I'm getting ready for a trip next month to Taipei, for Chinese New Year and for a reunion performance of my old band, Feiwu (廢物樂隊). I lived in Taiwan for many years, and during one visit in 2006 or 2007 I made this video about some of the non-touristy parts of the city and surrounding areas:
One thing I've learn about the city in 20 years of interactions is some parts never change. And that's OK with me ...
Showing posts with label Video. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Video. Show all posts
Sunday, January 06, 2013
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
廢物樂隊 Live
What was Feiwu (廢物樂隊) like live? The last show I played with them was more than 13 years ago, but I remember them as being a lot of fun, particularly after we developed a fan base. Our December 1998 CD release party, from which the following audio was taken, had a few hundred people attending. You can hear the crowd getting into it:
The song is 我要你的愛, which was a cover of an old Chinese big band tune (which was in turn a cover of an old American big band tune). We did it like the Ramones.
Note that the pictures are from many different shows and practice sessions from 1997 to 2001. The art is public domain from Ookaboo.com.
If you want to follow what the band is doing (including a reunion show planned for 2013) be sure to like the official Feiwu Facebook page.
A flyer from a concert we did with Sugarplum Fairy (甜梅號) at a local college in 1999:
If you're interested in learning more about the band, check out our Facebook page or the interview we did with GigGuide. We also have two Feiwu albums for sale on Amazon.
The song is 我要你的愛, which was a cover of an old Chinese big band tune (which was in turn a cover of an old American big band tune). We did it like the Ramones.
Note that the pictures are from many different shows and practice sessions from 1997 to 2001. The art is public domain from Ookaboo.com.
If you want to follow what the band is doing (including a reunion show planned for 2013) be sure to like the official Feiwu Facebook page.
A flyer from a concert we did with Sugarplum Fairy (甜梅號) at a local college in 1999:
If you're interested in learning more about the band, check out our Facebook page or the interview we did with GigGuide. We also have two Feiwu albums for sale on Amazon.
Sunday, June 17, 2012
Easy Chinese cooking: "Three Cups Chicken"/三杯雞
 |
| Three Cups Chicken recipe |
Another advantage of this Three Cups Chicken recipe: The main, must-have ingredients (chicken, garlic, ginger, soy, etc.) can be found in any American supermarket. For the special Asian ingredients such as rice wine (米酒), we give alternatives (in this case, water, beer or dry white wine).
It tastes great over rice, and we also recommend serving another vegetable dish with it (stir fried cabbage or mixed vegetables, etc.)
Three Cups Chicken recipe
“差不多”的三杯雞 or "懶人"的三杯雞
"Almost" three cups chicken or "lazy man's" three cups chicken
- Six or seven garlic cloves, smashed
- 2 inch long piece of ginger, skin cut off and sliced into 1/8" thick slices
- (Optional) Three scallions, cut down the center and chopped into thirds
- 2 tablespoons cooking oil (we used vegetable oil)
- 10 pieces dark meat chicken - we used boneless thighs
- 1/2 cup soy sauce
- 1/4 cup rice wine, white wine, water or beer
- 1 tablespoon sesame oil (you can probably live without this, but it adds a nice flavor)
- some rock sugar -- start with 6 small cubes, then adjust to taste. Or use a teaspoon of white or brown sugar.
- Handful of Thai or Italian basil, thick stems removed. (You should have this to make authentic three cups chicken, but you can get away without it, hence the name in Chinese, "lazy man's three cups chicken")
Put a large pot on the gas range, turn up heat to high. Throw in the ginger and scallion and garlic in that order. Make sure the garlic doesn't burn. Throw in the chicken in batches so at least one side gets browned. Stir it around so everything is slightly cooked on the outside (browning is ideal, but not required), maybe 10 minutes or so. Add the liquids. It should start boiling quickly. Note the chicken should throw off some liquid, too. Turn down heat to low-medium, cover and cook for 10 minutes.
Open lid, add the sugar, check the liquid. You're going to end up with a thick sauce that coats the chicken but doesn't really pool at the bottom, so if it's thin and an inch deep it's time to turn up the heat and leave the lid off. Pay close attention and stir regularly so it doesn't burn. Do this until the sauce is thick, around 20-30 minutes. Turn off the heat. Add the basil, stir it around. Serve on white or brown rice.
Three Cups Chicken recipe video
Sunday, June 03, 2012
Terrafugia's flying car. No, really.
Last week, I attended TiECON East as a finalist for the TiE Challenge accelerator program. One of the most interesting keynotes was given by Carl Dietrich, a young aerospace engineer and entrepreneur who leads Terrafugia -- a company building a flying car.
Dietrich joked in his talk that flying cars are featured seemingly every year on the covers of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics. But none of these inventions have been taken to market. Terrafugia is serious about approaching this challenge, which is multifaceted. Besides the engineering problems associated with building a vehicle that can drive on city streets and take off from a runway, there are also significant regulatory and business issues that must be overcome.
Dietrich laid out a very convincing business case for this type of vehicle, which he said would cost $270,000. The savings for pilots comes in the fact that storage fees and inconveniences associated with bad weather can be avoided (you'll never be stuck at a remote airport again because of bad weather!). His team is also working on the regulatory issues (he and several members of the senior management team participate on FAA advisory panels and standards groups). But the plane, the Transition, was the star of the show. He showed a flight video and it was hard not to be excited. Here's what it looks like:
Note the fact that it works on normal unleaded gasoline, not airplane fuel. And it fits in a garage. I can't wait to see these in the skies.
Dietrich joked in his talk that flying cars are featured seemingly every year on the covers of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics. But none of these inventions have been taken to market. Terrafugia is serious about approaching this challenge, which is multifaceted. Besides the engineering problems associated with building a vehicle that can drive on city streets and take off from a runway, there are also significant regulatory and business issues that must be overcome.
Dietrich laid out a very convincing business case for this type of vehicle, which he said would cost $270,000. The savings for pilots comes in the fact that storage fees and inconveniences associated with bad weather can be avoided (you'll never be stuck at a remote airport again because of bad weather!). His team is also working on the regulatory issues (he and several members of the senior management team participate on FAA advisory panels and standards groups). But the plane, the Transition, was the star of the show. He showed a flight video and it was hard not to be excited. Here's what it looks like:
Note the fact that it works on normal unleaded gasoline, not airplane fuel. And it fits in a garage. I can't wait to see these in the skies.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Educational iPhone game development: Our experience with Egg Drop
It's an exciting feeling to be a part of a team that creates something special. It's even more exciting when you see early users not only getting a kick out of the product, but asking to use it again and again.
That was our experience with Egg Drop on the iPhone, an educational game and our student team's final project for 11.127/252/CMS.590, Computer Games and Simulations for Education and Exploration (see also my post on an earlier student project from the same class, "A curriculum for learning computer programming in WoW"). Our assignment, which built on nearly three months of instruction, theory, readings, and other projects, was to design and produce a digital game that is playable for 15-20 minutes. "You should identify clear learning goals and map them onto game dynamics," we were told. To actually develop the game, it took about 24 days from the initial ideation sessions to the final presentation at class demo day.
There is a lot of flexibility in the term "digital game," and the half-dozen student teams in the class pursued all kinds of ideas. On demo day, we saw Terminus, a text-based adventure to teach terminal commands ("Zork meets terminal," was one way of describing it). Another student team created a PC game called Rocketmouse that taught children the fundamentals of gravity.
The class had a lot of Course 6 undergraduates, including some who had written games in the past. But the instructors (Eric Klopfer and Jason Haas) made an effort to balance out the teams with experienced programmers and people who couldn't program, but were able to handle other tasks.
Alec, a Course VI classmate with whom I had worked on a “digital gates” board game earlier in the semester, was interested, along with a few other undergraduates. We discussed how to improve the concept. One of the first suggestions was to do it as an iPad game. The idea was to use a touch-screen interface to build a skyscraper, and then testing the strength of the construction with various environmental forces such as wind, earthquakes, and other disasters. Alec came up with a clever twist: How about turning the game into a variation of Angry Birds? Instead of being the birds trying to get at the pigs, the player would be the pig, trying to protect the egg from being knocked down, by building a strong-enough structure.
The “Reverse Angry Birds” proposal (also known as “Reverse Upset Avians”, or RUA) was put on a whiteboard with about a dozen other ideas. It got some votes from the class, and was chosen as a finalist project. Five people joined the team in all, and we started to refine the idea and discuss the practicalities of implementing them.
One decision that we had to make right away concerned the platform. While the iPad sounded promising, there was a problem: Aside from me, no one had an iPad, which would make life difficult for our developers when it came time to test the app. The iPhone seemed like a better idea, because:
In the proposal document submitted to our instructors, we described the game as follows:
Another Course Sixer, Sarah, hadn’t used Xcode or Objective C before, but got up to speed very quickly. She was responsible for much of the final design as well as an in-game tutorial, which really helped make the game more appealing (you can see the tutorial in the gameplay video at the bottom of this post). She also created the system to import levels in XML format, which made it easy for me to do some age-appropriate level design and implementation on my own for our user testing -- before the XML engine was built, in order to alter levels during testing I had to change values in arrays and arguments in ResourceManager.mm. These changes were difficult to share with the rest of the team and prone to error, so Sarah’s work was very helpful. A third Course Six concentrator, Stephen, didn’t have a Mac (a requirement for Xcode) but worked on artwork, sound files, and documentation. The other member of the team worked on level design.
The game evolved from our original vision of creating a variation of Angry Birds. Creating the gameplay and artwork for the pigs and birds would have been extremely difficult and time-consuming (we only had a few weeks before demo day on May 10). We settled for a slimmed-down version of the game in which the goal was to build a structure that would protect a single egg from an onslaught of natural disasters at the end of each round. For instance, the kid-friendly level #3 used the following XML as inputs:
On the screen of the iPhone simulator, this translated to an egg resting on the plain at the start of the game (posx and posy describe its starting position). The player could place, in order, two vertical wooden planks, a horizontal straw block, and a horizontal brick, before the disaster (a meteor falling from the sky, directly on top of the egg) occurred. The only way to survive: Placing the two vertical wooden planks next to the egg and the horizontal brick resting on top of the plank, over the egg. Any other combination resulted in the egg breaking and “game over” for the player.
One interesting element of game design that came up with the Egg Drop project was the target audience. I thought we should really be clear who we were targeting at the outset. Segmentation and “Total Addressable Market” exercises are part and parcel of the Sloan way in classes such as New Enterprises. But we ended up taking a much more flexible approach, as described in our proposal:
Beyond the experience of working on iOS game design, there were several other takeaways from the project. One was being able to participate in a rapid prototyping process integrated with user testing. This combination is held up as an ideal at MIT and elsewhere, but getting the right team and the right testers in place can be difficult. Before coming to MIT, I worked in Web media for years. Even on those rare occasions when my employers had adequate engineering resources in place to develop new products, testing was usually handled in-house and at a very late stage. Sometimes this was because testing was not considered a crucial part of the product development process, but at other times it was difficult to find actual users or the product had to be kept under wraps out of fear of premature leaks or tipping off the competition.
For Egg Drop, not only was the team technologically top-heavy (three out of five were programmers), but we had access to real users in our target audience, which let us observe gameplay, hangups, and other aspects of the user experience. This feedback loop led to better gameplay and helped us eliminate speed bumps and outright bugs at a relatively early stage.
A second takeaway related to gameplay theory. While the Egg Drop project was focused on real gameplay issues and the practicalities of developing a game for a mobile device, I did find myself looking back to some of the research that we had studied in class earlier in the semester, in particular the readings from James Paul Gee. He articulated a lot of modern thinking about models, video games, and learning in his 2008 paper, Learning and Games (e.g., “Video games offer people experiences in a virtual world ... and they use learning, problem solving, and mastery for engagement and pleasure”). His “situated learning matrix” for understanding how context-based learning in games can be applied to the world at large was described in terms of first-person shooters in 3D worlds. But one can see how a modeling experience in a 2D world like Egg Drop (such as my son’s experimentation with reinforcing braces that I observed in the user testing diary) might also be internalized, generalized, and applied to other situations, even if protecting eggs from meteors never figures into his daily life. This ties back to our proposal to "develop the hypothesize -> experiment -> redesign strategy of designing, which is a useful skill in many wider disciplines than construction."
Gee introduced another interesting concept in What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. The concept of “Semiotic Domains,” as it applies to video games, basically says that players will find it easier to transition to new scenarios that have similarities to old scenarios they have already encountered. In terms of gameplay, this not only helps explain the continued popularity of RPGs, "shooters," and other genres, but also how specific features work for some gamers and not for others. For instance, my son was already familiar with the iPod touch and physics-based games such as Ragdoll Blaster and Angry Birds, which made it easy for him to get into Egg Drop. However, he was perplexed by the preview of the next object in the upper right corner of the screen. This convention dates from 80s-era games like Tetris, which he had never tried. He therefore applied his own gaming experiences to Egg Drop, and attempted to drag the preview pieces onto the playing area (this can be seen in the video of game testing, above). In a commercial development project, such an observation among many early testers might be a cue to re-evaluate that feature.
A third takeaway from the Egg Drop concerned the design of the game, not only as it relates to gameplay, but also the artwork used in the game. While the cocos2D physics were slick, the graphic elements were very simple (I should know -- I made the bricks and a few other elements using Preview in OS X). But to our young testers, it didn’t matter. The game art was enough to convey the concept, and the gameplay was addictive.
Fourth takeaway: As our instructors mentioned at one point late in the semester, sandbox mode can really work for younger players. I saw proof with my testers on the first few builds, before Alec had integrated the disasters and win states for levels. In the proto-Egg Drop, it was possible to drop a practically unlimited number of horizontal planks around the egg, but there were no disasters or special materials to work with. It didn’t matter. The kids simply liked the physics of the game, which allowed them to fill up the screen and sometimes model strange situations, such as a mountain of planks for the egg to roll down. I have many screenshots from early versions that show the playing area filled with planks:
Now the reality check: The analysis and observations above are based upon an extremely small userbase playing with test versions of the game. The ultimate excitement for Egg Drop would be refining it and releasing it to the wild, to see how a much larger population of players reacts. Of course, “refining it” would involve not only working on some of the issues identified earlier (level design, artwork, etc.) but also considering the original educational vision of the game -- teaching concepts related to construction and physics. We were not able to do enough basic research around how kids might best learn such concepts, which is unfortunate, because I believe the game is a marvelous vehicle for learning. But this also leads to the question of how to balance desired learning outcomes with gameplay. More experimentation would be required.
In the meantime, here’s a video of the gameplay and design, based on the final build in mid-May:
If you are interested in finding out more about the class, take a look at the course website. You may also be interested in reading about another mobile educational game development project I worked on in Linked Data (6.898) last year.
There is a lot of flexibility in the term "digital game," and the half-dozen student teams in the class pursued all kinds of ideas. On demo day, we saw Terminus, a text-based adventure to teach terminal commands ("Zork meets terminal," was one way of describing it). Another student team created a PC game called Rocketmouse that taught children the fundamentals of gravity.
The class had a lot of Course 6 undergraduates, including some who had written games in the past. But the instructors (Eric Klopfer and Jason Haas) made an effort to balance out the teams with experienced programmers and people who couldn't program, but were able to handle other tasks.
Coming up with an Egg Drop game idea
Our team didn't go into the project thinking that we would make a mobile game. The ideation process started with the class brainstorming on potential learning topics; those ideas were put on a whiteboard and then people could choose which team they wanted to join. Inspired by a recent engineering documentary about the construction of a helipad on top of a wind-blown skyscraper, I suggested doing some sort of construction-based game that would teach basic architectural concepts. At the time, I was thinking of something on a PC or the Web, which would allow for a more sophisticated interface.Alec, a Course VI classmate with whom I had worked on a “digital gates” board game earlier in the semester, was interested, along with a few other undergraduates. We discussed how to improve the concept. One of the first suggestions was to do it as an iPad game. The idea was to use a touch-screen interface to build a skyscraper, and then testing the strength of the construction with various environmental forces such as wind, earthquakes, and other disasters. Alec came up with a clever twist: How about turning the game into a variation of Angry Birds? Instead of being the birds trying to get at the pigs, the player would be the pig, trying to protect the egg from being knocked down, by building a strong-enough structure.
The “Reverse Angry Birds” proposal (also known as “Reverse Upset Avians”, or RUA) was put on a whiteboard with about a dozen other ideas. It got some votes from the class, and was chosen as a finalist project. Five people joined the team in all, and we started to refine the idea and discuss the practicalities of implementing them.
One decision that we had to make right away concerned the platform. While the iPad sounded promising, there was a problem: Aside from me, no one had an iPad, which would make life difficult for our developers when it came time to test the app. The iPhone seemed like a better idea, because:
- Three of us had iPhones or an iPod touch
- Three of us had Macs, which meant we could work in Xcode, Apple’s developer tool for the iOS SDK
- Alec had experience developing games and developing on the iPhone platform, and was also familiar with a 2D game engine for the iPhone called cocos2D.
In the proposal document submitted to our instructors, we described the game as follows:
Egg Drop is a physics-based game designed for the iOS platform that attempts to teach basic intuition of physics and stable structures.
Because it is an iOS game, the only way to play Egg Drop (barring a release on the Apple app store) is to download and compile the source. The source of the game is hosted publicly on Github and can be found at:
https://github.com/alect/Digital-Egg-Drop
Learning Goals:
- Gain a rudimentary understanding of physics, construction and other principles involved in building structures
- Learn strategies for building stable structures that can survive the elements.
- Learn to use resources in an optimal way to meet construction goals.
- Develop the hypothesize -> experiment -> redesign strategy of designing, which is a useful skill in many wider disciplines than construction. The flow of the game should lead the player to use this strategy inherently, and hopefully bring the strategy with them from the game.
Prototyping and game-testing Egg Drop
Our plan was approved, and we got started on RUA. MIT has built up a culture around experimentation and prototyping and we all got to work pretty quickly. Alec was the lead developer, and took on tasks relating to integrating the physics engines, building the objects and resource manager, and creating a sound engine. He built a working prototype within a few days and uploaded it to github, which let those of us with Macs download it and try it out in Xcode’s iPhone simulator.Another Course Sixer, Sarah, hadn’t used Xcode or Objective C before, but got up to speed very quickly. She was responsible for much of the final design as well as an in-game tutorial, which really helped make the game more appealing (you can see the tutorial in the gameplay video at the bottom of this post). She also created the system to import levels in XML format, which made it easy for me to do some age-appropriate level design and implementation on my own for our user testing -- before the XML engine was built, in order to alter levels during testing I had to change values in arrays and arguments in ResourceManager.mm. These changes were difficult to share with the rest of the team and prone to error, so Sarah’s work was very helpful. A third Course Six concentrator, Stephen, didn’t have a Mac (a requirement for Xcode) but worked on artwork, sound files, and documentation. The other member of the team worked on level design.
The game evolved from our original vision of creating a variation of Angry Birds. Creating the gameplay and artwork for the pigs and birds would have been extremely difficult and time-consuming (we only had a few weeks before demo day on May 10). We settled for a slimmed-down version of the game in which the goal was to build a structure that would protect a single egg from an onslaught of natural disasters at the end of each round. For instance, the kid-friendly level #3 used the following XML as inputs:
On the screen of the iPhone simulator, this translated to an egg resting on the plain at the start of the game (posx and posy describe its starting position). The player could place, in order, two vertical wooden planks, a horizontal straw block, and a horizontal brick, before the disaster (a meteor falling from the sky, directly on top of the egg) occurred. The only way to survive: Placing the two vertical wooden planks next to the egg and the horizontal brick resting on top of the plank, over the egg. Any other combination resulted in the egg breaking and “game over” for the player.
Changing the name of our Egg Drop project
As the game evolved, we dropped “Reverse Upset Avians” and started calling it EggDrop. It was an instant hit with my kids, even before we had meteors and earthquakes. The simple physics of placing planks around the egg was entertaining enough in sandbox mode (see screenshots, below). But when better artwork, different building materials, nails and other elements were added, it was addictive. My younger child in particular would ask to play it when he came from school, and after I came home from a long international trip, one of the first things he asked to do was play the game on the iPhone simulator.One interesting element of game design that came up with the Egg Drop project was the target audience. I thought we should really be clear who we were targeting at the outset. Segmentation and “Total Addressable Market” exercises are part and parcel of the Sloan way in classes such as New Enterprises. But we ended up taking a much more flexible approach, as described in our proposal:
“One advantage of iOS and other touch devices is that they support a very wide age range. We hope the game will be playable by children as young as five or six while still being entertaining to adults. Young children will most likely reap the most benefit from the educational concepts the game presents. In addition, we found that we could cater levels to fit different age ranges, making the game customizable for all learning levels.”While age customization was possible, for the purposes of testing we only had two versions: One for us and college-aged friends, and a simpler version for younger elementary school students. I worked extensively on the kid version, and developed new age-appropriate levels based on regular user testing. Here are a few excerpts from my user testing diary, which was submitted as part of our final project:
4/30/11One thing that’s worth mentioning about the testing is I didn’t need to pressure my kids to help out. Both of them love games. My son has probably tried a few dozen age-appropriate titles on my iPod touch, and regularly returns to the ones that are most entertaining. It was clear that Egg Drop fell into the same league as favorite games such as Angry Birds, Cro-Mag, Fruit Ninja, and the Simpsons game. He simply couldn’t get enough of Egg Drop, even during the early builds when the game was still rough around the edges. Here’s a video of him trying out an early version, about one week into the development process:
The kids had a fun time with a modified version of alect-Digital-Egg-Drop-3357c7c (I added about 30 extra block and nail objects, so they could play longer). They definitely get the nailing aspect of the construction, and used it to protect their egg almost immediately.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
5/4/11
Tested alect-Digital-Egg-Drop-9f0fc79 on my son. This was the first time he had seen the disasters, which he really enjoyed (especially the earthquake, which sometimes sends blocks flying).
I was also surprised to see that he right away figured out the solution to the wind disaster (nailing something to the floor) which vexed me when I saw it the first time.
He also used extensive experimentation to try to solve all of the problems he observed. For instance, for the earthquake, he tried positioning the blocks close to and further away from the egg, nailing different size blocks to the floor, etc. He gave up after 4-5 unsuccessful tries, at which point I showed him how to do it. Then he played to the end (two tall planks).
He noticed and liked the new egg [artwork].
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
5/6/11
Played build alect-Digital-Egg-Drop-d3eb420, which has some memory issues that Alec addressed. However, we noticed a bug after the second level that prevented us from going to the third level -- the level up button didn't respond on the emulator.
The gameplay is fun, and as a proof of concept it is good, but I wonder if the learning couldn't be more robust. Maybe if we had more time ...
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
5/9/11
Building out levels in XML. I am using Google Docs spreadsheet to track the progressive difficulty of the challenges, and using my own judgement and gameplay to see how they work.
The advantage of using oneself for testing is I can quickly rearrange the blocks or disasters, reinsert them into ResourceManager.mm, and play the new version on the emulator.
I am going to try to introduce it to my son tomorrow morning ... I unfortunately won't see him for the rest of the day.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
5/10/11
My son hadn't seen the new designs, so he was very happy to see the artwork. He also liked the meteor, cushion blocks, and the idea of the termites. He got up to speed pretty quickly on the simple progressive levels I set up for him. On the quake level, which requires surrounding the egg with cushions and nailing them together in a certain way, he couldn't solve it, and took an interesting area of experimentation that I hadn't considered -- reinforcing the cushions with wood braces.
The other thing that I am conscious of is the game really has to be customized to age/ability. What appealed to him as a 6-year-old wouldn't appeal to older players.
Beyond the experience of working on iOS game design, there were several other takeaways from the project. One was being able to participate in a rapid prototyping process integrated with user testing. This combination is held up as an ideal at MIT and elsewhere, but getting the right team and the right testers in place can be difficult. Before coming to MIT, I worked in Web media for years. Even on those rare occasions when my employers had adequate engineering resources in place to develop new products, testing was usually handled in-house and at a very late stage. Sometimes this was because testing was not considered a crucial part of the product development process, but at other times it was difficult to find actual users or the product had to be kept under wraps out of fear of premature leaks or tipping off the competition.
For Egg Drop, not only was the team technologically top-heavy (three out of five were programmers), but we had access to real users in our target audience, which let us observe gameplay, hangups, and other aspects of the user experience. This feedback loop led to better gameplay and helped us eliminate speed bumps and outright bugs at a relatively early stage.
A second takeaway related to gameplay theory. While the Egg Drop project was focused on real gameplay issues and the practicalities of developing a game for a mobile device, I did find myself looking back to some of the research that we had studied in class earlier in the semester, in particular the readings from James Paul Gee. He articulated a lot of modern thinking about models, video games, and learning in his 2008 paper, Learning and Games (e.g., “Video games offer people experiences in a virtual world ... and they use learning, problem solving, and mastery for engagement and pleasure”). His “situated learning matrix” for understanding how context-based learning in games can be applied to the world at large was described in terms of first-person shooters in 3D worlds. But one can see how a modeling experience in a 2D world like Egg Drop (such as my son’s experimentation with reinforcing braces that I observed in the user testing diary) might also be internalized, generalized, and applied to other situations, even if protecting eggs from meteors never figures into his daily life. This ties back to our proposal to "develop the hypothesize -> experiment -> redesign strategy of designing, which is a useful skill in many wider disciplines than construction."
Gee introduced another interesting concept in What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. The concept of “Semiotic Domains,” as it applies to video games, basically says that players will find it easier to transition to new scenarios that have similarities to old scenarios they have already encountered. In terms of gameplay, this not only helps explain the continued popularity of RPGs, "shooters," and other genres, but also how specific features work for some gamers and not for others. For instance, my son was already familiar with the iPod touch and physics-based games such as Ragdoll Blaster and Angry Birds, which made it easy for him to get into Egg Drop. However, he was perplexed by the preview of the next object in the upper right corner of the screen. This convention dates from 80s-era games like Tetris, which he had never tried. He therefore applied his own gaming experiences to Egg Drop, and attempted to drag the preview pieces onto the playing area (this can be seen in the video of game testing, above). In a commercial development project, such an observation among many early testers might be a cue to re-evaluate that feature.
A third takeaway from the Egg Drop concerned the design of the game, not only as it relates to gameplay, but also the artwork used in the game. While the cocos2D physics were slick, the graphic elements were very simple (I should know -- I made the bricks and a few other elements using Preview in OS X). But to our young testers, it didn’t matter. The game art was enough to convey the concept, and the gameplay was addictive.
Fourth takeaway: As our instructors mentioned at one point late in the semester, sandbox mode can really work for younger players. I saw proof with my testers on the first few builds, before Alec had integrated the disasters and win states for levels. In the proto-Egg Drop, it was possible to drop a practically unlimited number of horizontal planks around the egg, but there were no disasters or special materials to work with. It didn’t matter. The kids simply liked the physics of the game, which allowed them to fill up the screen and sometimes model strange situations, such as a mountain of planks for the egg to roll down. I have many screenshots from early versions that show the playing area filled with planks:
Now the reality check: The analysis and observations above are based upon an extremely small userbase playing with test versions of the game. The ultimate excitement for Egg Drop would be refining it and releasing it to the wild, to see how a much larger population of players reacts. Of course, “refining it” would involve not only working on some of the issues identified earlier (level design, artwork, etc.) but also considering the original educational vision of the game -- teaching concepts related to construction and physics. We were not able to do enough basic research around how kids might best learn such concepts, which is unfortunate, because I believe the game is a marvelous vehicle for learning. But this also leads to the question of how to balance desired learning outcomes with gameplay. More experimentation would be required.
In the meantime, here’s a video of the gameplay and design, based on the final build in mid-May:
If you are interested in finding out more about the class, take a look at the course website. You may also be interested in reading about another mobile educational game development project I worked on in Linked Data (6.898) last year.
Monday, June 27, 2011
WorldTV - our MIT Media Lab final project
One of the more interesting class projects I took part in during my last semester at MIT was our MIT Media Lab final project for MAS 571 ("Social TV: Creating New Connected Media Experiences"). The project was called WorldTV, and with my team (Jungmoo Park, MBA '11, and Giacomo Summa, MSMS '11), we created a pretty slick video demonstration of the proposed software UI. The video was shown at the MAS 571 demo day at the Media Lab (you can watch it below) and we wrote an accompanying concept paper that we are in the process of preparing for an IEEE CCNC workshop. In the following post, I'll describe not only what WorldTV is, but its genus and some of the reaction we've received so far.
WorldTV is a television app and accompanying mobile app for browsing user-generated video from one's social circle, as well as event video produced by strangers that tie into one's news and cultural interests. Instead of using traditional browsing methods -- scrolling through channels or searching for videos -- the proposed service uses a 3D globe as a navigational tool. WorldTV is aimed at people with global networks, which might include people with friends, relatives, and colleagues from other countries; people who spend a fair amount of time travelling; or people who are interested in news or culture in other countries.
The concept had great appeal to the entire team, not only because of our backgrounds (Giacomo is from Italy, Jungmoo is from Korea, and I spent most of the 1990s living overseas) but also because all of us have observed the exponential growth of user-generated video and realize its power and appeal to ordinary people. In 2006, I wrote about the potential of geotagged, time-stamped online photos to give insights into local events. I expanded the idea to include tweets and user-generated video in a proposal for my Linked Data Ventures class called PPP (PixPeoplePlaces). When I began the Social TV class, I took the PPP concept even further with user-generated video, emphasizing the social aspect of plotting event video on a local map (this was the basis of my first assignment for Social TV -- you can see the poster here).
There was clearly some overlap between our ideas, and we decided to team up for the final project. We expanded the concept to include not only video from breaking news in other countries, but also cultural events (festivals, parades) and entertainment (sports, performances, etc.). The social filter would not only display streaming/recent videos from one's social circle, but could also reflect the collective interests of the social circle.
Jungmoo, who had a background as a professional television reporter for a Korean broadcaster, was intrigued by our poster session presentation and joined the team. Our next task was to take the concept and make a demo to show at demo day at the MIT Media Lab in the last week of class in May. For the final deliverable, we didn't have the skills to produce a working prototype. However, we did have the skills to produce a software mockup and accompanying video demo.
The team got to work. I created a simple WorldTV television UI using HTML and CSS, built the maps with Google Earth, and mocked up a mobile UX on an iPhone "remote". Giacomo wrote the script and starred in the video. Jungmoo took the raw video and graphics and used his professional editing skills to create a really slick video demo, which is shown below:
We presented the video and an accompanying slideshow on the business model last month at the Media Lab. Our Media Lab instructors, Marie-José Montpetit and Henry Holtzman, invited a group of industry pros from major cable and national broadcasters (including NBC and WGBH) to watch all six student presentations. After seeing our team present, one of the NBC visitors was interested in the idea of "shared experiences." Giacomo explained that user-generated video around sporting events and concerts could populate the global view, depending on how one's filters were set up. This prompted another executive, who I believed was from HBO, to question the legality of using amateur concert video. I responded that copyright law was decades behind the technological and social reality, but she was skeptical. I then said that there would always be artists who want to exercise strong control over this content, but there were also many artists who recognized the value of fan content to generate additional interest or loyalty, and in my opinion, the latter group would have a competitive advantage. But as I thought about it later, it was clear that addressing the entertainment industry's copyright concerns would be a huge issue, regardless of how outdated the laws are.
Our team also heard from Henry, who thought the Real Time Requests business model was really a separate concept that did not match WorldTV. We agreed. Jungmoo and Giacomo had actually raised the same concern in our planning discussions, but I felt we needed a business model that did not involve standard subscriptions. Henry noted that a subscription might actually work for some people.
So what's next for WorldTV? All members of the team have graduated, and none of the industry visitors seemed interested in taking it further. We hope, however, that if our paper is accepted to the IEEE CCNC '12 conference, it might get some traction. In the draft that we are now preparing, I outlined the "Future Work" required to make WorldTV a reality:
WorldTV is a television app and accompanying mobile app for browsing user-generated video from one's social circle, as well as event video produced by strangers that tie into one's news and cultural interests. Instead of using traditional browsing methods -- scrolling through channels or searching for videos -- the proposed service uses a 3D globe as a navigational tool. WorldTV is aimed at people with global networks, which might include people with friends, relatives, and colleagues from other countries; people who spend a fair amount of time travelling; or people who are interested in news or culture in other countries.
The concept had great appeal to the entire team, not only because of our backgrounds (Giacomo is from Italy, Jungmoo is from Korea, and I spent most of the 1990s living overseas) but also because all of us have observed the exponential growth of user-generated video and realize its power and appeal to ordinary people. In 2006, I wrote about the potential of geotagged, time-stamped online photos to give insights into local events. I expanded the idea to include tweets and user-generated video in a proposal for my Linked Data Ventures class called PPP (PixPeoplePlaces). When I began the Social TV class, I took the PPP concept even further with user-generated video, emphasizing the social aspect of plotting event video on a local map (this was the basis of my first assignment for Social TV -- you can see the poster here).
Developing WorldTV - our MIT Media Lab final project
I envisioned all of these ideas as Web apps displayed on a computer monitor. For one of the early poster sessions for the Social TV class, Giacomo independently came up with a different approach. He asked, why not use a full-sized television screen to display a map of the entire earth with hot spots that reflected breaking hard news events that might be captured by amateur shooters? (This happened as anti-authoritarian demonstrations were breaking out across the Middle East in early 2011). Instead of being a "Lean Forward" experience (something that requires user input or interaction, such as a video game) this would be a "Lean Back" experience, in which the viewer could sit on the couch and take in the video. Giacomo also considered how video could be differentiated on the global map with different sized or colored markers, and how "likes", social networks, or newspaper articles could determine what appeared on the screen. He called it "WorldTV".There was clearly some overlap between our ideas, and we decided to team up for the final project. We expanded the concept to include not only video from breaking news in other countries, but also cultural events (festivals, parades) and entertainment (sports, performances, etc.). The social filter would not only display streaming/recent videos from one's social circle, but could also reflect the collective interests of the social circle.
WorldTV business model
An additional requirement for the final project was a business model. I had already been thinking about using phone and laptop cameras as a way for ordinary people to access amateur expertise all over the globe, for a price. Examples of amateur expertise might be a power user demonstrating how to use a new gadget, advice on registering a company in a certain state by an experienced business owner, practicing foreign language conversation with a native speaker, etc. I dubbed the scheme Real Time Requests. (RTR). A live auction and reputation system would determine prices paid by people seeking expertise, and match them up with sellers. We decided to fold it into the proposal. The idea was then debuted at another MAS 571 poster session in April:
Jungmoo, who had a background as a professional television reporter for a Korean broadcaster, was intrigued by our poster session presentation and joined the team. Our next task was to take the concept and make a demo to show at demo day at the MIT Media Lab in the last week of class in May. For the final deliverable, we didn't have the skills to produce a working prototype. However, we did have the skills to produce a software mockup and accompanying video demo.
The team got to work. I created a simple WorldTV television UI using HTML and CSS, built the maps with Google Earth, and mocked up a mobile UX on an iPhone "remote". Giacomo wrote the script and starred in the video. Jungmoo took the raw video and graphics and used his professional editing skills to create a really slick video demo, which is shown below:
We presented the video and an accompanying slideshow on the business model last month at the Media Lab. Our Media Lab instructors, Marie-José Montpetit and Henry Holtzman, invited a group of industry pros from major cable and national broadcasters (including NBC and WGBH) to watch all six student presentations. After seeing our team present, one of the NBC visitors was interested in the idea of "shared experiences." Giacomo explained that user-generated video around sporting events and concerts could populate the global view, depending on how one's filters were set up. This prompted another executive, who I believed was from HBO, to question the legality of using amateur concert video. I responded that copyright law was decades behind the technological and social reality, but she was skeptical. I then said that there would always be artists who want to exercise strong control over this content, but there were also many artists who recognized the value of fan content to generate additional interest or loyalty, and in my opinion, the latter group would have a competitive advantage. But as I thought about it later, it was clear that addressing the entertainment industry's copyright concerns would be a huge issue, regardless of how outdated the laws are.
Our team also heard from Henry, who thought the Real Time Requests business model was really a separate concept that did not match WorldTV. We agreed. Jungmoo and Giacomo had actually raised the same concern in our planning discussions, but I felt we needed a business model that did not involve standard subscriptions. Henry noted that a subscription might actually work for some people.
So what's next for WorldTV? All members of the team have graduated, and none of the industry visitors seemed interested in taking it further. We hope, however, that if our paper is accepted to the IEEE CCNC '12 conference, it might get some traction. In the draft that we are now preparing, I outlined the "Future Work" required to make WorldTV a reality:
The next steps for WorldTV would be to create a working prototype using Google Earth, YouTube and Facebook APIs, the Android or iPhone SDKs, and other existing software and hardware components. Besides using the prototype to evaluate functionality and performance, ordinary users in the target audience (people having global networks) could also test the system with an eye toward determining which features and use cases hold the most promise. When the product is ready for wider distribution, identifying suitable “TV App” platforms and partnerships could take place. In the long run, creating a scalable architecture with its own API and opening up WorldTV to outside developers (much like Facebook and Twitter have done) would help unleash the greatest potential of the platform. This would require significant investments, but in the long run would help realize innovations for the next age of television.If the paper is published, I will share a link on this space. In addition, if anyone is interested in learning more or helping to develop the idea, my contact information can be found here.
Tuesday, March 01, 2011
Social TV poster #1: PeoplePixPlaces
(Update: This concept has evolved further and turned into a final project called WorldTV, complete with a software demo and video) From the Social TV class I'm taking this semester at the MIT Media Lab: A social TV application based on news. I came up with PeoplePixPlaces, a Web-based application that gives a window into local news, using geocoded video, pictures, and tweets, as well as individual users’ own social lenses. The poster explains the concept in more detail:
The genus of the idea predates MAS 571. Last semester in 6.898 (Linked Data Ventures), I proposed a similar project, PixPplPlaces. The one-sheet vision:
Incidentally, I first had the idea for a geocode-based application for user-generated content back in 2005 or 2006. My essay Meeting The Second Wave explains the original idea:
For the Social Television class, we have to submit two more ideas in poster sessions. I may end up posting some of them to this blog ...
The genus of the idea predates MAS 571. Last semester in 6.898 (Linked Data Ventures), I proposed a similar project, PixPplPlaces. The one-sheet vision:
“People want to know a lot about their own neighborhoods.”The Semantic Web requirements for the 6.898 project and emphasis on tweets and photos gave the tool a different flavor than the Social TV version; in addition, I didn't consider the possibility of using "social lenses" to filter the contributions of people in the user's social circle. But for both projects, I recognized that the business case is weak, not only in terms of revenue, but also in terms of maintaining a competitive advantage if open platforms and standards are used.
- Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Professor Jim Hendler, discussing Semantic Web-based services in Britain, 10/18/2010
While superficial mashups that plot data about crime, celebrity sightings, or restaurants on street maps have been around for years, there is no service that takes geotagged tweets, photos, and videos, as well as associated semantic context, and plots it on a map according to the time the information was created. The idea behind PixPplPlaces:
• Index some publicly available location-based social media data in a Semantic Web-compatible form
• Plot the data by time (12:25 pm on 10/24/2010) and location (Lat 42.33565, Long -71.13366) on existing Linked Data geo resources
• Bring in other existing Linked Data resources (DBPedia, rdfabout U.S. Census, etc.) that can help describe the area or other aspects of what's going on, based on the indexed social media data
Potential business models:
• Professional services: News organizations can embed PPP mashups of specific neighborhoods on their websites, add location-based businesses who are their ad clients, or use the tool as an information resource for journalists -- what was the scene at the site of a fire on Monday evening, just before the fire broke out? Lawyers, insurance companies, and others might be interested in using this for investigations.
• Advertising services: A suggestion from Reed - "a source of ads/offers in Linked Data format - for the sutainability argument as a business. Maybe in the project you can develop an open definition that would let multiple providers publish ads in the right format that you could scrape /aggregate and then present to end users? If you demonstrate a click-wrap CPC concept you might be able to mock it up by scraping ads from Google Maps or just fake it."
To be researched:
• Is social media geodata (geotagged Flickr photos, geolocated Tweets) precise enough to be plotted on a map?
• Should this be a platform or a service?
• How can the data be scraped, indexed, or made into "good" Semantic Web information?
• Would any professional organization -- news, legal, insurance -- pay for it?
• How viable is the advertising model in a crowded field chasing a (currently) small pool of clients?
Incidentally, I first had the idea for a geocode-based application for user-generated content back in 2005 or 2006. My essay Meeting The Second Wave explains the original idea:
In the second wave of new media evolution, content creators and other 'Net users will not be able to manually tag the billions of new images and video clips uploaded to the 'Net. New hardware and software technologies will need to automatically apply descriptive metadata and tags at the point of creation, or after the content is uploaded to the 'Net. For instance, GPS-enabled cameras th at embed spatial metadata in digital images and video will help users find address- and time-specific content, once the content is made available on the 'Net. A user may instruct his news-fetching application to display all public photographs on the 'Net taken between 12 am and 12:01 am on January 1, 2017, in a one-block radius of Times Square, to get an idea of what the 2017 New Year's celebrations were like in that area. Manufacturers have already designed and brought to market cameras with GPS capabilities, but few people own them, and there are no news applications on the 'Net that can process and leverage location metadata — yet.
Other types of descriptive tags may be applied after the content is uploaded to the 'Net, depending on the objects or scenes that appear in user-submitted video, photographs, or 3D simulations. Two Penn State researchers, Jia Li and James Wang, have developed software that performs limited auto-tagging of digital photographs through the Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures project. In the years to come, autotagging technology will be developed to the point where powerful back-end processing resources will categorize massive amounts of user-generated content as it is uploaded to the 'Net. Programming logic might tag a video clip as "violence", "car," "Matt Damon," or all three. Using the New Years example above, a reader may instruct his news-fetching application to narrow down the collection of Times Square photographs and video to display only those autotagged items that include people wearing party hats.
For the Social Television class, we have to submit two more ideas in poster sessions. I may end up posting some of them to this blog ...
Friday, February 18, 2011
My MIT center of gravity shifts to digital media ...
An update on my Sloan Fellows experience: Last summer and fall, the Sloan Fellows curriculum was dominated by the core. For the two electives in the fall, I pushed for Internet/digital media offerings (6.898/Linked Data Ventures and my G-Lab project, which involved helping a Vietnamese Internet company develop their infrastructure and mobile strategies). Now, with the elective firehose on full, I am taking as many digital media-related classes as I can, with an emphasis on team-based coursework that involves product development and real business plans.
I am taking two classes at the Media Lab (MAS.664/Media Ventures, MAS.571/Social Television), one class (CMS.863J/Computer Games and Simulations for Investigation and Education) cross-listed under Comparative Media Studies/Course 9/Course 11, plus two Sloan classes that directly involve software and online media (Business of Software and Digital Platforms and New Enterprises). That leaves the single H1 core (Global Strategy) and a great law-focused class, Basic Business Law, Tilted Toward Finance. Here's a brief video entry explaining some of them:
For people who are wondering how I can take so many classes at once, the answer is I am "listening" (MIT's term for auditing) two of them.
Am I crazy for attempting to take so many project-based courses? Maybe. I leave my home at 7 in the morning, attend class and have team meetings all day, and in the last week, haven't gotten home until 8 or 9 pm. But this is my last semester at MIT. I won't get another opportunity to study under these faculty, or work on such a wide variety of interesting projects with teams at Sloan, the Media Lab, and even MIT undergraduates (the CMS course only has two or three other grad students, everyone else is undergrad, mostly Course 6). So far I'm keeping up, and it's exhilarating, but check back with me in a month or two to see how I am doing ...
I am taking two classes at the Media Lab (MAS.664/Media Ventures, MAS.571/Social Television), one class (CMS.863J/Computer Games and Simulations for Investigation and Education) cross-listed under Comparative Media Studies/Course 9/Course 11, plus two Sloan classes that directly involve software and online media (Business of Software and Digital Platforms and New Enterprises). That leaves the single H1 core (Global Strategy) and a great law-focused class, Basic Business Law, Tilted Toward Finance. Here's a brief video entry explaining some of them:
For people who are wondering how I can take so many classes at once, the answer is I am "listening" (MIT's term for auditing) two of them.
Am I crazy for attempting to take so many project-based courses? Maybe. I leave my home at 7 in the morning, attend class and have team meetings all day, and in the last week, haven't gotten home until 8 or 9 pm. But this is my last semester at MIT. I won't get another opportunity to study under these faculty, or work on such a wide variety of interesting projects with teams at Sloan, the Media Lab, and even MIT undergraduates (the CMS course only has two or three other grad students, everyone else is undergrad, mostly Course 6). So far I'm keeping up, and it's exhilarating, but check back with me in a month or two to see how I am doing ...
Friday, November 12, 2010
Kam Man in Quincy: A new model for old strip malls?
Most of my videos on innovation have focused on MIT technologies and research, but this week I thought I would highlight an example of successful innovation involving real estate and community. On the outside, the Kam Man (金門超市, or "Golden Gate Supermarket" in Chinese), located on Quincy Avenue in Quincy, Massachusetts, may not look that special -- an Asian supermarket located in an old strip mall. But there are a few things that make its business model unusual and ultimately successful. They are:
While the harsh flourescent lighting and scuffed linoleum of the old Bradlee's may not seem inviting, the model is clearly working: The parking lot of President's Plaza was filled to capacity, and most of the cube space was occupied. We saw many other customers doing the same thing as our family -- start with lunch at one of the small restaurants in the plaza, move on to shopping at the giant supermarket, and then browse the other businesses in the marketplace. There is turnover among the cube businesses, but some (such as the Lollicup shake tea) have been around for a few years, and the basic subletting model with Kam Man Food as the anchor has lasted since being established in Quincy in 2003.
- Identifying a niche and a need: The large but underserved Chinese and Vietnamese population south of Boston. As of last year, an estimated 22% of residents were Asian, Prior to 2000, many Chinese and Vietnamese living in the suburbs had to do their shopping in Boston's Chinatown (see my earlier report on the rise and fall of Super88)
- Leveraging existing networks and knowledge: Established in the 1970s in New York City, the Kam Man supermarket business was already going strong in the tri-state area (New York, New Jersey and Connecticut). Extending the model and distribution network to eastern Massachusetts was a feasible option for the company.
- Innovating on a huge and otherwise unusable retail space (a former Bradless in an aging strip mall not far from Quincy Center). A 40,000-square-foot chunk was devoted to the supermarket. The remainder was partitioned off cubicle-style (the walls don't reach to the ceiling) and sublet to other businesses serving Asian consumers.
While the harsh flourescent lighting and scuffed linoleum of the old Bradlee's may not seem inviting, the model is clearly working: The parking lot of President's Plaza was filled to capacity, and most of the cube space was occupied. We saw many other customers doing the same thing as our family -- start with lunch at one of the small restaurants in the plaza, move on to shopping at the giant supermarket, and then browse the other businesses in the marketplace. There is turnover among the cube businesses, but some (such as the Lollicup shake tea) have been around for a few years, and the basic subletting model with Kam Man Food as the anchor has lasted since being established in Quincy in 2003.
Walmart destroys local strip malls
Is it a model for the thousands of other Wal-marted strip malls scattered across the country? Unfortunately, the answer is probably "no". Most cities are already served by supermarkets, which makes it much harder to get the anchor tenant up and running. That leaves underserved ethnic communities of a sufficient population and lack of nearby alternatives. Having a relatively close distribution network is also key -- New York City is just a four-hour drive from Quincy, meaning some of Kam Man's trucks and suppliers could be extended into Massachusetts.Friday, October 29, 2010
MIT D-Lab demo: "cycle ventures"
This was fun. A bunch of the students in my program went to MIT's building E-62 on Thursday night, lured by the promise of free food and beer, and what else did we find? Cool MIT club and classroom demos as well! The following interview that I conducted at the event is from MIT's "D-Lab", which is described as "Development through Dialogue, Design, and Dissemination":
The D-Lab demo is specifically from the "Cycle Ventures" project, which, according to the project website:
Other MIT encounters:
The D-Lab demo is specifically from the "Cycle Ventures" project, which, according to the project website:
... Explores bicycle technology to provide human power for an increasing array of other purposes including water pumping, grain grinding and transport of loads in underserved communities with the aim to offer economic opportunity. The course provides a historical prespective on innovation in bicycle technology, reviews its engineering mechanisms and draws on the ubiquity of bikes to present them as innovative tools to foster socio-economic development.(Footage shot an edited on an iPod touch using ReelDirector)
Other MIT encounters:
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Disruption: Broadcast news vs. the humble iPod touch
The Newslab blog recently posted about the differences between "professional" video shot with TV crews and video created with mobile devices. Judging by the tone of the article, CNN and others are experimenting with such tools, but are doing so in a very cautious manner. It prompted me to leave a comment, in which I said:
It's apparent that there is still a lot of resistance in the broadcast news industry to using cheap mobile devices, laptop cameras, as well as any production process that's not "pro." In the mid-1990s, I worked in a TV newsroom, and know the prevailing attitude among many broadcast journalists (and crews) is a near obsession over making sure only the best-looking people and best-looking footage appear on screen. At the time, our reporter/cameraman teams would spend three or four hours every morning shooting tape and setting up interviews, and the remainder of the day editing down the footage and doing voice-overs. The result? One or two 2-minute clips per team per day.
Long after I had transitioned to online, the Flip video camera
came out, and was a hit. Until the Flip, consumer video cameras from Sony and JVC tended to have complicated user interfaces designed by Japanese engineers. The Flip did away with 90% of the UI clutter, and had just five buttons, a flash drive to store 60 minutes of video, and a flip-out USB plug to transfer video files to PCs. It was also very cheap -- just $125 dollars. I enthusiastically began using one for reviews and interviews, and evangelized it to everyone in the Computerworld newsroom. This was in 2007. However, the weak point with the Flip was the lack of good editing software, which forced us to turn to professional video staff for more complex editing tasks. Never mind the information or images captured by the Flip -- there was more than a little skepticism from the pro video people about the jerky, poorly lit footage, tinny audio, and the fact that there were compatibility issues with the expensive AVID editing suites they used.
Now, the Flip looks positively ancient compared to the iPod touch with its simple editing tools and wireless uploading. The iPhone and the iTouch have the potential to turn many online text-based journalists -- and even people who have never worked in a newsroom or been trained as journalists -- into effective online video journalists.
The professional broadcast community may not get it right now, but they will get the message soon enough when lots of quality work is performed by jackknife journalists and amateur producers, and audiences make it clear that expensive modes of production are not a prerequisite for their attention.
I recently started using a 4th generation iPod touch
Note that the only editing I did on the interview consisted of trimming the ends off the clip, an ability which is included in the iPod's camera application. From within the app, I uploaded it to YouTube, and then switched to my laptop to embed the YouTube clip on my blog post. A few days ago, I bought a $4 app in Apple's mobile app store called "ReelDirector" that lets me mix clips, add titles, switch transitions, and even add music.
With the cheap price and high level of functionality on these devices, there's no excuse for trying out mobile video. Is it pro quality? Of course not. But it's certainly enough to do newsgathering and interviews on the fly. And, the gear fits in your pocket and can be operated by the journalist -- no need for expensive cameras, extra crew, and extra overhead to get the story out.
It's apparent that there is still a lot of resistance in the broadcast news industry to using cheap mobile devices, laptop cameras, as well as any production process that's not "pro." In the mid-1990s, I worked in a TV newsroom, and know the prevailing attitude among many broadcast journalists (and crews) is a near obsession over making sure only the best-looking people and best-looking footage appear on screen. At the time, our reporter/cameraman teams would spend three or four hours every morning shooting tape and setting up interviews, and the remainder of the day editing down the footage and doing voice-overs. The result? One or two 2-minute clips per team per day.
Long after I had transitioned to online, the Flip video camera
came out, and was a hit. Until the Flip, consumer video cameras from Sony and JVC tended to have complicated user interfaces designed by Japanese engineers. The Flip did away with 90% of the UI clutter, and had just five buttons, a flash drive to store 60 minutes of video, and a flip-out USB plug to transfer video files to PCs. It was also very cheap -- just $125 dollars. I enthusiastically began using one for reviews and interviews, and evangelized it to everyone in the Computerworld newsroom. This was in 2007. However, the weak point with the Flip was the lack of good editing software, which forced us to turn to professional video staff for more complex editing tasks. Never mind the information or images captured by the Flip -- there was more than a little skepticism from the pro video people about the jerky, poorly lit footage, tinny audio, and the fact that there were compatibility issues with the expensive AVID editing suites they used. Now, the Flip looks positively ancient compared to the iPod touch with its simple editing tools and wireless uploading. The iPhone and the iTouch have the potential to turn many online text-based journalists -- and even people who have never worked in a newsroom or been trained as journalists -- into effective online video journalists.
The professional broadcast community may not get it right now, but they will get the message soon enough when lots of quality work is performed by jackknife journalists and amateur producers, and audiences make it clear that expensive modes of production are not a prerequisite for their attention.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
MIT Media Lab: Robots, and the best Lego set ever
One thing I've wanted to do since arriving at MIT at the beginning of the summer is to see the MIT Media Lab. I mean, I'm a media guy interested in geeky technologies, so it should be one of the first stops, right?
Well, I never got around to going into the Media Lab building, until today. I heard from two non-Sloan friends of mine -- a current PhD candidate studying new ways to do gaming AIs, and a staff member who helped make the world's first robot opera -- that there was a Media Lab open house, in which most of the current projects (and a few past ones, too) would be on display with researchers on hand to explain them.
Firehose time. I spent a few hours visiting the offices and labs, drinking in projects that ranged from anthropomorphic robots (such as Lexi, inset) to a kids-oriented programming language to "tangible media.
Unfortunately, there was no way to see it all. But I was able to shoot a few highlights and conduct some interviews using my iPod touch. There are three videos:
MIT Media Lab Open House Video #1: Scratch + Legos = Cool (interview with researcher Sayamindu Dasgupta from 00:00 to 08:00, for the final two minutes I spend a few minutes looking at other Media Lab projects)
MIT Media Lab Open House Video #2: Social robots! (interview with Personal Robots Group researchers, including Kenton Williams, discussing Nexi and human-social interaction) (note: audio is slightly off-sync)
MIT Media Lab Open House Video #3: An army of robots? (I was unable to find the identity of the PhD student on the Media Lab/Personal Robotics Group website, but I am wondering if that's because of the military sponsor?)
Other MIT classroom encounters:
Firehose time. I spent a few hours visiting the offices and labs, drinking in projects that ranged from anthropomorphic robots (such as Lexi, inset) to a kids-oriented programming language to "tangible media.
Unfortunately, there was no way to see it all. But I was able to shoot a few highlights and conduct some interviews using my iPod touch. There are three videos:
MIT Media Lab Open House Video #1: Scratch + Legos = Cool (interview with researcher Sayamindu Dasgupta from 00:00 to 08:00, for the final two minutes I spend a few minutes looking at other Media Lab projects)
MIT Media Lab Open House Video #2: Social robots! (interview with Personal Robots Group researchers, including Kenton Williams, discussing Nexi and human-social interaction) (note: audio is slightly off-sync)
MIT Media Lab Open House Video #3: An army of robots? (I was unable to find the identity of the PhD student on the Media Lab/Personal Robotics Group website, but I am wondering if that's because of the military sponsor?)
Other MIT classroom encounters:
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
MBA math review
I've been doing a lot of MBA math prep over the past four months. I started with a Barron's GMAT guide, then switched over to the Kaplan GMAT Math Workbook
, which was better for algebra and geometry review. But when it comes time to complete actual coursework, more advanced mathematical and statistics concepts will be required. For MBA math review in those areas, I've turned to an unlikely source: YouTube. Specifically, the wonderful collection of short videos found on the Khan's Academy website. Here's a sample from the calculus section, the introduction to limits that I watched last night:
The author and narrator of this and hundreds of other videos on math, science, and business-related topics is Salman Khan. "Sal" is a graduate of MIT and the Harvard Business School who started posting simple math videos on YouTube to help a young cousin who was struggling with a few basic concepts. When other people started watching and responding to the videos on YouTube, he quickly realized that there was a market for these types of tutorials, not only in basic math subjects, but also in more advanced topics. I've already mentioned the calculus videos. Another example for people preparing for an MBA is the section on finance, which starts out with an introduction to interest, and works up to videos on bankruptcy filings and the multiplier effect and the money supply.
These topics won't be news to students with Wall Street backgrounds. But for students entering business school who don't come from the worlds of banking or finance, they serve as useful briefings before starting the lectures, textbook chapters, and problem sets that are a part of the typical MBA curriculum. Sal explains the concepts in very clear language, putting diagrams and formulae on the screen as he describes the concepts and gives examples. He has a friendly, easygoing manner which really puts people at ease. Sal now works on the site nearly full-time, with a mission of providing an education via "the world's free virtual school" (the videos are free, and the organization is run as a nonprofit).
It's an admirable goal, and I thank Sal for sharing his knowledge with the world in this manner. While I have had harsh words about online education in the past, I think what he's doing here -- providing math and science lessons using simple, short-form videos -- is extremely useful. The point here is not dialogue (although some people have responded with their own YouTube videos and comments), advanced study with other students and faculty, or a degree. Rather, Khan's Academy is all about reinforcing basic concepts and introducing viewers to more advanced topics, and increasing their understanding of how things work.
Update: Since writing this post, I have taken an online math class for credit, and have this to say about the online education experience:
, which was better for algebra and geometry review. But when it comes time to complete actual coursework, more advanced mathematical and statistics concepts will be required. For MBA math review in those areas, I've turned to an unlikely source: YouTube. Specifically, the wonderful collection of short videos found on the Khan's Academy website. Here's a sample from the calculus section, the introduction to limits that I watched last night:The author and narrator of this and hundreds of other videos on math, science, and business-related topics is Salman Khan. "Sal" is a graduate of MIT and the Harvard Business School who started posting simple math videos on YouTube to help a young cousin who was struggling with a few basic concepts. When other people started watching and responding to the videos on YouTube, he quickly realized that there was a market for these types of tutorials, not only in basic math subjects, but also in more advanced topics. I've already mentioned the calculus videos. Another example for people preparing for an MBA is the section on finance, which starts out with an introduction to interest, and works up to videos on bankruptcy filings and the multiplier effect and the money supply.
These topics won't be news to students with Wall Street backgrounds. But for students entering business school who don't come from the worlds of banking or finance, they serve as useful briefings before starting the lectures, textbook chapters, and problem sets that are a part of the typical MBA curriculum. Sal explains the concepts in very clear language, putting diagrams and formulae on the screen as he describes the concepts and gives examples. He has a friendly, easygoing manner which really puts people at ease. Sal now works on the site nearly full-time, with a mission of providing an education via "the world's free virtual school" (the videos are free, and the organization is run as a nonprofit).
Update: Since writing this post, I have taken an online math class for credit, and have this to say about the online education experience:
Saturday, January 30, 2010
WGBH reception
Nevertheless, there are challenges. We have rabbit ears attached to our HDTV, and even though we live right outside of Boston, they often need to fine-tuned to avoid "freezing" and other digital reception problems.
Two weeks ago, though, the big public broadcaster in Boston, WGBH ("Channel 2") disappeared altogether. No amount of fiddling with the antennae or menu settings would solve the problem. I eventually went to the WGBH website to see if there was a FAQ or support page that could help. There wasn't, but the station did respond to an email:
In response to your inquiry, WGBH 2 began mapping to channel 19 (our actual digital frequency) on Thursday, January 14, affecting all of our over-the-air viewers. We believed the problem was resolved by Friday morning, and most viewers who contacted us about the problem confirmed that for us. However, for viewers with certain TV brands, like Samsung, the problem persisted through Wednesday, January 20.The double rescan fix worked on our TV. However, I wonder how other people who can't reach the right resources on the WGBH.org website or understand their HDTV's confusing UIs (our Samsung remote, for instance, has three buttons that control channel settings) will fare. These days, the learning curve for TV technology is steep. For those people out there who can't figure it out, it will mean lots of frustration or simply giving up on certain over-the-air broadcasters.
As of Thursday, January 21 at 6:00am, our engineers believe the problem has been resolved. If you now try tuning to WGBH at 2.1 or 2.2 and still do not find us there, please rescan for your channels and then try tuning us in at 2.1 or 2.2.
If you still do not receive us on channel 2, try a double rescan. This involves unplugging your antenna and then scanning for your channels, which should wipe out all channels from your TV's memory. Then plug your antenna back in and perform another scan. This should bring back WGBH 2 to channel 2.
If you can, please let us know how this works for you so we can report back to our engineers. Thanks!
Thursday, January 21, 2010
When touch screens were still novelties
I was looking through some of our older work at The Standard this afternoon, when I stumbled upon this video that we shot in August 2008, demonstrating Microsoft Surface. It's kind of remarkable that it was just 18 months ago, yet I was so unfamiliar with how touch screens worked. Since then, I've bought an iPod touch and it's become second nature. It's actually reached the point where I expect new mobile devices to have touch screen user interfaces built in, and am surprised when I get no response, such as when I tried out a family member's new Kindle.
I think a lot of other people will be schooled in touch technology in the months to come. But not because of Surface units, which are still rarely seen outside of a few hotels, museums, and tourist information centers. Rather, it's because of the iPhone, iTouch, and soon, the Apple Tablet.
Video: Hands on: Microsoft Surface (Chris Tompkins and Ian Lamont)
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
OK Go's YouTube problem highlights the music industry's cash struggles
But there's a little problem now, says OK Go in an open letter: While anyone can view the band's new videos on YouTube, you can't embed them in a blog post, like I did a few days ago with Hug a Pug. This means the viral potential is severely limited, as the video can't be easily shared with fans' own mini-audiences on blogs and fan sites.
Why has OK Go's record label, EMI, hobbled one of its most popular artists by disabling embedding of the band's videos? Because there is no way to monetize the videos, says vocalist Damian Kulash. YouTube runs ads next to and over videos showing on the site, and the videos producers can get a small cut of the ad revenue. On embedded videos, YouTube can also show ads, but respectable (i.e., deep-pocketed) advertisers often don't want to have their ads running in unknown blogs or sites that post the videos.
Kulash says that the issue illustrates the larger problem of a 20th-century industry trying to keep up with the new digital reality (sound familiar?):
What we’re really talking about here is the shift in the way we think about music. We’re stuck between two worlds: the world of ten years ago, where music was privately owned in discreet little chunks (CDs), and a new one that seems to be emerging, where music is universally publicly accessible. The thing is, only one of these worlds has a (somewhat) stable system in place for funding music and all of its associated nuts-and-bolts logistics, and, even if it were possible, none of us would willingly return to that world. Aside from the smug assholes who ran labels, who’d want a system where a handful of corporate overlords shove crap down our throats? All the same, if music is going to be more than a hobby, someone, literally, has to pay the piper. So we’ve got this ridiculous situation where the machinery of the old system is frantically trying to contort and reshape and rewire itself to run without actually selling music. It’s like a car trying to figure out how to run without gas, or a fish trying to learn to breath air.
So what about Hug A Pug, a YouTube video which can be embedded on blogs? Well, as I pointed out in my earlier post, the company that produced the music video (Ganz) is not trying to sell songs. They're trying to sell something else. Songs like Hug A Pug are purely promotions for other products -- namely, Ganz's stuffed animal line (Webkinz
), and the virtual world based on the animals (Webkinz World). In other words, Hug A Pug doesn't need to run ads because it is the ad.There are alternatives for embedding video, including MySpace and Vimeo, and OK Go has made its latest music video available on both services (see video below). But YouTube's huge reach and advertising potential are issues that the music industry are trying to balance, which means that for the time being the song won't be seen that much outside of YouTube.com and a few other sanctioned places.
OK Go - This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.
(Link: Hacker News)
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Charlie Chaplin would be proud
This is supposed to be real security camera footage. Check out the original here, and judge for yourself.
(Thanks Gavin P.)
Sunday, October 11, 2009
SNL's "University of Westfield" ad: The reputation of online degrees takes another hit
(Updated with comments and links at the bottom of this post) I saw this on Saturday Night Live yesterday: An ad for the "University of Westfield" and its online degree programs (note you may have to sit through a real advertisement before the fake SNL ad starts):
The basic message of the fake ad is summed up in this line from the script:
Update: A new blog post that illustrates some of the problems with distance education, as seen by instructors: Online education: A teacher speaks
2nd update: University of Phoenix astroturfing, or sarcasm directed at its own student customers? See this comment and my follow-up comment (#8), and judge for yourself.
3rd Update: Since writing this post, I have taken an online math class for credit, and have this to say about the online education experience:
ATTENTION COMMENT SPAMMERS: Don't bother leaving comments, they'll never make it past the moderation queue.
(Update: Since writing this post, I have launched a company which is dedicated to helping people understand complicated technologies and concepts. Besides creating online posts which address questions such as What is LinkedIn and What Is Google Drive, I have also published a series of guides under the In 30 Minutes brand.)
The basic message of the fake ad is summed up in this line from the script:
"The University of Westfield taught me that having gone to Internet college is not something that would make people want to hire me."Clearly, it's spoofing the University of Phoenix, which has its own image problems, as well as online education in general. Unfortunately for the people who are pinning their educational and career hopes on online degrees, jokes like these help perpetuate various stereotypes of Web-based education, regardless of the quality of the programs or the dedication of the students who register for them.
Update: A new blog post that illustrates some of the problems with distance education, as seen by instructors: Online education: A teacher speaks
2nd update: University of Phoenix astroturfing, or sarcasm directed at its own student customers? See this comment and my follow-up comment (#8), and judge for yourself.
3rd Update: Since writing this post, I have taken an online math class for credit, and have this to say about the online education experience:
ATTENTION COMMENT SPAMMERS: Don't bother leaving comments, they'll never make it past the moderation queue.
(Update: Since writing this post, I have launched a company which is dedicated to helping people understand complicated technologies and concepts. Besides creating online posts which address questions such as What is LinkedIn and What Is Google Drive, I have also published a series of guides under the In 30 Minutes brand.)
Thursday, October 08, 2009
Photorealism and film
Last month, I applied to be a presenter at the Economist Media Convergence forum in New York. The application required putting together a YouTube video discussing some technology that will shake up the media industry. I chose photorealism. It's something I've been writing about for years (see my paper on the topic below the video) but doing a YouTube video allowed me to incorporate some graphics, including a photorealism software demo and some clips from Wii and the XBox 360's Fallout 3:
Video, Computer-Generated Environments and the Future of the Web
Unfortunately, I didn't make the final cut at the Economist forum, but there will be more chances to talk this up in the years to come. It really is an unavoidable technology trend that will shake up the movie and video industries, as well as the ways in which we consume and customize what we see on TV.
Video, Computer-Generated Environments and the Future of the Web
Unfortunately, I didn't make the final cut at the Economist forum, but there will be more chances to talk this up in the years to come. It really is an unavoidable technology trend that will shake up the movie and video industries, as well as the ways in which we consume and customize what we see on TV.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Video: Japanese variety show
When I lived in Taiwan, it was possible to watch Japanese television -- including some of their wackier game shows -- on cable TV. Now that I am back in the United States, I can still watch them, thanks to YouTube.
Anyone with young school-aged kids will appreciate this. The goal is to get the boy out of bed and ready for school within 5 minutes. You'll see that a lot of it relates to multitasking. Watch the whole thing -- the mom does some incredible stuff toward the end:
Anyone with young school-aged kids will appreciate this. The goal is to get the boy out of bed and ready for school within 5 minutes. You'll see that a lot of it relates to multitasking. Watch the whole thing -- the mom does some incredible stuff toward the end:
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