Indian women. The make up is restrained to original Leonardo da Vinci, but with the touch of bindi, in the centre of the forehead. In the two insets in the main portrait is, first the original work, and below another alternate rendering of an Indian Mona Lisa - in perhaps Mughal-style garb and the whole painting being in Indian classical style.

Redesign!

Don't panic! You haven't come to a new web site.

Doesn't seem that long ago when I started this blog. 3 years, 1 month, and 95 blog posts later - it's time to do a rethink.

I finally built up the courage to do some radical work on the blog design. When I first set up the blog, I had chosen an old-paper and wallpaper background look, called "Scribe", created by Todd Dominey. It appealed to me as a contradiction to the high-tech medium on which blogs exist.

Over that time, I kept tinkering with the surrounding elements, namely gadgets, in the blog. I added complexity with enthusiasm, then hesitatingly retreated to simplicity. Most recently I added a gadget to display my Twitter updates, that seemed to bring the blog down yesterday, when the Twitter site once again failed.

Meanwhile in the web design environment, so much has happened. In the tug of war between functionality and design, it is design that is determining marketability as functionality becomes mature and standardizes. There has been an emergence of a digital fashion, user experience and web design chatterati with its endless, all-knowing, yet ever-changing recommendations.

Design in the end is not a science, no matter how much "experts" on this may try to convince you otherwise. However as artists, designers are to be respected.

Last time I had picked one of the standard blogger templates for the design, this time I was looking to pick an uncommon theme and modify it to my own taste. Browsing online, I was suprised at how much blog design has evolved and the number of specialist designers dedicated to this. It took me several days to go through the many impressive and detailed designs and form an idea of the range and possibilties.

To me the Charcoal theme, originally by Jinsona of web2feel.com, and adapted to blogger platform by Blogger Templates, stood out. I liked the design, but not quite the colour. For this I had to do a lot of modification work, that helped me familiarise with the design construction and elements.

I've always had a preference for dark colour backgrounds, and on computer screens it seems easier on the eyes. Strangely enough, it even seems that dark colour websites help save the environment by reducing energy usage (See Blackle).

As noted, an all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts.
     - ecoIron Blog

I doubt if I have enough visitors to justify the redesign in environmental terms. The basic truth is that I changed the blog design to this, 'cause I felt like it. Hope you like it too.

FoxTab: Firefox tabs SFX

Here's another interesting Firefox extension to navigate the plethora of tabs we open up in our browsers these days. It seems to offer the best visual special effect options in executing the transition between different tabs. A combined thumbnail view also allows the user to see what is in each of the tabs. A good thing is that by default it opens up inside your browser and doesn't take over your whole screen. That is, unless you want it to.

Among the effects are

• A Windows Vista type Flip 3D
• Apple iTunes style Cover Flow
• Cooliris PicLens style 3D gallery wall

A better explanation is in the video below



To get this add-on for your Firefox go here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8879

Hmm ... come to think about, ideally the best and most useful tab navigator is one that navigates the brower tabs and the open applications in one interface. It would require combining the browser system with the computer operating system with some stylized transitions. Let's see if anybody comes up with that one.

Webstock '09

This is the conference I look forward to every year. A huge amount of thought and energy by come of the most creative people in New Zealand web community goes in organizing this event. Sponsored by a plethora of companies and institutions such as Google. A typical attribute of the gathering is the rather forward looking and upbeat atmosphere which is easy to catch.

This year we have speakers include people from Apple Inc., Google, and Flickr. The forum provides a good community where they can share their insights and battle-stories and the audience understand, sympathize and learn from these.

They've finally induced me into starting a twitter micro-blogging account. I'll be putting live twitter updates when I can here, and will add further Scio-sphere blogs for some of the sessions later.

Conference website: http://www.webstock.org.nz
Flickr photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/webstock/
My Twitter: http://twitter.com/apanand

Library of the Human Imagination

Here's a personal library that most of us can only dream of. In fact, most public libraries can also just aspire to.

Stuffed with landmark tomes and eye-grabbing historical objects—on the walls, on tables, standing on the floor—the room occupies about 3,600 square feet on three mazelike levels. Is that a Sputnik? (Yes.) Hey, those books appear to be bound in rubies. (They are.) That edition of Chaucer ... is it a Kelmscott? (Natch.) Gee, that chandelier looks like the one in the James Bond flick Die Another Day. (Because it is.) No matter where you turn in this ziggurat, another treasure beckons you

- Wired News Article (includes more photos)

Here's a fascinating video talk by the owner/curator, Jay Walker:

UX Honeycomb

In a well-known blog post on Semantic Studios, Peter Morville defined a guide to evaluate User Experience on online websites. It's called the User Experience Honeycomb and depicted as shown below.



Always interested in visualization of ideas, I thought I'd give it a bit of 3-D touch. I made a Google Sketchup 3D model

URL:
Embed:

And then incorporated into a more detailed graphic (click on image to see larger size).

URL:
Embed:

Feel free to use any of these.

Windows XP Themes - free and easy

Customizable interfaces that's what we love. Users today spend a large part of the day staring at the same screens, sometimes they want a change but there's not much to have.

Microsoft Vista, window operating system's new avatar, did come out with a lot of that stuff - but it turned out to be something that doesn't go smoothly on your average computer. The result is that many, including me, are now choosing to use the older Windows XP. Seeing the problems in Vista, we are learning to appreciate the relative stability of WinXP, it's compatibility with nearly all popular software products, and ability to get the job done without too much fuss.

Yet, there's still much left to be desired. This blog is about the limited 'themes' in WinXP. By default, you'll find that out-of-the-box you get only 3 themes in WinXP - Windows XP, Windows Classic and 'My Current Theme'. Not very inspiring. 'M themes online...' link never leads anywhere useful.


Now since Microsoft is not very helpful, we end up seeing third party software such as StyleXP. Many of these are not free, which these days is means unusable. Some have custom software to do the configuration. Ideally one should just be able to get themes online and set them using the default WinXP setup shown above.

There had to be an easier way, I found it with Multipatcher - here's how to use it:

• Get the software here (file is uxpatcher.zip), currently it is at version 5.5. Note that this software will only work on Windows XP/SP1/SP2 or Windows Server 2003 (with Themes enabled)
  
• Unzip this to get the file UXTheme Multi-Patcher 5.5.exe. Run this program. This edits the Windows dynamic link library file uxtheme.dll, so that it can accept theme files that have not been signed off by Microsoft, otherwise any other theme files will not be recognised.
• On running you will get the following dialogue widow:
  
  
• click the 'Patch' button to go ahead with the install. Following window will then appear:
  
  

• This checks out your windows system. Click the 'OK' button. A new window will appear:
  
  
• This warns you about the Windows File Protection dialogue appearing. I'll explain about that further, for now click 'OK'. Next window is:
  
  
• To restart the computer after install, click OK. Make sure any unsaved work on your computer is saved before doing so.
• Before you restart a Windows File Protection dialogue may appear:
  
  
• For which click 'Cancel', or the following may appear:
  
  
• for which you can click 'Yes'
  
• If you are uncomfortable with patching your uxtheme.dll file, note that running this program again will un-patch the file.

Installing Themes

• You can find WinXP themes at varous online locations such as - here and here.
  
• To install these, put the *.theme file and any associated folders in C:\WINDOWS\Resources\Themes
• Then double-click on the file *.theme and it will open in the standard Display properties window shown above. Choose the theme and click 'Apply'.

Code Poets, Software Engineers

The following article by Jonathan Wise has been resonating online with the Software community. A lot that has been written applies to me and my colleagues everywhere. Our job titles are perhaps deliberately confusing enough to keep you guessing our 'real' work. The following excerpts highlight the best and easiest bits, but you can read the full article here to get the complete description.

• And believe it or not, I don't fix computers for a living.
• There's these organizations, some (not all) still stuck in the 70s and 80s, called “I.T. Departments” who's official purpose is to fix computers — but who's actual purpose is to attempt to prevent their users from doing anything dangerous (read: useful.)
• A software developer must be part writer and poet, part salesperson and public speaker, part artist and designer, and always equal parts logic and empathy.
• A piece of software starts, before any code is written, as an idea or as a problem to be solved.
  
• It is always tied to a human being — their job, their entertainment… their needs.
• Once you understand what you need to build, you still don't begin building it. Like an architect or a designer, you start with a sketch, and you create a design.
• Its not uncommon for the design process to take longer than the coding process.
• You put on a sales hat and you pitch what you've dreamt up… then wait with bated breath while they dissect your brain child.
• Software that can't be understood can't be used, so no matter how brilliant your design, if your interface isn't elegant and beautiful and intuitive, your project is a failure.
• To make something easy to use requires at least a basic understanding of human reactions, an awareness of cognitive norms.
• Only, unlike a salesperson selling someone else's product, you are selling your own work, and are inevitably emotionally-attached to it.
• Maybe its more like music ...
• ... the pieces are added up, each in itself a little work of art, they make, if programmed properly, a whole that is much more than a sum. Its is an intertwined, and constantly moving piece of art.
• ... next comes a Quality Assurance Engineer (or QA) who tries to break your code, question your decisions, and generally force you to do better than what you thought was your best.
• it takes a true artist, or at least an earnest student, to understand just how brilliant — or how wretched — the work behind it is.
• As a lead developer on a project, it falls to you to instill confidence, to speak articulately and passionately about the appropriateness and worth of your solution.
• ... user's are never really satisfied. So you think back to the design process, you remind them when they had a part in the decisions ...
• And you write and you teach. ... responsibility to educate people on the uses of our technology ...
• Then there's a party, a brief respite, where you celebrate your victory ... And you start again. ...
  
• ... you are only as good as your latest victory.
  

Thinking up Trademe

A very interesting presentation by Trademe co-founder Rowan Simpson. Rowan has been presenting TradeMe's story in several conferences, I had seen him at Webstock 2006. Trademe is acknowledged as New Zealand's most popular website. Like eBay it is a place where people auction and bid for goods. I've found many a good deal myself, such as this laptop I'm writing on. On to the Trademe Keynote presentation at Microsoft TechEd2006 ..



Rowan has come comments on this presentation on his blog.

New way to resize images automatically

At the SIGGRAPH 2007 conference, in the session named Image Slicing and Stretching there has been a notable technology presented by two researchers from Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL).

Called Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing, it's described as

Seam carving is a method for content-aware resizing that changes the size of an image according to its content. This paper shows applications to aspect-ratio change, image retargeting, and object removal.

Resizing images to make them fit in the required internet form factor without distorting its contents has always been a bit of a challenge. The demonstration of this tool, seems to make the work involved a lot easier and automated. The ability of a page to resize with the browser window is called liquidity. Here the images in the page also support that concept.

It also demonstrates the capability of locating areas of that are least important or have the 'least energy' and removing them without any noticeable distortions. However, there are limitations, especially where there are large composition elements such as faces and people that cannot be skewed without obvious effects.

To see these very interesting image transformation capabilities see the following video.



The two researchers, Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir have been promptly recruited by Adobe Systems Incorporated, who in-fact chaired the conference session. I fear this tool may also just get incorporated into Adobe's proprietary image manipulation software, instead of becoming available in the open source arena.

Meanwhile, traditionalists moan the manipulations possible in digital images and note that it undermines the integrity of photographs and the art of photography.

Prof. Hans Rosling shows us the real world

I had the priviledge to meet Sweden's Professor Hans Rosling at GOVIS 2007: Innovation in ICT conference held here in Wellington. I attended his workshop Unveiling the beauty of statistics with animations. Prof. Rosling was described in the GOVIS conference pages as

Hans Rosling has spent two decades studying the links between poverty, agriculture and disease in remote rural areas across Africa. He-founded Gapminder together with his son and daughter-in-law to promote better use and understanding of statistics by converting international statistics into moving, interactive and enjoyable graphics.

In the workshop he further informed us that his software Trendalyzer has been acquired by Google (yes, the big monster that's eating up everything) and they will help further develop it. Its features will probably be included into Google Analytics as well. This will give the software a platform and resources for more development.

Prof. Rosling already has a very busy schedule, being invited to speak in front of most major international forums, including UN bodies, OECD etc. I think every world government and media outlet should hear him. In most conference sessions I like to take lots of notes in case I forget something, but at the GOVIS session I had to put my pen down as I knew I wouldn't forget this one. Not only was the presentation enormously informative, it was also very entertaining. The famous videos below are from the TED conferences.

February 2006 - Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen




March 2007 - Hans Rosling: New insights on poverty and life around the world



Prof. Hans Rosling at GOVIS 2007 in Wellington

National Library 3D Building Model for Google Earth

I'm submitting this model to Google Earth today.

Google Sketchup Model


Link to this image: http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1176/962260016_9c348e09e3_o.jpg

Google Earth view


(Click on Image to Enlarge)
Link to this image: http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1010/971357387_6f747e9bc0.jpg
Link to large image: http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1010/971357387_fb76db9f49_o.jpg

Background

Google Earth is a very popular downloadable program for users, that allows one to 'dive in' and navigate the earth as seen from the air. Originally, this would have started out at as a GIS (Geographical Information System) that was mapping satellite photos on to the globe, but a rapid pace of innovation has introduced a lot of extra possibilites. Basically, if you can place it on a map, then it should be placed on this application. A very popular such feature layer is 3D buildings where if you navigate to any place on Google Earth, you can actually see 3D realistic models of buildings standing in their positions. The first such models were built by Google, but since has been opened up to accept user built contributions. Google released a very user-friendly application called Google Sketchup to build such models, and an online repository called 3D Warehouse to store the contributions. Google then assesses these for their suitability for inclusion.

Video of the Model

URL:
Embed:

Current status (and how to see it in Google Earth)

Right now this model has been submitted to Google's 3D warehouse. You can search for it by going to the 3D Warehouse site and searching for "National Library" or more specifically "National Library of New Zealand". If you are using Google Earth, please note that the model will not turn up by default in Google's 3D building layer until it goes through Google's approval process, but you can still see it by following the instructions here to get the Google 3D warehouse network link.

I've been doing this project in my 'spare time' at home. Now that I've finished, my wife will finally be happy to get more of my time. Not easy being married to a techie sometimes.

Also ..
just in time for the Library building's 20th Anniversary of completion (5 August 2007)!



Relevant Links

• Official Page on Google 3D Warehouse
• National Library of New Zealand Home Page
• Presentation at BarCamp, Scio-sphere post
• Where to get Google Earth
• How to view Google's 3D building layer
• How to view contributed 3D building content

SiB, Search in Black

My wife put me on to this web site. Apparently web pages with white background take more energy to display than black colour backgrounds. So the logic goes that if Google, which is one of the most used websites, were to be redone in black, then we would be saving Megawatts in electricity. That call was answered by an Australian group Heap Media who've set up Blackle. Yes, here you can search Google in black.

The claims of power saving are more applicable to CRT (Cathode Ray Tube monitors, the TV-type boxes) monitors rather than the LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) monitors. In fact it's thought that showing black consumes more power than white on LCD monitors. So the debate can go on.

This reminded me of the first Webstock conference, held here in Wellington. At first the organising group had set up a very well designed site with lots of images, bright backgrounds and detailed fonts. Then apparently an email circulated that designing these kinds of sites causes more power to be consumed when viewing on the computer. Being the caring-and-sensitive types, the group promptly took down all the styling until the web site was normal text on plain-gray background. This would have satisfied the green-minded, but by the time the conference was about to commence, lo - the styled version was back without any explanation. Somebody must have figured it out - you can't hold a prestigious conference with a dull, boring online website.

See related article.

From Microsoft Labs ... Seadragon and Photosynth

Webstock Mini-June
We were given a brief glimpse of this technology at Webstock Mini-June conference held here in Wellington last week. The presenter was Leigh Blackall, he showed us some features of Second Life virtual world. Proceeding on that topic he also gave us a brief glimpse of Photosynth. Curiosity drove me to the source.

TED
With the competition in internet innovation hotting up these days a lot of brilliant ideas are finding voice. An exciting development to come out of Microsoft Labs was demonstrated at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talks held every year in California, United States.

Seadragon
This was the first of the two technologies presented. Using the new Windows Media Photo Format, examples were shown of collages of photographs, that can be zoomed endlessly down to the tiniest level, smoothly and effortlessly. At one stage the software architect Blaise Aguera Y Arcas, mentioned that they were using 300 MegaPixel images. To put that in perspective, most images we get from digital cameras are only around 3 to 5 MegaPixels, and these are capable of being printed in large poster format without distortion. To facilitate this kind of technology I would normally assume that the software that can manipulate objects of this size would be very sophisticated and complex, requiring machines at super-computer level including giant memory stores connected to a very large bandwidth network. Yet, this project, which is under incubation at Microsoft Live Labs promises:

1. Speed of navigation is independent of the size or number of objects.


2. Performance depends only on the ratio of bandwidth to pixels on the screen.


3. Transitions are smooth as butter.


4. Scaling is near perfect and rapid for screens of any resolution.

PhotoSynth
This other project from Microsoft Live Labs allows one to see the photos in a context of 3D virtual world representation of the place where the photograph was taken. The model seems to map the position of the camera, the position of the photographed subject, and the photograph itself. Now, integrated with countless other photographs in the same area. What you effectively build up is a 3D world showing the view from any point in any direction using available photographic detail of the area.

Some latest digital cameras that come with built in Global Positioning System (GPS) sensors could, theoretically, encode the photograph itself with the data (or metadata) of where it was taken. To get the effective 3D coordinates, the metadata should also include the height in terms of 'above sea-level' of the photographer. However, Photosynth works from the other end - it takes your photographs, analyzes them, and working from familiar features in the photo - such as the architectural lines of a known building, determines the position and angle of the camera. Thus, the onus is lifted from the user to provide the location metadata for the photo.

There are further benefits envisaged to this technology such as Smart Photos - the idea of taking a photo of some item with your cellphone-camera, and sending it to a service that determines what's in the picture and sending you back information about the subject. Great for tourists!

You can install and try out the software, but note the system requirements before you begin.

One particular word said by the presenter is going to stick around in my mind - metaverse. It seems to be a reference to a universe built by amalgamation of all kinds of related objects, facilitated by the metadata of those objects.

The TED Presentation