Sounds like an older sibling to R2D2, but is in fact this
which is a tiny 3d camera that’s designed to go in a cellphone or whatever – and they’re 720p, which is no mean feat. The future’s so bright, everyone’s going to have to wear shades.
Obviously the first thing you’re going to do is get some of those completely opaque swimming goggles and blu-tak these to the front, with tiny screens inside… so you don’t bang into things etc. Then you’ll be able to do really cool things like erase your friends – or superimpose their heads over the bodies of squirrels etc – which is what I do in my imagination with my friends anyway, which is probably why I don’t have any.
As a soothsayer, I’m kindof conflicted over this one. There are two opposing vectors:
1) Entertainment is becoming more emmersive – it’s an NLP thing; it’s an art thing; it’s a porn thing. The closer an artefact is to reality, the more likely it is to… “catch”… to pluck a string in your heart, or gut, or knob or whatever… but you still need to isolate and amplify those aspects that resonate with the human condition. It’s this interplay between reality and fantasy – you need enough reality to fool your reptile-level nervous system into going along with the fantasy that the borg part of your mind responds to.
2) who could be arsed wearing glasses?
I think I need glasses actually. I can no longer read my medication containers.
It would kindof be better though if the screens were massive, around the other way, and you sat on the inside of it (not being hassled by massive cows). That’s what’s coming after 3D. 360-degree movies. You could be in space – where you belong etc. Out among the stars.
Or maybe not – movies are all about directing attention – 360 degree stuff is probably more useful for gaming etc. Still… nice idea.
Back to the first one – you could probably also use it for some creepy, weird and totally megalomaniacal sex toy as well – filled with tiny screaming porn-stars who you molest with your (suddenly, for the first time) massive todger. God you people are weird. I can’t believe that’s the first thing you thought of.
Reminds me of… some sort of Victorian toy. Or a doll’s house.
If you click on that, there’s a big picture – they gave this to a little baby queenlet once. It’s in Windsor Castle, so it’s kindof like a doll’s house with pet people in it, inside another dolls house with pet people.
I quite like mad amounts of detail for some reason.
That last one reminds me of that Czech guy who made a version of Alice in Wonderland that’s even more insane that the one that just came out, with Johhny Depp in it, who was also in the 9th Gate, that I also quite like.
I have seen women with eye’s like that (they glow a gold color). This movie is about the bible and the true religion of God. He knows the truth. I got a brown book like that. I means something. I know the book of revelation, what it means. The “matrix” is in the bible. Those are not just movie. Matrix means “womb” in greek. You are an apostle. You can heal, curse, not be poisoned, etc.
Like most people, I can’t wait for smellovision to finally arrive, although even at its best I imagine it will be a profoundly unpleasant experience.
I like the idea though – of a sort of camera that not only records vision (bi-focally, 360 degrees) but also does sound, smell, movement… etc etc. An full-spectrum sensory recorder. A detachable head. Again.
So anyway, this thing turned up recently which isn’t a smellovision machine, but a very photogenic way of measuring smell components
And maybe if you can do that, it’s possible to push it back the other way and actually create the smells.
Ok. A long shot.
It reminds me of something though… can’t quite put my finger on it.
Something it’s not though… but could have been is the Damien Hirst thing that is now safe and sound on the surface of Mars
I don’t buy it. Not any more – back in the days of Bush, when the air was clogged solid with stupidity it seemed like a breath of fresh air… but now…
I don’t buy it. I think the title on the video below says it all “1000 remarkable people gather in Monteray, California” (breathless crescendo / roll of drums)
Really? That’s not only a party to which I’m not invited, it’s also a party where I would feel like a total cunt even attending… to think of myself as a “remarkable person”. Oooh. Aren’t I special. If only I can persuade other special people I’m special then we can all hang about have self-satisfied, special conversations.
Fuck that. I’d rather hang out with people with interesting angles on self-hatred than puffed up tossers being intelligent.
Still… I am/was quite interested in what people had to say – so once got as far as the entry form to attend one of these events – but then found that they only wanted “remarkable” people to attend… and you had to detail why you were so remarkable. All of a sudden I wanted nothing to do with it.
So anyway, enough about that. I thought this was quite interesting
apart from the fact that it’s
a) TED – which to me seems like some sort of uber-touchy-feely-smug-fest where remarkable people can give standing ovations to other remarkable people and…
b) … they all go home, and a year later, fuck all has happened.
c) It’s Microsoft, and nobody cares about Microsoft
d) Because there seems to be this new genre of Science Fiction – now that bringing your product to market before the bugs are fixed is no longer competitive… it’s “Product Concept” which may or may not be a mockup, may or may not work… whatever… it doesn’t really matter, because the only thing that DOES matter, is the flash of INSPIRATIONAL attention in the eternal here and now. 2 weeks later everyone will have moved on to something else.
e) Still, thanks for the embed – I couldn’t find it on youtube etc.
f) and he seems like a nice bloke. I mean most people are etc..
No – I found this interesting because if you tried to do this in a shopping mall anywhere in the UK, the privately-owned police would immediately arrest you. They’re allowed to do that now. They can issue on the spot fines apparently.
It would be interesting though – all those millions of CCTV cameras… I mean a lot of them are paid for with our taxes… why should we have access to the feeds? It’s not like CCTV cameras actually reduce crime anyway – they’re a total waste of time and money, although I suppose they do give the police something to do. Keep them out of trouble etc. Keep them off the streets.
You could actually fly around in the system like the Australian CCTV Doom stitchup from a couple of weeks back. We could all be ghosts in the machine – swimming through Victoria Railway Station like lost sperm, all disconnected, alone, and… impotent. Omnipresent Impotence. God in is own image. Isn’t that what you wanted? To be? Not to be?
I’m also interested in this from the point of view of the increasingly immersive quality of entertainment… and this vacillation between reality and fantasy – in not just entertainment, but also war. And sex.
For some reason it makes me think of sleep-paralysis… floating around in this environment that is indistinguishable from reality but you can never get past the surface. And the slightly disturbing notion that reality itself is just a surface.
Look up from the screen now.
What you see out there is an insane blizzard of electrons and quarks… photons, photons, photons… forces and waves – and almost all of which is empty space, but your brain takes the sensory input, filters it and gives you a model that allows you to negotiate it.
But really, you’re seeing the model. You’re sitting there in a room inside your own head.
So obviously when I saw that Avatar, the first thing that sprang to mind was “Bah, Where’s the Smellovision I was promised”?
Not an easy thing to do though smell. It’s not really made of mixtures of simple elements like colours or musical notes etc… but here’s a thing where someone’s had a crack at it, combining it with um… colours and musical notes.
It’s a camera… or more accurately, a bunch of synchronised cameras, that someone has put together for around $300… and they take 360 degree photos in 8 second bursts… a bit like google street-view… but you can wear it as a hat!
Although you would look like a bit of a twazzock if you did. Still… I really like the idea of fully immersive video… particularly for tourism… instead of actually going to the National Gallery in London, you hire a robot that you control over the web… and with the right kind of headset, it feels a bit like actually being there.
I keep getting this vision of The Internet… The Universal Mind, having so many cameras and sensors going at once, that they cover the entire world (well, big cities at least) in this kind of lucid soup of perception. There are so many cameras at London railway stations right now that it’s practically already there… but anyway, there’s this soup of perception, that with the right software stitching together all the input from the different cameras, you can move through… and see pretty much whatever you’d see if you were walking (or flying) through the place yourself.
From Halfland – Shelley Noble who appears to be making an entire stop-motion movie out of… stuff. It looks amazing – and you can send in your own fish to make cameo appearances etc.
The Great Work if ever there was one. One of my favorite hobbies is going to film school for no particular reason (I go to film schools a lot). The most I’ve ever managed to pull off is a little 10 minute thing – and the amount of work that went into that was daunting to say the least. Taking on a whole feature-length movie (where you’re creating an entire world from scratch) leaves me feeling slightly faint.
There seems to be a bit of this going on at the moment – open-sourcery of film-making I mean. It’ll be interesting when things start hitting the screen.
I have this nagging doubt about Movies 2.0 though. Having spent about a decade on a stage, standing (with spindly legs) between a Statocaster and a load of massive amplifiers, I’m a believer in chemistry….
…in music. There’s something about music where the sum is almost always greater than the parts – and the parts don’t even need to like each other, or be playing the same song (in their minds). You often need the clash of personalities for it to work.
This (almost) never happens in painting. Writing?… sometimes (the smaller the group the better). Serial-killing?… yup, often happens in pairs; Movies?…
… movies need a lot of people. Robert Rodriguez may have been able to get away with 3 back in the day, but… generally, movies need a lot of spare hands. This isn’t the same thing as crowd-sourcing though. Although movies need a lot of people, you still need insane geniuses driving it, otherwise artwork-by-committee syndrome kicks in, and/or nothing gets done. Another thing I’ve noticed (and this may well be down to the politics of the business) with most of my favorite films the director is also the writer.
I’m not sure that movie making as we currently know it is a democratic process really – in fact I suspect it might be the LEAST democratic process that (in The West at least) we allow.
Web 2.0 it ain’t. There are strong drives (and incentives) though towards… turning this avalanche of innovation and expression that’s currently blossoming all over the place into some sort of conduit for stories which have more cultural/narrative value than a billion people ranting at webcams. It’s starting to happen I think… people are trying things.
The reason all this has come tumbling out is that I’ve been trying to get my head around the Purefold thing.
It’s… err…. “Purefold is the first product conceived by Ag8 and developed in partnership with Ridley and Tony Scott’s newly launched entertainment division Free Scott. Purefold is an open media franchise designed for brands, platforms, filmmakers, product developers and communities to collaboratively imagine our near future.”
There’s a video on the link above, which explains it a bit more, but every time I go back, I get more confused about what it actually (once you get past all the brand-speak) “is”. As far as I can tell (through these cynical eyes) right now it’s a Friendfeed group (which covers similar ground to this here blog) which is skimmed by the production company for ideas/scripts or whatever to make product-placement films out of… which are fed back to the subscribers, taking the role of focus-groups.
Personally I think it will work… which is to say, it will work in the way that all this crowd-sourced creativity works, and that is, a small number of insane geniuses float to the top – and the crowd-sourcing of focus-groupery has a much greater chance of picking winners than Hollywood normally does – partly because it’s a type of focus-groupery that also contains its own built-in viral evangelising (which is cheating). The focus group becomes the sales team.
I quite like the idea of a whole world being created as well – not just a set/setting for a story, but a world in which multiple stories can unfold/interweave. This was the first thing that sprang to mind when I saw Shelley’s thing. If you’ve got all these characters, all this scenery, all this material – it seems a shame to limit it to one story. It’s an extension in some way to the increasing immersiveness trend we’re seeing in films… swimming closer and closer to video games.
I mean why should all the Harry Potter stories be about Harry Potter? (the little git) There’s a whole world to play with there.
So anyway, there it is. A handful of thoughts, thrown like straw up into the wind.
Ok, I know I go on about how much I hate electric cars that look like teapots AND speculative stuff, which is all could/may/might… and go on about it and on and on etc, so obviously I’ve got some sort of issue…
… but I actually quite like this, even though it’s speculative, AND it’s an electric car that looks like a teapot, because it’s kindof way out on the edge.
It’s a car concept that has 360 degree immersive, augmented reality, so when you drive through traffic, it can look like you’re underwater surrounded by sharks, or on the planes surrounded by wilderbeast etc. Not only does it look like a pod from The Matrix, but it kindof behaves like one as well.
Like a surround-sound/sensory-deprivation version of the personal-cars from Wall-E.
I know it’s only concept, that’s highly unlikely to actually happen etc – but it’s not yet another incremental innovation. It’s transformative. It’s like De-Bono’s Square wheel concept where thinking of something impossible opens doors and makes connections that you wouldn’t normally consider.
The genius of this I think… is that while everybody (yea, well. Kindof) is thinking about making cars that are skinnable the way that wordpress is skinnable, this thing turns that idea inside out, and skins the whole of external reality. Brilliant.
