Brian Stokes: The Intermittent Super-genius

X-Files: My Face Is Out There

2009-06-26T09:55:00.000-07:00

Me staring at Skully and the incoming big-ass needle, second one over from the left (the only nurse with chest hair).

I am in the background on the upper left, pointing at the X-ray panel for no reason.

Closer view of me pointing at the X-ray panel, left side.

I'm dead center, facing away from camera standing at the foot of the stretcher.

As you may have read here last year, I wound up being on the set of Chris Carter's movie X-Files: I Want To Believe. While he and another friend of his were both somewhat certain I made it into the final cut of the film, neither I nor my friends were able to find me when we went to the theater to see it. Aaaargh! Unfortunately, the movie itself isn't that great and I couldn't muster enough energy to see it again.

Then the DVD came out a few months ago and I figured I would try the deleted scenes to see if I hiding in there somewhere. Nope. I tried combing the two main emergency room sections. Sure enough, while running scene 12 (where Skully is doing the stem cell operation on the terminally ill boy) in slow motion, I found a few spots with me! Whohoo!

TED: Portable "Minority Report" interface!

2009-06-23T10:10:00.000-07:00

For those of you haven't seen Minority Report, the movie showcases some seemingly futuristic gestural interfaces that Tom Cruise uses to control a complex computer system. Yet only a few years after it came out, we're already seeing just how possible this is. In this TED video, Pattie Maes from MIT demonstrates a low-cost ($350) system that lets the user use any available surface (a wall, a free hand (!)) as a multi-touch interface. Granted, it's a bit slower to use than Jeff Han's table or Microsoft's Surface, but hey, it's cheap and you can bring it with you.

Kutiman + Youtube Amateur Music clips = The Future of Media?

2009-06-19T13:30:00.000-07:00

Man, we are almost at Beatles-level in the world of mashup artists. DJ Earworm continues to weave top 40 hits together. Now, Israeli artist Kutiman has taken unrelated bits of amateur music performance clips on Youtube, blending them together magically to make new creations, like this one:

My advice to the RIAA and media conglomerate executives? It's time to learn to love the world without excessive copyright, because this IS the future, like it or not. No amount of litigation, government crack-downs, or lobbying will end these "violations." Not even a doomsday lock-down on electronic communications itself, China-style. Time to evolve new business models, not cryogenically preserve archaic ones.

Microsoft's Project Natal: Motion Capture, Mime, Puppetry For your Xbox 360?

2009-06-02T10:30:00.000-07:00

The computer vision wizards of Microsoft (including the Internet sensation Jonny Lee, the guy who hacked a Wiimote into a virtual whiteboard) have been busy working on a controller-less technology that, apparently, can sense shapes and forms and track their motions.

Imagine the uses for puppetry or mime! In the video above, the boy gets to perform the rampages of a giant Japanese monster. The girl drives a car by miming the hands on a steering wheel. I can see this being used for virtual Muppets, where a simple two-handed rod puppet could drive a virtual puppet decorated to look like whatever you want.

Some questions to ponder. Can Project Natal track depth accurately? What's the latency? How many things can it track? If a tracked object gets occluded and then reappears, is there a delay before it gets picked up again?

Low-cost motion capture / digital puppetry inches closer and closer. I hope Microsoft opens this up to XNA so that indie developers can play with it.

Reactable: Multi-touch Tabletop Synthesizer Now Available

2009-05-12T10:50:00.000-07:00

Oooh boy, me want!

This is the final product version of the Reactable, previously a thesis project by grad students at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain.

What is it? It's a tangible multi-touch projection surface hooked up to an interactive modular synthesizer. In other words, take the Evil Supreme Being's water surveillance screen from Time Bandits:

and combine it with a virtual version of Robert Moog's modular synthesizers:

What I like about this multi-touch screen is that it can "see" special barcode-like glyph patterns on the sides of objects. These glyphs can generate specific controls on the screen, or represent modes (like say "octave" or "turn on delay"). The screen detects their position and rotation. In contrast, something like the iPhone tracks fingers, but once you remove the finger, the tracking and control (as well as the visual representation of the control) are gone unless something tells the software to make that control "stick". This is not as intuitive as a tangible control. (After all, we know what to do with blocks as soon as we're old enough to grasp things.) The blocks on this surface are the signal to the screen to make a control. Removing them makes the control disappear. No extra interface to learn. It's also a nice way to partition the work of many users. Each player can control something (or many things) with his/her own block and participate with the overall result of everyone else's control blocks.

Looks like this incarnation of the Reactable is meant for museum and art installations, rather than personal use. And of course, it's running a specific application, namely a synthesizer. Wonder how much it costs!

As mentioned before on this blog, the last couple of years have been great for multi-touch interfaces. Jeff Hahn's interface, Jonny Lee's Nintendo Wiimote hack for a multi-touch whiteboard, the Reactable, Microsoft's Surface and the iPhone. Keep 'em coming!

Douglas Rushkoff's "Life, Inc" book and short film preview

2009-05-11T09:47:00.000-07:00

Media ecology professor, author, and documentarian Douglas Rushkoff has been writing a book called Life, Inc: How The World Became a Corporation and How To Take It Back. While Joel Bakun's book (and documentary film), The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Power, describes how public corporations are basically psychopathic neighbors that are bound by Law to make choices detrimental to humanity and the environment (in the pursuit of infinite profit growth), Rushkoff's book will discuss how Kings fabricated an economic environment designed to control the merchant class, bringing rise to chartered corporations and a mindset of self-interest, consumerism and profit above all other virtues that people, particularly Americans have adopted as the default nature of being.

Above is a short video preview.

Joe Raposo's song "Wonder Child"

2009-05-04T19:11:00.000-07:00

I remember being in my grandfather's high-rise apartment in Philadelphia sometime in the mid-to-late 70s. I was sitting on the bed in his bedroom. An off-white Zenith TV with a thick, noisy spring-loaded button metal brick remote sat on a stand in front of a large window overlooking the 30th Street Train Station. On the screen, a fuzzy PBS station was airing Sesame Street, and Helen Reddy was singing a song that has been stuck in my mind's infinite shuffle playlist ever since.

Of course, where else do I find it but YouTube, the ever-present fountain of nostalgia?

Lovely song. But then I discovered the Ritchie Havens version, also on Sesame Street and possibly the original version of it:

Tricia and I love this version even more!

The song was written by the late Joe Raposo, the primary musical force behind the early Sesame Street and The Electric Company years. Probably best known for his "Bein' Green" song sun by Kermit The Frog. Musically, he's got a trademark sound built upon flutes, piccolos, glockenspiels, chimes, harpsichords, player pianos, 70s funk bass and guitar, random sound FX and banjo. He believed very strongly that children should hear music from everywhere else, and that it wasn't over their heads.

Obama Giving In?: The U.S. May Spy On You; You Can't Sue

2009-04-09T13:14:00.000-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Well I for one am disturbed. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against AT&T and the Bush administrations's illegal surveillance hit a humongous snag -- Obama's Department of Justice filed a brief saying they not only endorse the Bush administration's reasoning that the suit cannot be pursued because of national security, but that retroactively, from now on, NO ONE may sue the government or its contractors for warantless wiretapping unless that information is made public by said government.

But more importantly, it undermines Obama's entire campaign.
This is a complete about face, folks. He vowed to hold our government accountable for illegal activity, to preserve the Constitution which expressly forbids surveillance without warrants. To sneak around having to do this to prevent rocking the boat this early in his term is a horrible sign that perhaps, we were all duped. I really hope this isn't the case -- Obama is a nice friendly figurehead but, despite election promises, unwilling or unable to fix the corruption his predecessors engineered.

He better do something. That we are in a manufactured "War on Terror" (a term the Obama team no longer uses) is NO EXCUSE for tramping the civil rights of its citizens. Unless of course you want a fascist nation. (Some do -- better for business.)

Is Obama's DOJ full of lingering Bush administrative people seizing the opportunity? Is Obama oblivious? How could he support such a thing?

More editorial about this here.

If you're angry with all this, please sign the CREDO petition.

Will Wright: Software Will Write Itself

2009-04-08T14:32:00.000-07:00

Found this quote from Will Wright -- game designer extraordinaire and creator of SPORE, The Sims and Sim City -- about Software:

Most of the software that we’ve used thus far has been designed software—procedurally designed software. We’re just getting to the point where we’re getting a lot of automatically generated software—you know, CASE tools or adaptive programming, where I’m pretty convinced that in a few years a lot of the software is going to be evolved, as opposed to written by humans. So over time, we’re going to be able to understand the way the software works less and less. It’s going to become a soft biological system. But at the same time, it’ll be very robust, very fault-tolerant compared to the very brittle software we have today. Once we lose control of software design, once software can design itself, write itself, improve itself, I think we’re going to have a different relationship to it. You can take a very complex piece of software, like an airline reservation system, and there’s no one person who understands the way the whole thing works.

Maybe soon we'll be able to breed software the way we do apples, roses, or cattle.

via Dr Dobbs

Hovering Hotel In the Sky?

2009-04-07T16:06:00.000-07:00

Now this is how I want my Future! I love this French dirigible flying hotel by designer Jean-Marie Massaud.

I've always thought the world was better off with blimps. (Infamous inferno-causing Hindenberg excluded, of course.)

Today's Musical Inspiration: Nick Drake

2009-04-06T12:19:00.000-07:00

Tricia and I watched Seven Pounds on DVD last night and while we did not like it all that much, one redeeming part was that there's a song in it I recalled hearing before on another movie soundtrack (Garden State), a jazzy guitary piano tune with a vaguely Cat Stevens vocal and lyrics like "Could've been a sign post...could have been a crook." I thought perhaps it was a modern artist returning to an earlier production style, something KCRW might play.

Turns out this is "One of these things first" by British folk singer Nick Drake, recorded in 1970 on the album Bryter Lyter. Sadly, as seems typical of many Romantic poets and painters, Nick suffered from depression and died way before his time (age 26). His work is only now starting to get some attention in movie soundtracks.

TED for Underprivileged Kids, and other Brainstorms

2009-03-27T18:46:00.000-07:00

My girlfriend Tricia and I have both been enjoying the TED videos for a while. It's great that the otherwise expensive and exclusive TED Conference can be viewed by anyone with broadband Internet access, but this week was TED's first foray into bringing the live experience to a university setting, where students and some of the more general public can attend.

Still, something feels amiss. We had a conversation this morning -- what about the kids in bad neighborhoods, in bad schools? Who is bringing great ideas and inspiration to them? What TED-like experience could be brought to them and would it have an impact on their literacy, their motivation, and future success in life?

TEDx USC: The Bavard Hall Reception

2009-03-26T21:19:00.000-07:00

After all that inspiration, motivation, and thought-provoking it was time to partayy! (Or at least, get something more substantial to eat than cookies and coffee.)

TEDx attendees (and staff) hob-knob and eat hors d'oeuvres, drink free wine and beer, and do some triadic networking...

Others look at the dazzling exhibits, like the eight-player tabletop retro arcade game unit, or ...

... Moldover's Synchomasher!

After scarfing down some egg rolls, mini-pizza things and a glass of wine, I explored a bit and mingled. Thanked various people who had made the event possible, shook hands with Junoon, and thanked Moldover himself for getting me in.

Looking forward to next year!

TEDx USC: Elizabeth Gilbert and Having Your Own Personal Genius

2009-03-26T20:38:00.000-07:00

Moving talk shown at TEDx (which I had seen online before) from the author of the best-selling book Eat, Pray, Love. After the unexpected success of her book, the maddening pressure of coming up with a second success made her realize that perhaps the ancient Roman belief of "genius" being a voice in your wall that gives you great ideas wasn't such a bad idea after all. Keeps a creative person from going insane!

TEDx USC: Juan Enriquez

2009-03-25T18:36:00.000-07:00

The folks in the TEDx booth fixed the audio glitch and played this TED 2009 video again. Ahh, much better.

It's a rare public speaker who can take an otherwise depressing topic (the collapse of Wall Street and the U.S. economy) and make it both humorous and hopeful.

I had no idea how far advanced organ regrowth technology has come, nor that Boston Dynamics (whom I've been following since the early 90s since hearing about them via Alan Alda on Scientific American Frontiers) now has a free-standing quadraped robot that walks freakishly close to a real animal. Wow!

Now if we can all get affordable health care and free robotic assistants, the future looks brighter indeed!

TEDx USC: Aimee Mullins on being "Superabled"

2009-03-24T16:33:00.000-07:00

Reframing your situation can lead to opportunities and powers you never imagined. No legs? Build them. But why build them to be ordinary? They can jump higher, run faster, be beautiful sculpture, make you taller, shorter...

Great speech shown at TEDx by Aimee Mullin about not letting society's biases stop you.

TEDx USC: Kellee Santiago and Videogames as a Potentially Sophisticated Artform

2009-03-24T15:38:00.000-07:00

Kellee Santiago is the co-founder of thatgamecompany and former Interactive Media graduate student at USC. Her excellent talk centered on the old debate of whether videogames are Art, or at least, can be Art. She showcased a few examples, including a game where the player gets to be the cult leader Dave Coresh, as well as her company's new downloadable PS3 game, Flower, where the player is the wind blowing flower petals over grassy hills. (Nice!)

I'm not sure she entirely made her point though I agree with it. Yes, videogames CAN be Art. Yes, we could be at the early stages of the Art form like we were with cave paintings or early live action shots of film. But I believe Truely artful games are a rarity still not because the medium is primitive. It's because most Game Designers are not truly great. In fact, most get their jobs by starting out as game testers who play the particular games being produced over and over again. This would be like Chefs becoming chefs by eating a particular food over and over. Granted, well acclaimed animation directors at Pixar DO watch old classics over and over, but a large breadth of them, not just the ones they worked on previously. And granted, there are IMHO some truly great Game Designers out there or now part of History. Will Wright, Peter Molyneaux, Shigeru Miyamoto, Keita Takahashi, Richard Garriott, Dani Bunten Berry, Sid Meier many more I don't know about, and perhaps the folks at thatgamecompany will be among them too.

One thought I had while watching: Is an edited screen capture of a game still a game? Or is it a form of cinema? (Indeed, there exists a spin-off artform based on videogame engines called Machinima, with its props, sets and actors based on game art but its grammar based on film conventions.)

TEDx USC: Dave Logan and Tribal Leadership

2009-03-24T14:52:00.000-07:00

Dave Logan, Associate Dean and Executive Director of Executive Development at University of Southern California's (USC) Marshall Business School, gave an excellent talk about tribes, based on his recent book, Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization.

According to Logan, tribes are small groups (10-100 people) of people that form naturally. They tend not to be the same from each other and that difference is called "culture." A crowd or a business will likely contain many tribes. Tribes can be classified by one of 5 stages and each tribe can only hear one level below and above its own level. The stages are:

"Life sucks" (ex. gangs)
"My Life sucks" or "How can people so dumb live?" (ex. the DMV)
"I am great (and you're not)"
(ex. lawyers or doctors meeting in an elevator, conferences)

"We're great!"

"Life is great!"

According to research, only 2% of tribes are stage 5, with most hovering in stage 2, 3 and 4. Mr. Logan encouraged us to "nudge our tribes" towards the next level, and to start doing triadic networking, that is, introduce two people you don't know to each other (in effect, bridging tribes together).

Ultimately the point of the book is to dispel the myth and mindset that only Dog eat Dog cutthroat companies survive and grow big. In fact, cultures based on back-stabbing and fear and "cover your ass" (as so prominent in FX and game companies in my experience) are doomed to stagnate or die. Not surprisingly, Mr. Logan encountered hostility when speaking about his book on FOX News:

A lot of TEDxers enjoyed this talk a lot, citing it as one of the highlights.

TEDx USC: Junoon (Salman Ahmed) and Melissa Etheridge LIVE

2009-03-24T14:08:00.000-07:00

Junoon and its lead guitarist/singer Dr. Salman Ahmad (part rock star, part U.N. Ambassador and humanitarian) performed twice at TEDx. Its music is a nice mix of South Asian and Western influences with a Sufi touch (think George Harrison). Later in the program though we were surprised by a special guest -- Melissa Etheridge! She and Dr. Ahmad met at Al Gore's Nobel Prize ceremony and became fast friends (meeting later for a "mind meld", according to Melissa). Both performed a special song together (accompanied by the audience ringing little white bells provided beforehand). Later in the day, he sang John Lennon's "Imagine" with some volunteers from the audience.

TEDx USC: Natasha Tsakos

2009-03-23T14:27:00.000-07:00

Very cool TED Video shown here at TEDx about Natasha Tsakos, a corporeal mime actress who combines nonverbal communication, Foley sound FX, and projected CG animations in her work, in particular her show called Upwake.

Reminds me of the work of Robert LePage, with more of a Charlie Chaplin / Buster Keaton performance style.

TEDx USC: Donal Manahan and the "Blue Revolution"

2009-03-23T13:56:00.002-07:00

Donal Manahan (biology USC professor) demonstrates how the fishing industry is literally sucking the fish from the sea like a vacuum cleaner. The United States aquatic protein capacity is small (about the size of Greenland's), not the "bread basket" of the world. A solution? Hybrid organisms made to grow fast (i.e. slower metabolisms)

Arthur C Clarke:
"How innappropriate to call this planet Earth when it clearly should be named Ocean."

Sounds good, I love oysters! But all those giant half shells will make us much more attractive target to alien space otter invasion!

TEDx USC: Chris Anderson, C.L. Max Nikias, broken TED video, Jayne Poynter

2009-03-23T13:22:00.000-07:00

Krisztina Holly, USC's MC for the program introduces herself and the first group of many guests, including Chris Anderson of TED.com himself:

C. L. Max Nikias (from USC) reads his speech about interdisciplinary communities and the importance of intellectual friction (that is, surrounding yourself with people with ideas not your own).

They try to show a TED video but it has audio problems... now we're hearing from Jayne Poynter, who has lived in an artificial BioSphere, or a simulated closed environment. Problems she dealt with: eating herself (i.e. exhaled CO2 feeds sweet potato, which she eats...), losing oxygen (7 tons) to compost and into the concrete, realizing how smelly we are on the outside, and losing touch with her impact on the Environment once she left the BioSphere.

TEDx USC: Qi Zhang opening

2009-03-23T13:09:00.000-07:00

Qi Zhang opens sitting at an unusual organ-like instrument with foot pedals. However, the music being played sounds nothing like an organ, it's a symphonic tune reminiscent of a Walt Disney World fireworks show. But all being played by her! Whoa! Drums, percussion, horns, strings... Incredible.

UPDATE: The piece played is Prokofiev's The Love of Three Oranges. (Ménage à troi l'orange?)

TEDx USC: Parking, Registration, Seating

2009-03-23T12:40:00.000-07:00

Arrived at 11:30 AM at the USC parking lot. Really warm today, left leather jacket in the car. Followed the signs to Bovard Hall, where a set of tables were set up for registration. Asked somebody where comp tickets were picked up -- around the corner, where a few folks were setting things up still. Registered without a hitch, other than they needed to get more plastic lanyards.

Looked in vain for something to eat. No luck. Back to the front of Bavard Hall to read the program. Paul Debevec (Benjamin Button FX), Moldover... Met a radiologist who has attended many TED conferences, and other gatherings.

Found a seat, 2nd row. Hope laptop battery holds out! Guy next to me and woman next to him are Twittering on their iPhones. They showed me how to sign up and use it, although it's a little cumbersome on the website itself. We'll see how it goes. (How interesting is it to read 1200 "I am at the TED conference" messages?)

Attending TEDx tomorrow...

2009-03-22T17:10:00.000-07:00

Whohoo! I have always wanted to attend the TED conference (the videos of which are often blogged about here).

There's a talented electronica mash-up performer (and self-proclaimed controllerist) named Moldover whom I've seen perform at a NAMM after party and at an Ableton Live user's group. Anyway, he sent out a mailing list announcement that he'll be showcasing his multiple user musical instrument (the Octamasher) at TEDx, a smaller version of TED over at USC tomorrow, and mentioned that he might be able to invite people to the otherwise invite-only event. I emailed him back and luckily they had space for one.

So you'll be getting full coverage tomorrow on this blog. The guest list and range of topics look intriguing:

This year's TEDx USC speakers and performers include the street artist who created the Obama "HOPE" poster, a worldwide rock star who has sold more than 30 million albums, one of the creators of the most complex scientific instrument in history, and an inventor who is restoring sight to the blind. Also on hand will be several USC innovators who are changing the world in gaming, immersive environments, bioengineering, animation and music.

Stay tuned!