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Viacom Asks YouTube to Remove Clips - New York Times
In a sign of the growing tension between old-line media and the new Internet behemoths, Viacom, the parent company of MTV and Comedy Central, demanded yesterday that YouTube, the video-sharing Web site owned by Google, remove more than 100,000 clips of its programming...
The dispute underscored the tense dance that major media companies are doing with Google, which bought YouTube for $1.65 billion last October. Google hopes to strike deals that will give it the rights to mainstream programming and also wipe away its potential liability for any violations of copyright law by YouTube so far...
YouTube is supported by advertising, but in most cases it does not share that revenue with copyright holders.
These developments are important to note, but the following comment jumped out at me and formed a synergy of thought about intellectual property and property rights in an age where the frontier no longer exists and natural resources of the world have become scarce.
"They choose not to filter out copyrighted content, " said the spokesman, Carl D. Folta. He added that the company apparently had the technology to filter out pornography and hateful material, which is rarely seen on YouTube.
It is no secret that totalitarian governments like the one in China use filtering software designed and sold by western companies, headquartered in liberal democracies.
I am not suggesting that Google’s use of filtering software in the context of this New York Time’s article is totalitarian. It’s not. The thoughts that flowed within me after reading the article and which will follow do not directly relate to the content of the article itself.
NB I do know Google's relationship with the Chinese Communist Party is complicit when Google agreed to filter the Internet in order to secure their place in the oxymoronic "opening" of the Chinese market(s). Who knows? I suspect they rationalize that their decision to do so is part of China's long term transition to liberal democracy brought about by the eventual increase in the economic and consequent political power or the Chinese middle class: in other words, a slow revolution or political evolution. That model is certainly documented in human history. I hope they are right.
In terms of any technology, for example, it is not the knowledge of how to split the atom that creates ill, it is the contextual use of technology that creates both good and evil.
More to my ultimate point, I was more struck by the description of the filtering technology's application and the way in which its reference in the article further illuminated to me my own age and its philosophical dilemmas.
Perhaps, the mention of filtering technology describe within reminded me of how its benign application for Google could be used in other contexts. Certainly, Viacom has the right to protect its intellectual property however it wishes. But what about this notion of intellectual property and ideas itself, the life blood our political and economic discourse?
The rise of fundamentalism and the changing post "Cold War" world order has been studied and described by others more accomplished than me, including Samuel P. Huntington in his "Foreign Affairs" essay and then book, The Clash of Civilizations.
News, media and politics are interdependent organisms...and certainly many political scientists focus on their relationship to one another both in terms of the political cycle of nation states (elections), but also their political economy, in other worlds the market place. The West increasingly depends on sectors like entertainment, research and development, and defense for its continued economic growth, and its overall political economy is direct responsibility for much of the West’s political stability and power.
We live in an age where entertainment and defense are curious bedfellows. For example, entertainment software, as I have said elsewhere on this site, drives the technological development of the processors used by the defense sector.
I have never heard anyone, however, flesh out the dilemma of Locke's notion of property rights in his "Second Treatise on Nature" (the philosophical underpinning of our own democratic republic is this notion of property rights) vis a vis intellectual or abstract property rights, central themselves to our creative economy, the underpinning of the West's continued economic growth.
When intellectual property becomes the central driver of our economy, as it has, and the organs of information that distribute that property are consolidated (as they naturally are. See Creatonomics), what does this mean for the average citizen? For those who poo poo these ideas as too high brow for the mass, or somehow separate mass culture from the philosophical debates of our time, I say, “Forget the forest or the trees, you, my friend, are missing ecosystem of the forest.”
Will our citizen own his plot of land in the media and entertainment landscape, or will he be forced to rent space from the company owned tenement, distribute his goods by the company owned railroad, and buy his supplies from the company owned store? What does self-protection, natural to Locke’s notion of natural rights mean for the individual and social group within society?
More importantly, the growing factionalism of our political discourse and the ceaseless polemics of extremist ideas are not simply a rehashing of polemics from times before. These extreme polemics are manifest because of the underlying conflict and philosophical dilemmas of our time, the repercussions of which are experienced through every organ of society, including its central organs of information and ideas, mass media, entertainment, and art.
There is no save haven or neutral space for the tolerant in a world with less resources and no frontier to escape to. This is the philosophical dilemma of our age and we must understand the dilemma as such. Our liberal democracy depends upon it. Our economic innovation, which drives our nation’s wealth, also depends upon that neutral and open space.
The role of art, information, propaganda, and communication are the new frontier and the battleground in our ‘New World of Information’. Is there an alternative to the increasing space that extremist polemics take up in our nation’s intellectual life? Any alternative must ultimately float the complex tensions of political correctness and fundamental secularism that is equally damaging, in my opinion, to the fabric of our society.
Understanding these questions is the work of my generation and those living whose experience and wisdom can guide our society’s safe passage. There are always consequences, even to inaction, so the focus of those who are interested need not be filled with petitions for the lazy.
When the pilgrims came to North America, they were escaping religious persecution in the Old World. A war of ideas is not new to human history, the epoch that we are in, however, is critical to the very existence of those organisms that we take for granted in the West.
I continue to look to the former dissidents of eastern bloc countries, like the former Czechoslovakian, Vaclav Havel, 'playwright and antipolitican' later president of the democratic Czech Republic, for insight into the post-modern world order.
For example, Havel wrote in the 1981 in his famous essay the "Power of the Powerless” about the post totalitarian state: where ideology is the tyrant (not the Politburo) and how the line of complicity runs through each citizen, including the grocer who puts up his seemingly benign poster which states, "Workers of the World Unite".
All of us live in interesting times, but those of us involved in media have a tremendous responsibility for those who come after us. I look forward to investigating and understanding these questions myself and in the timely work of my generation and others more capable and experienced than me. More on these ideas later.
Cable television is undergoing worldwide expansion, especially in the Arab world.
I have previously spoken on The Second Sight about "cultural crossover content", in other words, the growing market for, say Bollywood movies, in western countries including the United states - first from immigrant and first generation Indian Americans - followed by the trend towards becoming part of mainstream culture. See NYT's article on the red carpet, New York opening for the recent Bollywood release, Guru. American children take globalization for granted. Japanese anime is as much a part of their pop culture as it is to children in Japan.
I firmly believe this trend towards "cultural crossover content" will increase as the game generation ages and media firms continue to exploit emerging foreign markets. I have highlighted some of this under the catagory (of the same name) here at The Second Sight.
More specific to this entry's title, I was recently informed of a wonderful Arab media and entertainment link sahafa.com . More on that market later.
Before I left for vacation last month, I sketch out for you my undigested thoughts on the emerging aethetics of the game generation (35 and under): there is a degrading of image quality and techniques that lower-end digital technologies have supplanted into the aesthetic psyche of many younger viewers – just look at the ads created and aimed at the under 30 demographic. Old tricks. Why is that? Perhaps because these kids are expert consumers of electronic stories and know it’s manufactured.... They are deconstructing the image.
Today Patricia Winters Lauro writes in the New York Times that[s]traight direct-response pitches hardly ever work anymore, and increasingly agencies have turned to spoofing their own industry to attract viewers long enough to deliver a new message...Direct-response advertising as a genre is especially appealing to parody because it’s “so cheesy,” Mr. Jendrysik said. It is an inside joke that the public gets, he added, even the GameTap target audience of 25- to 35-year-olds, who may be too young to recall the ’70s pioneers like Ronco, K-Tel or Ginsu knives.
Mr. Jendrysik said the spoofs were also a good strategic fit for GameTap, which was introduced nationally last year and is trying to build its subscription base.
I will not have access to the Internet between November 4th and the 18th, because I will be traveling on a sail boat from Grenada to Antigua. Please excuse the blog interruption.
I leave you for the time being with my undigested thoughts on the broad and relevant topic “the evolving nature and aesthetics of creative content”.
First, it covers the evolving structures of storytelling via new media. Examples of new media structures are foureyedmonsters.com and lonelygirl15.com; and interactive television content that is created on the web to supplement traditional shows. Reality TV is obviously interactive but LOST is the best original dramatic example of this interactivity; and then of course, their is the growth of user generated content from channels like YouTube and CNN): What do these new storytelling structures look like? How are these structures similar and different to their predecessors?
Television, can have a relationship with the internet that film cannot. I imagine that the nature of going to the movies will still demand High Imaging that allows for suspension of disbelief...but there is a degrading of image quality and techniques that lower-end digital technologies have supplanted into the aesthetic psyche of many younger viewers – just look at the ads created and aimed at the under 30 demographic. Old tricks. Why is that? Perhaps because they are expert consumers of electronic stories and know it’s manufactured.... They are deconstructing the image.
Another thought, I think of Mark Chiolis’ (Grass Valley) remark to me in my interview with him:
"Today there are a number of thought provoking questions that are being asked. What happens when there is a true RGB 4k (there isn't one today) sensor that rivals, if not exceeds, that of today's film stock? One of the arguments for film is that people like the "look" which includes the grain and movement through the gate. What happens when the "game-boy" generation takes over? Having grown up with "video" is this the "look" they want to see? Will they have a different set of standards to compare to?"
Film (theatrical features) is (are) different. I think they will demand even more heighten realism and I suspect that Digital 3D will become increasingly popular in that format in the years to come (an outgrowth of the gamers demand for a heightened experience).
What are the fundamental relationships that the younger generation seem to be exploring via this new media content and traditional content? Some may say the subject matter is generally solipsistic, passive - an outgrowth perhaps of the individuals solitary communion with the anonymous web or with media itself...but look at the bleeding edge technology and science of virtual reality. Look at the studies of the psycho-physical effects of these media tools on users in medical and defense research. Passive is not the right word to describe this relationship. Interactive is better. But with what (media) and whom (other players)?
I say one cannot understand this generation unless they have a MySpace page and love it. Why? There is a freedom of movement in the field of archetype and symbol that enables both artist and audience to observe without disclosure, absorb without acquisition, and create without the demand for conclusion. The repetition of archetypical representation uncovers both artist's and audience's collective mythologies, thereby revealing: The anonymous is personal.
Renowned urban planer Richard Florida notes that the fundamental social and economic changes that underpin the Creative Economy, demonstrate that in “virtually every aspect of life, weak ties have replaced the stronger bonds that once gave structure to society. Rather than live in one town for decades, we now move about. Instead of communities defined by close associations and deep commitments to family, friends, and organizations, we seek places where we can make friends and acquaintances easily and live quasi-anonymous lives. The decline in the strength of our ties to people and institutions is a product of the increasing number of ties we have.”
How have television and new media influenced the sensibility and subject matter of creative content. I see the primary relationship that the younger generation is exploring, is with the media itself (I am not talking about the news media, I am talking about media itself). You may critiqued the passivity of video games...but, perhaps that passivity masks an exploration with identity that is not understood by non-participants and therefore disregarded as irrelevant. I say this exploration is powerful and emergent in movies like Adaptation and I Heart Huckabees. This relationship between identity and media is increasingly portrayed as mystical, interactive, and “high touch”. Their is a propensity for role playing, a desire for authenticity coupled with a disdain of truthiness and even traditional ideology. For dramatic content and docu-reality, they create satire and even sarcasm (the mass may also create cynicism, but I would never characterize this generation as cynical. They know the line of complicity runs through each of them).
In some respects, “reality shows” seem like an outgrowth of this propensity for role-playing, a study of the dramas of personality. In deconstructing the “sit com” and “documentary” and even the “commercial brand”, there appears to be an investigation of topics like truth and being.
Regarding lonelygirl15.com. As one writer I spoke with remarked, “Entertainment is always flirting with reality. It seems that things that don't aim to be thought of as real do a much better job. Verisimilitude, it's what it's all about."
Is there a common thread in the subject and structures explored by newer creative content, a post-post modern sensibility? See the NYT’s article, “Brand Underground”:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/magazine/30brand.html?ex=1311912000&en=82edb890b1d6c977&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
There are several larger forces manifesting in the recent development of MTV's Virtual Laguna Beach for example. One of them is the evolution of brand: how the concept has extended itself into the realm of branded communities in the digital age. Gamers (the generation under age 35 and including generations X and Y) have grown up in a world saturated by brand so that the phenomenon is now a vehicle for personal expression and identity beyond the ostensible confines of a corporate mandate (well, except their own). Commentators like Rob Walker (The Brand Underground, NYT) have elucidated the social phenomena well, however, they tend to look at the expression as another failed modernist attempt to beat the system. Hand me the cyanide, the revolution is over and we lost!
Boomers are wired to view creativity as a choice between “selling out” or “sticking it to the man” and the quest for the great society as a dogmatic battle between the mediocrity of relativism and the virtue of absolutes. To use former bohemian terminology, today’s generation does not have that hang up. “They have relatively little generational consciousness,” writes David Brooks, “because this generation is for the most part not fighting to emancipate itself from the past.” The suggestion is provocative considering that while “the baby boom included the largest U.S. birth cohort to date, the game generation will ultimately outdo the baby boom in size, in scope, and presumably in influence,” notes John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade in their study of the game generation’s influence on organizational values in business. “The total size of the game generation is already greater than the baby boom ever was,” and the whole generation of gamers, “including X and Y and letters to be named later-simply approach the world differently than their predecessors.”
I am a broken record, but like dissident antipoliticians from the former Czechoslovakia, who used satire and absurdity to highlight the fact that in a postmodern consumer society the “line of complicity runs through each of us," this new American generation distrusts political grandstanding and even traditional forms of organized politics. Hence, the popularity of so-called no brow satires like South Park, The Colbert Report, and The Daily Show.
The playwright Heiner Mueller once remarked that the potency of theater in his native East Germany was based on the absence of other ways of getting messages across to people. "As a result," Mueller says, "Theater here has taken over the function of other media in the West," before now. While the never ending surface chatter of talking points and double speak on both the left and the right continue to erode the value of words, they also inflate the space between the lines.
None of this mentions how the game generation take globalization for granted and the growing crossover of cultural content from other traditions, “bollywood”, Japanese Anime et cetera.
The Second Sight Podcast, © 2006 Alexa D. O'Brien, (26:35)
The Second Sight offers insight and analysis on the media and entertainment industry - an often misunderstood or mischaracterized sector of the American economic and cultural landscape in the midst of its own technological and cultural shifts - from globalization and the emerging creative economy; to digital technology and the evolving aesthetic and nature of content; to the growing technological cross fertilization between media, defense, and medicine.
My name is Alexa D. O'Brien Gault. For the next two months, we will focus our attention towards understanding the evolving nature of the below-the-line training cycle for motion picture technicians, in the face of both digital technologies and newer end to end digital workflows; and the coming of age, so to speak, of the game generation - the older cusp of which, now in their mid thirties, having finally entered their productive years as journeymen technicians and content creators.
Today, we are talking with cameraperson, John Clemens. For seventeen years now, Clemens has ac'ed and operated for directors of photography like Lance Acord (Buffalo 66 and Lost in Translation). His most recent work with Acord was on a Mercedes Benz spot that Acord shot and directed. John has also worked with Joseph Yacoe, known for his commercial and music videos work. Clemens most recent job with Yacoe included a hair product commercial with Penelope Cruz. Director of photography, Darren Lew, who has shot commercials for the likes of Clinique, Versace, Nike, and Adidas, and who began his own career as a still assistant to renowned fashion photographer, Steven Meisel, has said of John Clemens:
"I have never worked with a camera assistant who had it more in his blood than John. He has got a sixth sense for focus and a working method of military precision and consistency, it is no wonder he works with the greatest DP's from all over the world. His skill goes beyond the technical--he quietly contributes to the art of camera work each time we work together everyone else becomes second best after working with John."
John Clemens' credits include Buffalo 66, Naqoyqatsi: Life as War, and Requiem for a Dream. I am honored to have John Clemens on the line for a Second Sight pod cast interview.
Alexa D. O'Brien Gault
Hi, John. How are you?
John Clemens
Good. How are you doing?
In his prescient and aptly titled book, The Rise of the Creative Class, urban planner Richard Florida identifies the emergence of a new economic and social class of "thirty eight million Americans roughly thirty percent of the entire U.S. workforce, whose creativity is the driving force of our nation's economic growth." [1]
The key difference between the creative class and other classes, according to Florida, lies in what they are primarily paid to do. Those in the working and service classes are primarily paid to execute according to plan, while the main economic function of the core of the creative class - which includes people in science and engineering, architecture and design, education, arts, entertainment, and the media - is to create new ideas, new technology and/or new creative content - in other words intellectual property. [2] In addition, around this creative core, exists a broader group of creative professionals in business, finance, law, health care and other related fields, who engage in "complex problem solving" that involves a great deal of independent judgment and requires high levels of education or human capital. [3]
The creative class in the United States today is larger than the traditional working class. The service class, totaling fifty five million workers or forty three percent of the U.S. workforce, is the largest of all. The growth of the service class, according to Florida, is in large measure a response to the demands of the Creative Economy. "Members of the Creative Class, because they are well compensated and work long and unpredictable hours," writes Florida, "require a growing pool of low-end service workers to take care of them and do their chores." [4]
I have outlined the work of others as it relates to the creative economy elsewhere on this site. Here is a quick summary of three of its important aspects:
- Creative Economy has Substantial Scope.
John Howkins categorizes the creative economy to include fifteen creative sectors - such as research and development, software, design, and content industries like film, music, and video games - that produce intellectual property in the form of patents, copyrights, trademarks and proprietary designs. The annual global revenue for Howkin's fifteen identified sectors was $2.24 trillion in 1999. The U.S. share represents forty percent of the market with revenue totaling $960 billion. The U.S. share also accounts for more than forty percent of research and development, forty percent of television and radio, and thirty percent of film. Howkins calculates that core copyright industries will be worth $6.1 trillion internationally in fifteen years. U.S. dominance in these segments - more than productivity improvements related to new technology and new manufacturing methods - is responsible for much of the nation's global economic competitiveness since the nineteen-eighties. [5]
- Creativity is Mainstream.
More Americans work in art, entertainment, and design, than as lawyers, accountants, and auditors. [6] In the United States, professional artists, writers, and performers have increased three hundred and twenty-five percent from 525,000 in 1950 to 2.5 million in 1999. [7] Graphic designers outnumber chemical engineers by four to one, and more Americans are directly employed in film production than in the steel industry. [8]
- Creativity is Expensive and Time Consuming. The production of commodities in the creative industries, which include film and television, is said to suffer from "Baumol's disease": Costs in these sectors tend to climb faster than the rate of inflation, chiefly because creativity is dependent on highly specialized human capital and inherently labor intensive. Labor costs in the creative sectors also tend to rise more rapidly than others do.
In many respects, the demands of the creative economy have flattened the business model of most major industry sectors, requiring firms to capitalize on the greater efficiency gained by the creative factory and subcontract manufacturing systems - translate outsourcing. Stephen Barley has noted in The New World of Work that the entire economy has moved towards a more horizontal division of labor and hyper-specialization among firms. "The digital business environment that Kodak is transitioning to is more horizontal in construct" says Antonio Perez, CEO and President of Kodak: "It requires alliances, partnering and, to a certain degree, acquisitions to move quickly into new markets." [10]
A natural outcome of this development is a "horizontal labor market" with people tending to move laterally instead of vertically. "Climbing the corporate ladder is not much of an option," writes Florida: "Perhaps because there isn't as much of a ladder in many of today's leaner, flatter firms - and it is liable to shift or vanish before you're halfway up." [11] In fact, Americans now change jobs on average every 3.5 years. This figure has been declining steadily for every age group. Workers in their twenties switch jobs on average every 1.1 years. [12] The phenomenon is also coupled with a tendency towards hyper-specialization among individual occupations, just as it is among firms. Those "in authority no longer comprehend the work of their subordinates," notes Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Friedman in The Horizontal Society, because occupations themselves have evolved into "clusters of domain-specific knowledge." [13]
The game generation - the older cusp of which are now in their mid-thirties - have come of age professionally and technically in the midst of this evolving labor market, which is evermore dependent on them to act as the "work horses" in their respective creative sectors. "In most Creative Class occupations," writes Richard Florida, "people manage their careers by 'front-loading' - working excruciatingly long and hard at the outset of their professional lives in the hopes it will pay off in greater income, marketability and mobility later." [14] Moreover, people today not only tend to identify themselves with their occupation or profession instead of the company that they work for, but they also bear more of the responsibility and risks for their careers. This means individual workers invest more of their own time and resources into education and skill acquisition now than any other time before.
The trend is particularly acute among new media professionals, who, according to Rosemary Batt and Susan Christopherson of Cornell University, spend an additional 13.5-hours per week obtaining new skills - all of it unpaid. This has become an individual responsibility, "both because the interactive nature of computer tools allows new media workers to learn new skills at their own pace and within their own learning style, and because formal learning programs have not kept pace with skill needs in this fast-changing industry." [15]
In fact, digital technology has transformed 'economies of training', so that "the training cycle is now longer than the life cycle of the devices in use," says Bill Drury Senior Consultant formerly with IBM EMEA, when I interviewed him this year: "That means companies cannot afford these long training cycles any longer." In the new labor market, it no longer pays for companies to invest significantly in developing their people's skills and capabilities.
Consequently, the game generation has different organizational values and attitudes about professional roles than their predecessors. In their groundbreaking book, Got Game, John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade argue that entertainment software itself has shaped the organizational ethos of gamers and profoundly influenced how they approach their work - well beyond the scope of those influential meta-forces mentioned above like hyper-specialization and the flattening of the labor market, both of which have emerged from the creative economy and the obvious technological convergence of digital technology and business.
One first has to comprehend the profound penetration of entertainment software usage among individuals under the age of thirty-five. This demographic has spent "billions of dollars, and billions of hours, in the virtual world[s] created by these machines," and despite the prevailing boomer amnesia on the subject, games, like the television to boomers, "are a universally shared, technology powered experience." [16]
According to the Entertainment Software Association, the average age of a gamer is thirty-three; and despite assumptions to the contrary, thirty-eight percent of gamers are women:
"Adult gamers have been playing an average of twelve years. Among most frequent gamers, adult males average ten years for game playing, females for eight years...The average adult woman plays games 7.4 hours per week. The average adult man plays 7.6 hours per week. Though males spend more time playing than do females, the gender/time gap has narrowed significantly." [17]
Beck and Wade also add: "One survey found ninty-two percent of children ages two to seventeen in the United States have regular access to video games, and eighty percent of U.S. households with children have a computer...And games, unlike computer and Internet usage, are not limited to the socioeconomic elite." [18]
Video games are big business. According to Beck and Wade, "Today's game market is huge because nearly every kid is involved." [19]
"Electronic Arts, now part of Standard & Poor's 500 Index, earned $2.5 billion in 2003 and more than the combined revenue of the year's ten top-grossing movies. [20] Nintendo's Mario series of video games has earned more than $7 billion over its lifetime - double the money earned by all the Star Wars movies. [21] Sony's Everquest, with 650,000 registered players who stay online an average of twenty-two hours a week, at thirteen dollars a month, that adds up to about $101 million a year in revenue from subscription fees alone." [22]
Secondly, according to Beck and Wade, video games are powerful training tools:
"The game's complex, nearly cinematic images and multilayered sound tracks give players the feeling of total immersion. After all, the game responds almost instantly to any action the player imagines, and other players (whether live or computer generated) respond to them in real time. Even the environment shapes itself to match the player's skill level. The game generation grew up in this world of immersion and instant response. Naturally the exposure has an effects. What gamers learned, among other things, was how to manipulate electronic information...Compared to the activities that pregamers grew up with, for instance, the game generation lives in a world that is incredibly responsive. And that's not real life...Yet it is perfect for training. (Even the U.S. military-a culture that knows a few things about training - recognizes this. As far back as the 1980s, on Atari technology, the Army used a modified commercial game, Battlezone, for armored gunnery training. A variant of Doom has been used to train Marines in urban combat.)...The game world is a giant, accidentally created machine for giving kids an enormous number and range of choices and then immediately showing them the consequences of what they choose." [23]
This responsiveness has made gamers more focused on value-added than their predecessors. According to Beck and Wade, "All that experience with video games has made these people passionate about added value. You have to look closely, at first, to see that passion. Initially, what you see is the value gamers put on skill...They understand that their only real job security comes from their capabilities and continued productivity.[24]
A corollary of the authors' argument is that the game generation's propensity for role-playing is partly responsible for the dot com era, just as much as the flawed business models of the firms headed by these 'Sim City" CEOs were responsible for the bubble; for, the game generation believes that as long as they have the right tools, they will can do and be anything. Beck and Wade write:
"The biggest danger, however, is that the game generation's passion for adding value can be so easily misconstrued. When we first started reviewing these survey results, we found the word arrogant coming readily to mind. The tendency of twenty-something gamers to describe themselves as experts for example, can certainly seem that way. But when we connect their focus on skill and expertise with their desire for professional respect and their willingness to be paid only for results, we sense a different pattern." [25]
No industry sector is immune to these developments, including film production and post - although the effects are more apparent in the latter. I would argue that the breakdown of the traditional apprenticeship system in media and entertainment content production is a result of this trend toward a more horizontal labor market, the emerging creative economy and the ethos of the game generation.
Granted, film production has always relied on "domain specific knowledge" between departments. Even intra-departmentally, the division of labor is quite specific, although customarily cumulative in breadth. This division of labor is part of the traditional apprenticeship system. "It's always been an industry of apprenticeship," says Bob Harvey, Senior Vice President of worldwide sales at Panavision when I interviewed him this year, "and people grow up from being loaders all the way up in the camera department, and I think all the departments. I don't know if that's going to continue and that's too bad."
"Many of the individuals who participate in an entertainment production would refer to their skills as a trade, notes the 2001 Department of Commerce Report on Runaway Production, "Traditionally, practitioners often developed their trades in a union environment, which facilitated an individual's development of the necessary learned skills through apprenticeships and on-the-job experience." [26]
The dramatic increase in worldwide demand for cable content coupled with the high production cost inherent in the creative industries, or "Baumol's disease", has lead to an amplified need for cost-effective digital production, a growing trend towards production outsourcing-translate runaway production-and a concurrent rise of non union production over the last fifteen years. These events are transforming the below-the-line labor market from a culture of tradesmen to a culture of technicians.
As I already noted this phenomenon is keener in postproduction, where transition to digital technology has been more apparent and complete. "The changes in the tools that are utilized to perform these post-production functions," notes the 2001 Department of Commerce Report on Runaway Production, "have presented opportunities for new post-production markets to appear with newly trained workforces that have bypassed the historical "apprenticeship" programs that have existed in Hollywood for many years. This new workforce consists of individuals who have attended technical schools or government-sponsored programs that provide the required training to operate the new generation of equipment."[27]
Just as the flattening labor market of corporate America has seen a trend towards self-education, so too has the labor market of below-the-line technicians. Part of this is a result of the increase in electronic acquisition and the advance of digital acquisition and post technologies. "In the past, when you got into the film industry, very often it was from art school, or you went to a school and studied photography or film. You seldom went to liberal arts schools and got into the industry. Some did, but not very many. I think that changed with your generation," said Director of Photography, Michael Falasco to me last year: "Everyone absolutely believes that they can take Avid courses and Final Cut Pro and come out and be editors."
This is evidence of the erosion of the traditional film training cycle discussed above. According to the 2001 Department of Commerce Report on Runaway production, historically
"[T]he learning curve associated with developing the skills to become an on-line editor was substantial. As such an editor was required to understand and work with up to 20 different types of manufacturing equipment, all with different user interfaces working in conjunction with one another to create the desired effect. Today, computers utilize common user interfaces and software tools to combine many of these tasks. This has greatly reduced the learning curves associated with becoming an on-line editor. This reduced learning curve, when combined with formal training through government-sponsored school programs, has allowed many foreign production centers to be able to gain the necessary expertise to staff productions with local workers at a substantially lower cost than having U.S.-based workers travel to the foreign production site. This has increased their ability to attract foreign production, and these trends are continuing today."[28]
Ripples are also felt in the world of production, especially in the cable TV market, where the demand for low-cost content is insatiable. Lower cost digital cameras and editing equipment have made production cheaper and lowered the barriers to market entry. This lowers capital equipment costs and the labor requirements for low-end production. For television broadcasters, the lowering of production costs has made it more economically feasible to produce docu-reality content aimed at narrower audience segments.
In terms of high-end digital cinematography, one of the obstacles towards seeding the future is access to the tools - in other words, getting one's hands on the equipment. "They need access to be able to learn how to use it and how to get the best from it," says Steve Shaw of Digital Praxis, "The most difficult part at the moment is getting hands on experience [with high-end digital acquisition]."
Another aspect of the new training cycle is simply the lack of uniformity amongst the large chip cameras and the increase in variables that affect image quality along the digital supply chain. "When I was coming up," remarks Director of Photography Michael Falasco:
"[C]ertainly everyone knew original negative because we were production people. If you worked in a duplicating house or an optical house, then all of a sudden you had to learn inter-negative, and you had to learn CRI, and you had to learn inter-positive, and black and white pan masters, and every one of them had different gammas, everyone of them had different curves, so that always seemed like a lot....but you only had three or four stocks to choose from, you had three or four duplicating stocks, and then a handful of print stocks so you really could learn all you needed to know about them. Now at any given time a shooter has the choice of a dozen different stocks to work with and the same in duplication, and even now when your making a digital intermediate you have 2K, 4K, and 6K shortly...I just read an article by a European DP and he was talking about why he liked the Master Primes, and he quoted three or four very aesthetic things. There was no specific technical stuff that he quoted about any of them. What that said to me, 'If you took four of these, if you took the Master Primes the Optimo, the DigiPrimes, and the E Series and you shot on any given stock which is so good these days, and you transferred on a Spirit or you transferred on a C-Reality or you laser scanned like Amelie and that was at 2K and now they have 4K and 6K; it's almost impossible, it's imperceptible to say this particular thing is result of the contrast of the DigiPrimes when there are so many other high tech variables that happened within the work flow.'"
Beginning with my generation of film technician, access to viewing film dailies for the apprentice technician decreased in inverse proportion to the increase in electronic acquisition. This fact alone functions as a hole in the traditional film training infrastructure. Certainly one of the biggest misunderstandings about large chip cameras is the fact that one lights them like motion picture film. That requires the expertise of a skilled lighting technician. In most respects the skill sets are transferable. Moreover, people often forget that lighting for motion picture is not merely about exposure, but also an important part of storytelling.
Beyond the changing nature of content brought on by new media, there is evidence of an evolving aesthetic, arising from the introduction of lower-cost digital acquisition and post technologies and the evolving ethos of the game generation in relation to these tools. That fact alone will have a continuing effect on the nature of content and the training cycle of below-the-line technicians: As Mark Chiolis, Senior Marketing Manager of Thomson Grass Valley’s Strategic Marketing and Business Development Group, remarked in an interview I conducted with him earlier this year, "Today there are a number of thought provoking questions that are being asked. What happens when there is a true RGB 4k (there isn't one today) sensor that rivals, if not exceeds, that of today's film stock? One of the arguments for film is that people like the "look" which includes the grain and movement through the gate. What happens when the "game-boy" generation takes over? Having grown up with "video" is this the "look" they want to see? Will they have a different set of standards to compare to?" For now, the subject is outside the scope of my essay, but I look forward to investigating this matter in the coming weeks.
This month we focus on understanding the evolving below-the-line training cycle and the newer end-to-end digital work flow as it relates to acquisition and post. The traditional training cycle of below-the-line technicians has slowly eroded over the last ten years. Now the older cusp of the game generation in their mid-thirties have recently entered their productive years as journeyman technicians and content creators. These technicians and artists came up in an infrastructure married to film but sleeping with video, an infrastructure infiltrated more and more by electronic acquisition and digital post - a result itself of the explosion of world wide cable and the desire to stem the rising cost of production. A corollary of this would also translate to the growing outsourcing of production and post, and the changing nature and aesthetic of content in the form of both docu-dramas, generated by professionals and users alike, and advanced CGI.
I remember having the opportunity to compare formative experiences with Dedo Wingert, inventor of the dedo light, at a lighting expo one rainy winter night in New York City in 2000. No one showed at the event except myself and a few other below-the-line technicians. This fact alone is important to note. One executive at a prominent rental house in New York City recently mentioned to me that attendance at seminars has been declining over the last few years. This phenomena, according to elder technicians, is evidence of the arrogance of today's younger generation. After listening to Wigert talk of his traditional film apprenticeship, I couldn't help but feel inadequate.
Ultimately, the generational myopia and phenomena alluded to above are symptomatic of larger forces and better understood in context: These are the advance of digital post and acquisition technologies, the evolution of the below-the-line training cycle and infrastructure, the emerging ethos of the game generation and its influence on culture and business, and finally both globalization and the creative economy as it relates to media and entertainment.
Today digital cinematography and digital end-to-end workflows are reaching critical mass. The culture war I came up in between film and "video" has given way to hybrid projects with newer digital formats that incorporate the best of both worlds. The change is liberating for me because I am a member of the game generation and the newer tools are more natural to my sensibilities, even as they complicate the creative process with an increase in variables that influence image quality along the digital supply chain.
Rather than inundate you with a dissertation on these matter I have decided to break my thoughts down and post them in easily digestible gruel (just kidding!) courses. By months end you shall understand why monkey brains are a delicacy. And lucky for you, the meal will be topped by an even better desert in the form of pod cast conversations with highly respected below-the-line technicians.
Here's are planned stops along the topic route:
I. The Creative Economy
II. Creativity is Expensive and Time Consuming
III. The Creative Factory - a. Globalization and Convergence, b. Outsourcing Production and Post
IV. The Horizontal Labor Market - a. Culture of Tradesmen vs. Culture of Technicians, b. Art at the fringe vs. Creativity as Mainstream
IV. The Cultural Ethos of The Game Generation - a. Generational Myopia and Culture War, b. Evolving Nature and Aesthetic of Content
V. The Digital Work Flow
There are several larger forces manifesting in the recent development of MTV's Virtual Laguna Beach. One of them is the evolution of brand: how the concept has extended itself into the realm of branded communities in the digital age. Gamers (the generation under age 34 and including generations X and Y) have grown up in a world saturated by brand so that the phenomenon is now a vehicle for personal expression and identity beyond the ostensible confines of corporate mandate. Commentators like Rob Walker (The Brand Underground, NYT) have elucidated the social phenomena well, however, they tend to look at the expression as another failed modernist attempt to beat the system.
I am not suggesting that the gaming generation, of which I am a part, is somehow untethered to history. Instead, I want to emphasize that the boomers polemic between left and right overlooks how truly different this generation is. To paraphrase David Brooks, this generation has simply moved on from the culture war in many respects. Other commentators have illustrated how the game generation has put its resources into transforming corporate America in a similar way its predecessors channeled its own energy into political and social movements. Some, like John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade in Got Game have gone so far as to say that the dot com era was an example of this corporate revolution and symptomatic of the game generation's predilection for role playing, in other words, Sims taken beyond the confines of the console.
The evolution of brand and branded communities is provocative in another respect. Multinational corporations have growing political and commercial leverage that is unfettered from the confines of the nation state. That phenomena presents a challenge to the polis but also changes the way constituents, if only subconsciously, organize themselves. In a commercial world, branded communities, become social organs as much as a commercial one. The notion infuses the gaming generations unique identity and illustrates another way in which they have ostensibly moved on from the polemic that sets art against commerce.
In the new world, media and technology must play to these sensibilities if they intend to reap the rewards of the younger demographic. I would not be surprised in ten years if movie and home theaters became virtual environments equivalent to branded paintball. Gamers demand a heightened sense of reality and want to be engaged with their media in a way far more intense than the boomer's relationship with television. Virtual Laguna Beach is in my mind symptomatic of the beginning of this transformation.
Advertising Age - Digital - How MTV Plans to Let Anyone on 'Laguna Beach'
Excerpts:
"Think of virtual Laguna Beach as a cross between Second Life, the online virtual world community that opened in 2003, and popular computer game The Sims. "
"MTV Networks figures that a single "resident" of its virtual world can translate into $150 of incremental revenue, based on estimates from existing virtual world There.com, whose technology fuels VLB -- or "Virtual Laguna Beach." And that doesn't count revenue from potential advertising. MTV is already in talks with marketers Pepsi, Procter & Gamble, Cingular and Paramount about developing campaigns for the virtual version."
They use the keyboard to walk or run around the island and a toolbar along the bottom of the computer screen offers more functions and can adjust their physical appearances -- from hair color to face shape to complexion. They can go shopping, exchanging MTV dollars for, say, new clothes or a surfboard (they earn MTV dollars by spending time in the world and interacting with brands).
"MTV promises advertising will be much more than billboards on the side of the virtual sidewalk or product placements and said the opportunities for behavioral targeting are "incredible." They also haven't worked out the ad rates -- in part because no one's exactly sure what the ad model will end up looking like."
"'We didn't back into revenue expectations,' said Sean Moran, exec VP-MTV 360 ad sales. 'This is a case of you can't put the cart before the horse.' (For context, however, in the kid- and brand-friendly virtual world Whyville, cost-per-thousand rates range from $6 to $30 and onetime sponsorship setup fees range from $25,000 to $250,000.)"
"Michael Wilson, CEO of Makena Technologies, which created and powers There.com, says the virtual worlds are a breeding ground for focus groups and consumer research."
"'There are a lot of unsafe places online, and we wanted to make this a safe place for our audience and our advertiser partners,' said Jeff Yapp, exec VP-program enterprises at MTV Networks' Music Group."
"MTV developed the project primarily in-house, using about 20 employees over four months. So if it doesn't work, Mr. Toffler said, it's not like the company went out and spent $50 million on an acquisition that bombed. (MTV execs wouldn't outline exactly how much the initiative cost, but earlier this summer Viacom Chief Financial Officer Mike Dolan said broadband channel Overdrive was built with an investment of $5 million over eight months.)"
"VBL is the first step in a series of virtual communities MTV hopes to build around music and lifestyles -- look for a Logo-themed world to launch in 2007, for example."
"Soon VBL will include an e-commerce aspect (the first step will be working with the actual stores in the real Laguna Beach before expanding it out to other national retailers) and launch a second-tier subscription-based service for residents who want the ultimate virtual lifestyle -- who want to live in a waterfront beach house, for example."
Advertising Age - Q&A With the NFL's Lisa Baird: How to Market the Biggest Reality Show
Excerpt:
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Lisa Baird joined the National Football League from IBM Corp. last year at a time of transition: the extension of TV deals with CBS, Fox and DirecTV; a new pact with NBC; and the shifting of Monday Night Football to ESPN -- not to mention a new commissioner who took over on Sept. 1.
Ms. Baird, now senior VP-marketing, took over the top marketing spot after the departure of ex- General Motors Corp. executive Phil Guarascio. As the NFL's big kickoff weekend begins, Ms. Baird took time to talk about matters including the league's future in a digital world.
The NFL is the ultimate reality show: It's unscripted and unpredictable, played out in front of the biggest TV audience each Sunday and Monday night. Mark Burnett couldn't come up with "reality" like the next 21 weeks of our season.
Changing demographics and emerging technologies continue to mystify those companies that are five to 10 years down the road. We're also in a unique brand position with the NFL and the 32 clubs having such massive audiences. We continually need to protect our brand from companies that look to redefine the NFL image to their own advantage.
We've talked a lot about better understanding how our most important constituency -- our fans -- interacts with the NFL, consume media and spend their time and money, particularly given changes in American demographics.
We hold the keys to some of the world's most valuable content -- NFL games. We need to keep finding compelling ways to deliver our content, while protecting our network packages which have been the underpinning of our league and what makes us unique.
MySpace cowboys - September 4, 2006
Excerpts:
With Murdoch's backing, the site has an astonishing number of projects underway: a Google pact to sell text ads on the site; a MySpace Records label; a VoIP feature to let users call one another; international sites in Britain, Australia, France - with nine other countries in Europe and Asia coming soon. DeWolfe counts 20 new products in the development pipeline. "We think we can extend MySpace around the world and it can be a major force globally," says Murdoch, whose Internet ambitions have helped drive News Corp.'s stock up 18% this year.
PC Pro: News: Google wants its MTV
Google and MTV have begun a flirtation by signing a deal to distribute MTV clips through the Google network. The Official Google blog says that clips from MTV and its associated channels such as VH1, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central will start appearing on a site near you that is part of Google's AdSense programme. It is only a toe in the water but may be the prelude to a much bigger alliance.
It is only recently that MTV has woken up to the threat posed by YouTube. It was widely expected that the new 'Flux' web site would be a rival to YouTube. However, at the moment Flux is merely a shop for selling ringtones and pictures. By teaming with Google, MTV may be hoping to use the Internet giant's muscle to challenge YouTube's encroachment into music video.
Business Week writer Catherine Holahan elucidated the pitfalls of brands like Viacom's MTV in a digital age with its lower barriers to market entry. The big question is if and how MTV will maintain its hegemony over the younger demographic, especially with increasing competition from the likes of online content distributors like YouTube and MySpace.
Excerpts and Highlights:
Major Internet players—from search engine Yahoo! (YHOO) to startup video site YouTube—are striking deals to broadcast music videos over broadband. Their hope: The same strategy that won Viacom's (VIA) MTV Networks cult-like control of the 12- to 34-year-old audience two decades ago will prove just as successful today on the Web.
Reality television is a result evolving market forces. Certainly, the rising cost of production and the demand for content with the worldwide proliferation of cable is one obvious driver. Reality television especially of the type that is integrated with the Internet or with direct viewer response is also part of the evolving trend towards interactive media with the younger demographic. Interactivity is also part of the gaming generation's fascination with role-playing. Sims in the world of traditional television content is found in the form of reality television. According to John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade, in their study of the gaming generation's attitudes towards business, entertainment software has trained this generation to expect a heightened relationship based on immediate rewards or consequences with media and the world at large. I believe this ethos towards role-playing and interactivity is seen in the form of reality-based shows like "American Idol" and the "Apprentice".
With advertising in turmoil on broadcast TV, reality shows - like American Idol or even Tommy Hilfiger's less successful "The Cut" - take product placement well beyond a can of Coke enjoyed by our favorite television show's character. "Idol was simply a marketing tool for me to sell records," says Simon Cowell on "Larry King Live." "The show was one thing but it was actually my record label, which was the most important thing. So, my background is I run a record label, and I still run a record label and that's really my passion.
The real winner of "American Idol" is Cingular Wireless. Cingular has an exclusive deal with the show's producers that let customers text their votes instead of trying to call in on busy lines. In Season Four last year, 41.5-million text votes were sent in; Cingular charges between $19.99 per month for a text package with 2,500 messages included and 10 cents per message on a pay-as-you-go plan, meaning the company raked in as much as $4.15-million in text messaging fees from American Idol votes alone last year. When the Apprentice was at its peak, Ad Age writes, Yahoo's product placement was a solid success, "After the ice cream challenge during the second season, viewers were told to go search Yahoo, and “Within three hours of the end of the show, the term ‘Apprentice Ice Cream’ was the third-most-searched term on Yahoo that day. By 5 o’clock the next afternoon, the ice cream was sold out,” says Yahoo VP Jim Moloshok. And the results kept coming. After the Levis challenge, “[f]our days after that episode ran, viewers were still searching Yahoo avidly for ‘Apprentice Jeans’ to get a copy of the catalog. And "Apprentice Jeans" was still ranked No. 1 among Yahoo Web searches,” AdAge reports. Using secret tracking devices, Yahoo discovered that “The core demographic for the ice cream was 21 to 34 years old. For the jeans, it was 35 to 44.” Yahoo VP Moloshok says, “If you can complete the loop, product placements like Mark Burnett is doing are one of the most effective ways to get people engaged with a product.”
Now CNN like MTV Flux are taking "reality" one-step further implementing an infrastructure for user-based content.
Advertising Age - MediaWorks - Dell to Sponsor CNN's 'Citizen Journalism'
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- At a time when much of the digital media world's focus is on how to monetize user-generated content, CNN has signed Dell as a major sponsor of its foray into citizen journalism -- iReports and the CNN Exchange program.
Guardian Unlimited Business | | MTV hooks up with Google
MTV is to supply segments of its programmes to the thousands of websites and blogs affiliated with search giant Google.
MySpace a launch pad for next-gen media biz
Excerpts:
It's too soon to know the future of paid content downloads on MySpace, having recently launched its first offering: $1.99 downloads of the Fox series "24," sponsored by Burger King. However, paid search represents a considerable revenue-generating opportunity for MySpace and a search partner.
News Corp. sculpting bold plan for growth
Excerpts:
News Corp. in the past 12 months has been forging media's future by buying and riding the likes of social networking leader MySpace.com and video gamer IGN to meteoric heights while also enjoying record performance levels at its core broadcast and cable television, film and print operations, even as they struggle to reinvent their business models.
FT.com / Companies / Media & internet - News Corp to sell films online
Excerpts:
News Corp’s internet properties, including MySpace.com, are to start selling Fox films and television content on a download-to-own basis in an effort to create a foothold in this potentially huge new digital market.
Advertising Age - MediaWorks - MTV Wants to Be Marketers' On-Ramp to the Web
Here are some exceprts:
Around the Google deal, it really is the first time where anybody in the content business can use video and create a new content economy on the internet by marrying a video to an advertisement and allowing smaller owners to place that on their sites. It promises to be a groundbreaking way for content to be distributed and monetized on the internet. We brought this idea to Google. Eric Schmidt and I negotiated the deal and it's the first of many [MTV will] be doing in the digital media space.
Realism is, hands down, the holy grail for game developers, and their journey towards photo-realistic gameplay is getting a very nice boost courtesy of ATI. ATI is showcasing a new technology called Parallax Occlusion Mapping at its booth on the show floor. For those of you somewhat familiar with graphical terms, think of POM as a variant of bump mapping or normal mapping, but with actual depth -- not the "simulated" depth other technologies create with fancy lighting effects. To show off the technology to me yesterday, ATI loaded a 3D representation of a cobblestone street in which each stone had a significant height raised well above its setting in the ground. The stones were not, however, shaped individually by a 3D artist; rather, the whole walkway was modeled as a perfectly flat, two-polygon surface (one polygon is a triangle, so just two are needed to make a rectangle). The POM technology gave the walkway actual depth, making it seem as though thousands of polygons were used to create a vision actually modeled with only a couple. To really show it off, an employee at the booth panned the camera down and swung it between two cobblestones -- something utterly impossible with normal mapping's "simulated" depth, which is revealed as truly flat at such ranges and angles. POM looks to be singularly awesome, and it's already hitting the streets on the XBOX 360. Gamers, cue your drooling.Tomorrow's Treasures, Day 2 - SIGGRAPH 2006 - Computerworld Blogs
I watched as users opened multiple instances of the same map, resized and moved the windows to partially overlap each other, set each instance to display the single map differently (one topographically, another politically, etc.), and then effortlessly scroll, rotate, and zoom the map, watching as it dynamically shifted to their easy touch.
To put it short and sweet, this is exactly the kind of technology that would be positively awesome to see in a future kitchen. Forget posting pictures on the refrigerator -- just bring them up on the wall, scale them, crop them, cut them, rotate them, and organize them at your leisure. Stop buying post-its for use in to-do lists; just use the integrated wall-keyboard to tap out animated notes for your loved ones. Need to check a map before heading out? I couldn't imagine an easier-to-master interface.
Tomorrow's Treasures, Day 3 - SIGGRAPH 2006 - Computerworld Blogs
Though graphics and animation are obviously the overriding themes of SIGGRAPH 2006, there are several sub-themes that unite the various showcased technologies into mini-groups. For example, there are numerous innovative touch interfaces throughout the conference, both in the Emerging Technologies hall and on the main floor (the Multi-Touch Wall I mentioned yesterday being one of the stronger contenders in the area). One sub-theme of the conference is, unsurprisingly, game-related technology; considering the fact that computer and video games so often drive the development of video tech, many companies on the show floor are using games to show off their individual products, while others are simply showing off their games.
One of the booths I stopped by yesterday was run by Linden Lab, the creators of the massively multiplayer online community known as Second Life. Jeffrey Ventrella, one of the technical developers for the game, invited me to take a gander at a player-driven animation technology he was working on, and I must admit that I was impressed, despite the fact that I don't play the game. Apparently, players will soon be able to pose their online avatars by moving and manipulating body parts through a very intuitive, point-and-click interface. Not long afterwards, they'll be able to create personalized animations using the technology, saving them for hotkey-use in future sessions.
LucasArts, the gaming arm of George Lucas's development kingdom, is also sharing some new technology at the show. The company showed off a technology yesterday called euphoria (all lowercase, because apparently that makes it look modern) by Natural Motion Ltd. euphoria is being used in LucasArts' upcoming Indiana Jones title, driving much of the animation of the game using a set of predefined rules rather than scripted keyframes. When something smacks our good friend Indy in the back of the head, for instance, euphoria determines how he'll be jarred forward, will attempt to recover his balance, and then either stay up or fall over, creating all the animations on the fly. Thus, almost every time anything animates in the game, the movements are subtly different. It's a step in the right direction for realism.
Realism is, hands down, the holy grail for game developers, and their journey towards photo-realistic gameplay is getting a very nice boost courtesy of ATI. ATI is showcasing a new technology called Parallax Occlusion Mapping at its booth on the show floor. For those of you somewhat familiar with graphical terms, think of POM as a variant of bump mapping or normal mapping, but with actual depth -- not the "simulated" depth other technologies create with fancy lighting effects. To show off the technology to me yesterday, ATI loaded a 3D representation of a cobblestone street in which each stone had a significant height raised well above its setting in the ground. The stones were not, however, shaped individually by a 3D artist; rather, the whole walkway was modeled as a perfectly flat, two-polygon surface (one polygon is a triangle, so just two are needed to make a rectangle). The POM technology gave the walkway actual depth, making it seem as though thousands of polygons were used to create a vision actually modeled with only a couple. To really show it off, an employee at the booth panned the camera down and swung it between two cobblestones -- something utterly impossible with normal mapping's "simulated" depth, which is revealed as truly flat at such ranges and angles. POM looks to be singularly awesome, and it's already hitting the streets on the XBOX 360. Gamers, cue your drooling.
Tomorrow's Treasures, Day 4 - SIGGRAPH 2006 - Computerworld Blogs
One of the more frequently-used technologies in the realm of VR here at SIGGRAPH is a subsonic noise-based tracking system developed by a company called InterSense. Though several booths were showing off giant VR screens for various marketing purposes, they all used InterSense tracking systems to allow users to interact with their virtual wares. The tech works by implementing a set of three tracking bars on the top and sides of a given VR screen (itself little more than a rear-projection screen about 10 feet diagonally). Each bar both emits and receives sonic waves to and from a pair of wireless devices: a glasses-mounted sensor to track eye position (and thus modify a projected VR image on the fly to align it perfectly with the user's eyes) and a handheld sensor attached to an interacting pointer device. In order for the pointer to emit a virtual beam on the screen, giving it a presence in the virtual world, InterSense's sensors must track its location and orientation so that its virtual reflection can be displayed to match.
Thus, when a user pops on a pair of stereo glasses and grabs the pointer, a virtual beam of light is "emitted" from its tip, perfectly aligned no matter where the user is standing or the device is held. Given a virtual representation of a human heart, for instance, a user could hold the pointer horizontally, casting its beam in front of the heart, and then literally step forward, swing the beam around, and cast it through or behind the heart. The effect is startlingly convincing, as though you're moving a handheld pointer around and behind an actual three-dimensional object, pointing at (or modifying at will) different parts of it.
Different VR projectors are provided by different companies and paired with different kinds of eyewear, even though InterSense's technology is used for tracking purposes almost universally. There are two different kinds of stereo projection techniques: passive and active. Passive stereo is what you're probably used to: two projectors simultaneously emit images to the screen, but each projector emits polarized light at different angles. A user wears a pair of polarized glasses to view the image, so that each eye is fed a view from a different projector. Assuming that the distance and angle of the two projected images are calibrated correctly to each other and the viewer (helped along under optimal conditions by one of InterSense's glasses-mounted trackers), you end up with a very decent 3D image. IMAX uses such technology to full effect every day; here at SIGGRAPH, Purdue University is using passive projectors to drive a VR flythrough of its entire campus.
Active stereo, however, takes things a step further than their counterparts. A single projector emits a flip-flopping image to the VR screen, toggling back and forth between the view designed for one eye and the view designed for the other. The user wears special glasses that have tiny shutters in the lenses, opening and closing in time with the projector (which, as you can imagine, is far too fast for the eye to notice). The left shutter opens to view the left image exactly when the projector displays it, and then the process shifts to the right eye. Back and forth, dozens of times a second, and you end up with a 3D image that doesn't suffer from the slight hazing that passive stereo is so often plagued with. InterSense itself is using active stereo at its booth here at SIGGRAPH, as is Barco -- though the latter company has taken things a step further than anyone else by providing six-sided VR cubes for highly immersive experiences.
Tomorrow's Treasures, Day 5 - SIGGRAPH 2006 - Computerworld Blogs
As the final day of ACM's SIGGRAPH 2006 graphics and animation conference rolls around, I wanted to sit down and examine three different technologies showcased at the Boston convention that, given just a bit more development time, could theoretically be used together as the veritable Voltron of virtual reality experiences.
In order to create that experience, we would need technology that could fool the senses into suspending disbelief. Dismissing the olfactory and gustatory systems (smell and taste, respectively), we'd still need to replicate sound (which is easy), sight (which is pretty darned difficult to do convincingly), and touch (which is nigh impossible to accurately simulate). If we wanted to immerse someone -- let's call him Jimmy -- in an environment, we'd need to give him the ability to hear it, see it, feel it, and finally, traverse it.
Hearing, as I said, is a piece of cake; give Jimmy a pair of headphones and a decent sound card and we're set. Seeing is a little harder, though, which is where the good folks at Sensics Inc. come in. Sensics is demonstrating their piSight head-mounted display at SIGGRAPH, which boasts an incredible 150-degree viewing angle -- just an imperceptible smidgen beneath that of human eyesight. The piSight uses multiple OLED-powered displays focused into the eyes with twelve lenses per eye; combine it with InterSense's tracking technology, which I mentioned yesterday, and you get a pretty convincing, fully-3D visual. The level of detail and quality could certainly use a bit of work, but it's unquestionably the best head-mounted display I've ever heard of, much less used.
Immersion is the company responsible for force-feedback technology, so if you've ever felt the rumble of an XBOX controller in response to a game or felt a joystick buck in your hands, that's them talking to you. They produce a product line based on their CyberGlove, which can monitor hand and finger motion. Combined with an exoskeleton they develop (it's ugly as heck, but Jimmy will have his headset on, so he won't notice), the CyberGlove can deliver actual feedback and pressure to the hand, meaning Jimmy could be stopped by a wall in front of him, could pick up and feel a can of soda, could feel the weight of a brick or a suitcase, or could trace the outline of a sculpture with his finger. Let's slip those on Jimmy: not only can he see everything around him, but now he can interact with it all too.
Finally, we need to give Jimmy the ability to walk around in his environment. I'm talking about actual foot motion -- forget about using buttons on the hands to float through virtual space, the only way to be immersed in a VR experience is to be able to walk through it at your own speed and leisure. For that, we have to turn to Hiroo Iwata at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, and his dully-named Powered Shoes, which he presented at SIGGRAPH's Emerging Technology exhibition. The Powered Shoes are literally a form of roller skates whose wheels are actuated by motors. If we were to slip them on Jimmy and he were to walk, the wheels would counter his movements and roll just enough to keep him in one spot. A lot of work still needs to go into the shoes -- changing direction is a little awkward, and you can't run yet -- but the concept is sound, and it works well enough already; it just needs a bit more time to reach perfection.
LONDON - MTV's college network mtvU has acquired Y2M, the largest interactive network of online college newspapers in the US.
Excerpts:
Off-Broadway? Try online. That's where you'll find Absolut Ruby Red: The Evolutionary Musical, an oddball animated production by Stockholm-based agency Great Works that trumpets the Swedish vodka brand's newest flavor. The word "surreal" doesn't even begin to describe this interactive musical, which puts viewers in the director's chair by allowing them to choose the narrative path of a heroic grapefruit as it evolves from a simple fruit into a glorious alcoholic beverage—all while encountering flying sharks, anthropomorphic camels and other similarly bizarre characters along the way. After completing the musical "choose-your-own-adventure"-style, viewers can download their masterpiece onto their PSP or iPod. And for those who'd rather play composer than director, the Song-O-Gram feature lets you pick the words and genre for a personalized musical shout-out to all of your unsuspecting friends.
The Brand Underground - New York Times
Moving homes today...more soon.
Ultimately, television can have a relationship with the internet that features cannot. “Features have been able to grab on to what internet can do for marketing and publicity,” says Megan Wolpert, executive vice president of Spyglass Television, when I interviewed her in January this year: “However, TV can do what movies can’t with that relationship, because they don’t need to add a step. They don’t need to say come see us. They just show it. You can show a memoir, a travelogue, a serialized anything on the internet. I think even if you just look at the act of watching a movie versus watching television, it’s more analogous to the act of watching a computer.”
Certainly, the popularity of Reality TV is the outcome of the game generation trend towards interactivity. What is happening more recently, however, is an extension of the relationship between television and internet with show like Lost and VH1 Webjunk. Now MTV introduces MTV Flux a combination social networking portal/television channel.
Excerpts:
Moenk's piece on the game generation's social application of technology and its influences on Web 2.0 design is both insightful and uniquely refreshing. While everyone is talking about marketing on MySpace, Moenk focuses on the effect of the MySpace ethos on business culture as the game generation matures into their productive years.“They have relatively little generational consciousness,” writes political columist David Brooks about the game generation. Why? "[B]ecause this generation is for the most part not fighting to emancipate itself from the past.” This suggestion is provocative considering that while “the baby boom included the largest U.S. birth cohort to date, the game generation will ultimately outdo the baby boom in size, in scope, and presumably in influence,” notes John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade in their study of the game generation’s influence on organizational values in business. In fact, “the total size of the game generation is already greater than the baby boom ever was,” and the whole generation of gamers, “including X and Y and letters to be named later-simply approach the world differently than their predecessors.”
This generational amnesia is partly the result of the movement away from traditional forms of social capital towards weaker, and more numerous ties. Renowned urban planer Richard Florida notes that the fundamental social and economic changes that underpin the Creative Economy, demonstrate that in “virtually every aspect of life, weak ties have replaced the stronger bonds that once gave structure to society. Rather than live in one town for decades, we now move about. Instead of communities defined by close associations and deep