Archives - March 2009


SXSWi – Minority Report Is Real

Here beginneth the write-up of the various panels from SXSWi 09!

The first panel I attended kicked the conference off in style, with an inspirational exploration of the future of ubiquitious computing & immersive interfaces from Ben Rigby, Barrett Fox and Jeroen Lapre in Minority Report Is Real.

Despite the fact that the scene where Tom Cruise manipulates files in a 3d projection using LED gloves lasts for less than 5 minutes, it was so powerful that ‘Minority Report’ has become shorthand for any kind of immersive and gestural computer interface. The focus for the panel was how film has influenced science in the sphere of futuristic / next-gen interfaces, and vice versa:

Being able to touch, move, and magically discover information has been the long-time fodder of sci-fi movies.

With few technical limitations, Hollywood artists have created wonderfully immersive sci-fi computer interfaces. They leave us on the edge of our seats, wanting to experience the magic in real life. Throughout the past few decades, little by little, many of these fanciful productions become real.

Science fiction sets the popular expectation, creating not only anticipation, but a sort of pre-familiarity with new interface paradigms…We expect to control them with gestures, for them to surround us with useful and accessible information, and above all, for them to be beautiful.

In this panel, we’ll explore the convergence of fields that, finally in 2008, made this interface paradigm possible. Hollywood artists provided inspiration. Information visualization experts provided one-off examples showing stunning visuals mixed with useful data. And in 2008, massive reductions in Internet infrastructure costs and data-availability made it possible to create systematic and generalized interfaces that are, at once, beautiful and also useful. Along with the engineers and artists who make these interfaces, we’ll journey through the creative process, limitations, opportunities, and the adventure that awaits in the next several years

The leading conclusion was that the predominant WIMP computer interface ( window, icon, menu, pointing device) will unquestionably evolve – and that this evolution will be signficiantly sharper and more dramatic than the journey from a command line to a windows-based UI.

Key trends in the future of user interfaces:

 

The Holo Projector

As envisioned in film: Iron Man

 

As seen in real life: CNN’s crazy holographic election night coverage

 

 

Data overlay & augmented reality

Augmented reality is something we’re gradually becoming more and more familiar with: the key point about AR vs the virtual reality we used to envisage as The Future, is that whereas virtual reality excludes us from real life, augmented reality allows us to overlay data onto our real lives, bringing together the digital and analogue worlds.

As envisioned in film: Microsoft’s Vision of 2019:

 

As seen in real life: Pattie Maes’ Sixth Sense projector at TED – a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment. Look at a roll of toilet paper in the supermarket and see instantly the data that surrounds it – is it made in an eco-friendly fashion – does its parent company employ child labour? Meet someone? Display their CV next to them – or your CRM records:

 

 

Surround holography

As envisioned in film: The Matrix 3 ship docking sequence, or its best known incarnation, the Star Trek Holodeck:

 

As seen in real life: CAVE holodeck: A Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (better known by the recursive acronym CAVE) is an immersive virtual reality environment where projectors are directed to three, four, five or six of the walls of a room-sized cube. The name is also a reference to the allegory of the Cave in Plato’s Republic where a philosopher contemplates perception, reality and illusion:

 

 

Gesture & Tangibility

As envisioned in film: Minority Report (duh) and Quantum of Solace:

 

As seen in real life: Microsoft Surface – I had a play with this at SXSW, it was pretty cool, although the below video make it look like little more than a giant iPod touch:

 

The Oblong g-speak spatial operating system (from John Underkoffler, one of the technical advisors for Minority Report film) combines “gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels,” to deliver what the creators call “the first major step in [a] computer interface since 1984:


g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

 

Or for a home-brewed version, try this hack by Johnny Lee: using an LED array and some reflective tape, you can use the infrared camera in the Wii remote to track objects, like your fingers, in 2D space – letting you interact with your computer simply by waving your hands in the air:

 

 

Natural Language

As envisioned in film: HAL

As seen in real life: we’re not there yet! The dream of being able to ask our computers to do things for us using simple voice commands, a la Star Trek, hasn’t yet been realised in any non-clunky way. Although the semantic web may have some of the answers, as the Wolfram Knowledge Engine promises to do some of this:

Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions — like questions that have factual answers such as “What is the location of Timbuktu?” or “How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?,” “What was the average rainfall in Boston last year?,” “What is the 307th digit of Pi?,” “where is the ISS?” or “When was GOOG worth more than $300?”

 

 

Media Cloud

As envisioned in film: The Matrix weapons loading sequence (no pix / clip available) – using 3D space to navigate selections of objects or data

As seen in real life: At present only 3d visualisations within the 2d constraints of your desktop, but nevertheless pretty damn cool: Cooliris lets you surf the web in 3d – in a more cinematic, visual way:

 

See also: Viewzi, Photosynth and Zoomarama

 

True to the subject matter, the panellists eschewed the linear nature of powerpoint for presentation stimulus, and instead used an interactive mindmap to take us through their exploration of the future of interactive interfaces (click below for the full picture):

This whistlestop overview of the journey through the near and distant future doesn’t do justice to the panel at all, but hopefully gives you a flavour of the innovation just around the corner – check out the panellists’ dedicated website Minority Report Is Real for more info and inspiration.

March 26, 2009 in Inspiration | Permalink | 1 Comment

Unplugging in the here and now

Technology is bloody great, isn’t it? I absolutely love my Macbook, my iPhone, ubiquitous connectivity via 3G and wifi, the ability to be plugged-in 24-7.

But more and more, actually taking a step back from our hyperconnected lives and simply unplugging can be be a Good Thing.

If you’ve not already done so, I recommend reading John’s recent 2 day experiment to try leading his highly-connected, highly computer-dependent life without his PC, and Iain’s experience of Mental Detox Week last year. Or Lucy Kellaway’s Before Personal Computers experiment. You get the idea.

Adrian Hon and Naomi Alderman spoke about this at GeeKyoto, positing the notion of a secular sabbath – one day of the week when you unplug and step off the grid for 24 hours. Whilst orthodox Jews observance of the sabbath (all work is forbidden, no use of electricity, cars, telephones etc) is in order to devote the day to prayer, the original focus of the secular sabbath was saving energy. But it’s also a way to have one day a week where you’re free from the distractions of your hyperconnected life to truly experience the offline world (cynics might call this Real Life).

I’ve been thinking a lot about the tension between the awesome benefits of technology and hyperconnectivity, and the sheer information overload that comes with it. That sinking feeling when you see the number of unread items in your RSS reader or inbox. That pile of photos waiting in iPhoto to be uploaded to Flickr and tagged. Those delicious links you bookmarked but still haven’t got round to reading. The backlog goes on.

But the idea of a backlog isn’t anything new – To-Do lists with endless un-done tasks have been around for ages, it’s just that what we’re not keeping up with is changing (and arguably accelerating as the sheer pace of available information speeds up).

What I think’s more interesting is the tension between simultaneous use of technology and our real-time real-life experiences. When you’re so busy trying to take photos that you spend more of your time behind the camera trying to capture where you are and what you’re seeing and doing, that you don’t really experience it. When you’re at a conference, talk or seminar, and you’re so busy trying to live-blog or tweet it that you simply don’t have the mental capacity to really digest what’s being said (the same arguably goes for lofi notetaking, so even when you’re scribbling in your moleskine, you’re still not 100% there in the moment)

The idea of continuous partial attention is fascinating, and there’s lots of different schools of thought about how our constant multitasking is affecting our brains and the way we process information. But leaving that aside, however we manage multitasking, it’s hard to avoid the fact that when we’re doing two things at once, we’re less able to truly focus on the experience of the here and now.


Missing the here and now?

As I mentioned above, even this isn’t exactly new – people have been taking holiday snaps for years, and note taking is hardly a new art. But technology facilitates this in such a way that the sheer volume of opportunities for lifecasting or capturing information are more than ever before:

As we progress through our short span here on this planet, living our lives and documenting them along the way, we may be forgetting…for moments at least…how to actually live. And living, like it or not, means that sometimes we need to disconnect, put the camera down, and enjoy a moment for once.

Technology is great – but are we forgetting to live?

I’m incredibly guilty of this. One of the most frequent tips for SXSWi n00bs was to leave the damn laptop at home, not only because you’ll avoid having to lug it around, but because you’ll get so much more out of the panels if you’re actually there in the here and now, rather than frantically trying to capture what’s being said to be the first one to blog it (or bitching about it on the Twitter backchannel!). Although there’s another school of thought on this entirely, the subject of another post, methinks.

More than ever I think the idea of a secular sabbath is bloody appealing. Or just putting the damn camera down and experiencing the here and now. After all, what use is a perfect record of our experiences, if we never really got to experience them in the first place?

March 21, 2009 in Technology | Permalink | 3 Comments

We Tell Stories wins Best of Show at SXSWi

sixtostart

SXSWi is utterly mindblowing – I was going to try and liveblog the panels, but instead I’m trying to actually pay full attention to them and write up my notes later – full of incredible people, the smartest minds around, good times and much merriment once the day is over.

Full write ups will follow probably once the madness over, however it absolutely had to be brought to everyone’s attention that my good friends, the utterly fabulous Six to Start, not only won their category (Best Experimental) SXSW web award, for the amazing work they did for Penguin on We Tell Stories [previous blogpost here] – but they only bloody took Best of Show as well!

Absolutely wonderful to see a UK company doing so well, and to see such innovative work being recognised. What’s particularly awesome is that this wasn’t just an attempt to do something new and cool as a means of marketing (although it did this bloody well, and was a damn sight more innovative than most marketing efforts in any category) – it’s how Penguin are experimenting with different models for distributing content, and actually exploring potential new business models for the future (so they don’t become Polaroid).

And it’s even better when the underdog wins.

March 16, 2009 in Communication | Permalink | Leave a Comment

I Am Spartacus

So I’m about to go head first into what I’m sure is going to be a mindblowing 5 days at SXSWi, and I’m wondering how many attendees will class themselves as social media socialists / experts / consultants / gurus. I’m sure everyone’s seen, and loved Hugh’s cartoon about this very subject , but it’s just so right on the money:

It’s yet another case of I Am Spartacus.

At Naked we’ve used this analogy when talking about communications planning. Naked were thought of as a bit weird (well, we still are, to be fair) when the founding partners first set out their stall offering this thing called comms planning, totally divorced from any vested interest in implementation, and therefore able to provide utterly neutral and unbiased advice about the best communications solution. When Naked was first founded, apart from M&B, there wasn’t really anyone else talking about comms planning. Then the media agencies, and of late the ad agencies, all started to boast of their expertise in communications planning. Everyone was claiming to be Spartacus – making it very hard to tell who really was.

I’ve seen media agency colleagues have their job titles rebranded from ‘media planner’, to ‘communications planner’, except that they’re not actually doing anything different. When one of your biggest drivers of income as a media agency is the interest from from media billings which come through your books, even if you’re paid on a fee basis rather than commission on media booked, you can’t really claim to be wholly neutral. You might say you are, but when you stand to lose out financially if you recommend that actually they shouldn’t spend their budget on media solutions which you then book on their behalf, that what’s needed is an internal comms job within the organisation (and thus no media billings, and several million £ that’s not coming through your books). So lots of claims to be Spartacus, claiming to provide comms planning, when actually it’s just media planning by a different name.

Obviously the analogy breaks down a little in this case, in that unlike the film, when you are Spartacus, you don’t want everyone else claiming to be Spartacus when they’re not. It doesn’t help you when everyone’s now claiming to do what you do – when in fact they don’t. It dilutes – and pollutes – the very essence of your offering. And it makes it bloody confusing for anyone else to tell whether you really are the genuine Spartacus (the analogy holds up here!). When such terminology is bandied around carelessly, it renders it virtually meaningless. After all, when every man and his dog is claiming to be a comms planner, you couldn’t be faulted for thinking comms planning’s just another buzz word for what media and account planners have always done. It’s not supposed to be, but in many cases that’s what it’s become.

Now every man and his dog are claiming to be social media specialists. The term’s been bastardised to such an extent that it’s become totally meaningless, and utterly laughable. Now, some people really do know their shit, and there are a lot of clients who could really do with some of their expertise to help them avoid almighty fuck-ups when navigating the social space. And I should preface this by saying that I reckon true experts in social media can be found in a number of different places, not just in social media / ‘conversation’ agencies, or as dedicated consultants in this space.

But my god there are a load of pretenders out there. I’m sure you’ve all seen a few. I saw a presentation the other day which left my gob truly smacked. Knowing how to use Twitter and being able to chuck up a couple of case studies about how some brands have engaged with people using social tools doesn’t make you a social media expert.

At somewhere like SXSWi, where there’s such a ridiculous quotient of talented, smart, savvy people, most of the people who do claim to be experts in social media very probably are. But unfortunately, it feels like they, like us comms planners, have had their territory usurped from under their feet.

Saying you’re Spartacus doesn’t actually mean you are Spartacus. no matter how much you’d like to believe it to be true.

March 13, 2009 in Communication | Permalink | 3 Comments
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