The Benefits of Dogged Persistance
Posted by Tom Carpenter in Writing / Publishing on February 7th, 2010
I finished reading the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell today. One theme from the book was the idea that 10,000 hours of meaningful work within a skill set will make you an expert. A brief example from the book is a comparison of three groups of violinists at Berlin’s elite Academy of Music. The first group are judged as having world-class potential as a violinist. The second group was judged as merely “good.” While the third group aspired to be high school music teachers.
The difference in their ability was correlated to the amount of time they practiced. All of them started around the age of five, but the world-class players practiced for long hours and had achieved the magical 10,000 hours by the time they reached the academy. The second group had totaled eight-thousand hours and the last group only four-thousand.
This should come as no surprise to anyone that hard work pays off. The book goes on to give examples of how people like Mozart, Bill Gates and the Beatles all benefited from their 10,000 hours.
The surprise to me was that, well, I was surprised. This wasn’t the first time I’d heard this axiom. Growing up I played soccer and attended Pat McBride’s soccer camp in St. Louis. Pat played for the Olympic team and is in the National Soccer Hall of Fame. He’s a legend around these parts. One of the things he said was that to be a great soccer player, you must touch the ball a million times.
While I never aspired to be a professional soccer player, I always took that lesson to heart for soccer. It’s not until I’ve become a bit older and wiser (and having read Malcolm’s book) that I realize that is true for any skill.
Thinking back to two of my favorite writers, Steven King and George R.R. Martin, I realize that both of them recounted the many rejections they received at a young age in their books on writing. They were working on their 10,000 hours at ages long before I’d even thought about putting pen to paper on a regular basis.
This also holds true to Heinlein’s Rules, which is a guidepost for new writers (and old ones still trying to learn the craft.)
1. You must write.
2. You must finish what you write.
3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
4. You must put the work on the market.
5. You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.
And if you need another example, then read these posts from Dean Wesley Smith about Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing. Read not only the posts, but the comments. Reading all of them has been like jacking into the Matrix and downloading thirty-years of experience in a few hours.
While I haven’t yet reached the mythical 10,000 hours, I’m working diligently on that task. This year my goal is 200,000 words (not including my blog posts for here and Games Alfresco.) That seems like a lot, but I hit 140,000 words last year (one novel, 4 short stories.) and made around 220 blog posts. Professional full-time writers probably put in about 500,000 words a year.
In the end, I’ll only get better if I have the courage to keep writing, sending out stories and novels, and waving at the rejections as signposts on my way to success.
Popularity: 2% [?]
What the Movie Avatar Can Teach Augmented Reality
Posted by Tom Carpenter in augmented reality on February 6th, 2010
The biggest news about the movie Avatar has been the 3D experience and the way its blown the doors off the previous records. The movie has garnered huge success because it pushed the boundaries of technology and told an interesting story.
I loved the movie and the way 3D helped give more perspective to the enviroment. My own Star Trek loving mother didn’t even realize the Na’vi were CGI. She thought they were people in blue suits (really… I’m not joking.) And though storytelling will become important to later advanced augmented reality applications, it’s not what I wanted to point out.
James Cameron is part art-dude and part tech-geek. He waited for years for the technology to ripen enough to do the movie the way he wanted. One of the innovations that he created for the movie was the Fusion camera for the live-action sequences. Normally, scenes are filmed before a green screen and then the CGI is added afterwards. The actors play a game of make-believe and the director has to guess at how the enviroment will unfold around them. CGI movies tend view flatly because the emotions are added later by the special effects guys and not the actors on the scene. Cameron has changed all that.
The Fusion camera system is an augmented reality viewport into the CGI world. When Cameron was filming the actors, he was able to direct them and see the results. When he looks through his camera, he can see them interacting with the world Pandora as the nine foot Na’vi and help them tell the story. The camera itself wasn’t even a real camera in the sense that it filmed the action. The camera allowed Cameron to see the action being recorded by multiple sensors and cameras. Once the action was recorded, he could go back and reshoot the action from a different perspective, even with the actors gone.
Facial expression was another hurdle they had to jump to make the movie work. So they added little cameras hanging on people’s heads to capture their range of facial expressions and then tweaked algorithms to get them to react correctly. Even now we can pull off this trick.
Together these systems are similar to an immersive augmented reality world. While we don’t have the HMDs, complete camera access and processing power to pull off the world of Pandora now, time and continued improvement will make lesser versions possible.
If you look at the Fusion camera system, the camera is essentially the HMD display, albeit a large and bulky one. Multiple cameras, RFIDs and tracking markers help the computer understand the world, and complex and powerful computers put all the pieces together. I can only imagine that this system could be turned into a mind-blowing game in an empty warehouse with the proper HMDs.
Essentially, the movie Avatar teaches us that augmented reality has sky-high practical possibilities. All the components of his Fusion system can be ported to the commercial world (not now, but in three or four years) and used to make complex and believable environments overlaid our own world.
In the future, you too can be a nine-foot tall blue Na’vi and you won’t even have to have your soul sucked through a fiber-optic tree.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Insights Into Augmented Reality from Total Immersion
Posted by Tom Carpenter in augmented reality on February 4th, 2010
Total Immersion leads the augmented reality industry in total projects (around 125 last year and they’re expecting over 250 in 2010.) They’ve successfully created world-wide campaigns like Coke Zero and the Avatar i-Tag game line. So when they talk about augmented reality, I want to make sure I’m taking notes. Iriny Kuznetsova from 2Nova interviewed Nicolas Bapst about the company and their current activities. The interview was short, but had a few interesting insights.
Total Immersion has done work for the military in creating augmented reality solutions that put simulated objects on the battlefield. This is a much cheaper alternative to war-gaming with real equipment. Hopefully this encourages the military to fund more see-through AR HMDs.
Total Immersion expects that AR mobile marketing will be the new trend in the coming year and shows off a brief demonstration. They’re converting their PC software to mobile to take advantage of the smartphone growth. I found Nicolas’ observation about how augmented reality marketing applications give you direct access to your customers interesting. By moving people from static newspapers to the computer (and especially the smartphone), then they can find out exactly who is interested in their product and then leverage social media to spread the word. Nicolas explains they doubled time on websites by adding augmented reality content. I’m curious if this increase will sustain as the novelty of augmented reality wears off.
Nothing game breaking here, but worth a few minutes if you’re not familiar with the company.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Robert Rice Speaks At MOMA
Posted by Tom Carpenter in augmented reality on January 31st, 2010
Robert Rice, the CEO of Neogence Enterprises and blogger of augmented reality on Curious Raven, spoke in June at Mobile Monday. His speech targets the intermediate developer of augmented reality. If you’re new to the technology, most of this speech will go over your head.
The video is long, but if you’re serious about augmented reality and the future of mobile, the speech hits major points about the industry. And at 40 minutes, I’d give it a good five minute buffer if you’re going to watch the whole thing.
“Mobile is dead,” said Robert to begin his speech. He goes on to explain it should be brought back to life in a different format. Reincarnated, if you will. The point-to-point communication that we use right now will need transform into an immersive, predictive, meta-enviroment and can’t just be another way to access the internet.
Robert briefly explains the history of communications and tells us that if we do augmented reality correctly, it’ll join the pantheon. If we can remove the excess hardware of keyboards and screens in our mobile devices and convert to sunglasses, then the computer can become a buckle or a watch, conspicuous computing. We need to get away from the 2D mindset of flat screens and create 3D spaces where we can throw a YouTube video to another person through our AR enviroment, or send an SMS as a paper-airplane.
Augmented reality needs more than graphics over video, Robert goes on to explain. Should move past being even interactive and more dynamic and meta. It should answer the who, what, where, when, why and how. Computers have been vague points of demographic data because multiple people can use them, but mobile is an individual thing which allows us to break away from aggregate statistics and start answering questions for individuals.
Robert goes on to talk about venture capital, which he believes doesn’t get AR yet, and smart cities, and give suggestions to developers to keep the tagging of the world in mind, so we don’t have to go back and retag later.
Overall, I have to say I enjoyed the speech, though I was hoping Robert would get into specifics about Neogence Enterprises and their recent Mirascape announcement. And having spoken to him at length at ISMAR09 about the details of augmented reality, I thought he might elaborate on his anecdotes about furries and micro transactions. But maybe those weren’t appropriate for MOMA, anyway.
(edit note: this video was taken back in June and posted on GA.com but its still very relevent. Enjoy.)
Popularity: 6% [?]
Apple’s iPad Camera Fail
Posted by Tom Carpenter in Writing / Publishing, augmented reality on January 27th, 2010
Unless you’ve been living in a box today, you know that Apple finally unveiled the tablet iPad today. The biggest surprise about the announcement was the lack of a camera on the lap sized PC. No camera, really? If you don’t believe it, check the official spec page.
Besides the implications for augmented reality, which I’ll get to in a moment, the iPad not having a camera is a giant fail. I actually expected the iPad to have two cameras. One forward-looking so the iPad could function as a giant Polaroid and the other user-facing so videos could be recorded. We could forgive eliminating one of them, probably the forward-looking one since its so big, but not having the user-facing camera is inexcusable.
The series of tube we call the Internet has moved beyond simple text. People want to record and upload videos straight to YouTube without having to yank out their dust-covered hand held or use Skype to call their friends while they’re watching the game.
The Apple iPad not having even one camera is like hooking up satellite without DVR. Sure you can do it, but why?
Of course, I’m being overly melodramatic here.
The real point to the iPad is competition for the Kindle, eReader and the Vook. Apple wants to revolutionize the way we read magazines, books and newspapers. Functionality for augmented reality isn’t even an afterthought. How many people are using their camera lying in bed reading an interactive book?
And is this a major setback for augmented reality? Not really. A giant-sized magic lens would add a fun new canvas to play with, but really wouldn’t be a game changer. Additionally, Apple isn’t expecting the tablet market to come even close to the smartphone market in sales.
So in the end, the iPad is a fail for augmented reality, but will probably give Jeff Bezos nightmares for months as he wonders how he’s going to compete against a Pentium 286 when he’s selling a Commodore 64.
And maybe, just maybe, Steve Jobs is still working on a see-through AR-enabled HMD. Then I’d say, all is forgiven Stevie, I’m coming home to Apple.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Weird Augmented T-Shirt Game
Posted by Tom Carpenter in augmented reality on January 20th, 2010
Training the Visual Way
Posted by Tom Carpenter in augmented reality on January 14th, 2010
Homo sapiens are visual creatures. We receive 75% of our information through our eyes. Explaining how to do something can be tedious and inefficient. Augmented reality offers a visual medium for explanation. This quick demo on how to assemble a LEGO tower using ARToolKit illustrates how effective this technique can be. If you don’t believe me, give a friend a pile of LEGOs and then try to explain how to create the tower in the video. Time your result and compare it. I’ll guarantee the AR method will win.
Popularity: 11% [?]
Hallmark Launches AR Greeting Cards
Posted by Tom Carpenter in augmented reality on January 12th, 2010
Not a big surprise that Hallmark would get into the augmented reality game with a line of AR greeting cards. It makes a lot of sense to add content to a static piece of cardboard. I would suggest they consider adding free smartphone apps to view the cards so people can check them at the birthday table, but it’s a start.
Hallmark Launches Webcam Greetings with Augmented Reality
New cards combine the physical and virtual world
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (Jan. 12, 2010) /PRNewswire/ — Hallmark Cards, Inc., today announced the release of webcam greetings, new cards that use augmented reality technology to bring the card to life on a computer screen.The person receiving the card can visit www.hallmark.com/extra and follow the directions to be able to view a 3D animated feature by holding the greeting card up to the web camera. The technology breathes a digital life into the card. The animation tracks with the movement of the card, so no matter which way the card is moved, the animation will rotate along in full 3D. In many cards, various scenes appear as the card is turned in different angles in front of the webcam for a range of digital experiences.
“As Hallmark embarks upon our next 100 years in business, it’s important to continually identify new ways to help amplify the emotions our consumers feel when experiencing and sharing our products,” said Monic Muldrew, associate product manager. “With the experience available through these cards that come to life with a webcam, we hope consumers will fully explore and interact with this fun new way to connect.”
The augmented reality enhancements in webcam greetings are unique to the greeting card industry. Ten cards currently are available for Valentine’s Day and, as the year progresses, the company will roll out additional webcam greetings. Most webcam greetings retail for $2.99. Some webcam greetings include a sound clip that plays when the recipient opens the card (clip is audible without going online). These cards retail for $5.99. All webcam greetings are available wherever Hallmark cards are sold.
Popularity: 13% [?]
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