30 August 2001

Virtual Realities in the Way - At Siggraph developers are demonstrating what could soon be our future reality.

[ Technology Review ]: "Eyematic of Inglewood, CA, demoed a scanner workstation and software that maps human features so precisely and quickly that real human faces can easily be put into computerized scenes. One day, an avatar that looks like you could be delivering your voicemail. LifeFX Networks used every graphics rendering and VR trick in the book to generate the very realistic characters and scenery in its full-length feature film, The Final Fantasy. It also trusted artificial intelligence, text-to-speech and voice synthesis algorithms to let its virtual characters build their own histories and develop their own personalities. [ more... ]

Side note.: besides MIT's Technology Review, we have added Technology Review Extra to our realtime technology news section. (August 30., 2001, )

Besides common features like modeling and animation, AXEL offers a graphic approach to creating interactions with drag-and-drop connections between sensors and reactions. Sensors are what prompt AXEL to activate the reaction. Reactions can consist of sound or animation playback, be linked to an URL, allow for object manipulation, and a lot more. If you want to open a door in Axel, you donât point at it and click. You pick up the key and put it in the lock and rotate it. Otherwise, the door doesn't open. AXEL however requires a seperate player plugin to view animations in a browser. [site not updated yet]. (August 30., 2001, )

Blue Abuse - A tutorial on Quicktime media skins

Blue Abuse is a showcase of interactive QuickTime content that covers everything from complete QuickTime sites to individual QuickTime movies.

More specifically, they feature a tutorial about customized Quicktime players, aka Media Skins: "A good skin can be considered part of the whole QuickTime experience - making your projects more personalized - and may be one of the draws to get people to notice your movies." The site also features the Emmaboda Festival project and how the excellent media coverage was created.
(August 29., 2001, )

Moho contains a vector-based drawing component, making it suitable for illustration tasks as well. The animation tools include manipulators for controlling skeletons - useful for working with characters. Moho works with text the same as any other primitive, making it useful for simple video titling up through any complex text deformation.
And they have a demo Mac version (4,5 MB, for OS 9 and OS X) out now.

Stop Motion Pro. is designed for stop motion animation - traditional cel, claymation, cutout or experimental techniques. You need a video camera, a computer, a video capture device and their free trial. (For Windows, no Mac version) (August 29., 2001, kb)

[ Businessweek ]: "Think back to when the Web was young: The ideal was to create a bevy of niche sites for fly fishers, hot-air balloonists, even Jell-O wrestlers -- all maintained and paid for by aficionados. The niches would offer finely targeted audiences for advertisers and slowly draw dollars from mainstream publications." [ more... ] (August 29., 2001, )

Emanzipation mit der Powertaste - Die IFA beweist wunderschön, daß digitaler TV-Programme ebenso langweilig sind wie analoge TV-Programme.

[ Die Zeit ]: "Technik hilft bei der Emanzipation von der Glotze. Vom Internet lassen sich Filme herunterladen wie bisher schon Musik, demnächst von jedermann. Diese Piraterie weckt mehr noch als die Steuervermeidung eine anarchische Freude, auch in Erwachsenen." [ weiter... ]

Wann kommen die ersten Videoblogs? Wir sind dabei... (August 28., 2001, )

Dreamweaver fix for IE 5.5+/Quicktime - The M$ Quicktime low punch has been countered for Dreamweaver users.

Jonathan Krop has made fiX Move, a freeware extension for Dreamweaver that writes the correct Object tags needed to play in IE 5.5 and greater. On that occasion Jonathan has also created Smart Block, another freeware extension for Dreamweaver that blocks Smart Tags from working on your web pages. (August 25., 2001, )

Flix converts video to Flash - To deliver digital video to 90 percent of the computer population without providing various formats, converting it to Flash may do the trick.

Wildform finally has released a Macintosh version of Flix. Flix takes .avi, .mov, .mpg, or .asf video files and convert both sound and image to .swf. It also converts .wav, .mp3, .wma or other audio files. You could do that before, but you had to extract audio and single image batches from the video source before re-synchronizing both in Flash. Flix' presets seem to be adjustable by editing an XML file so it should be possible to generate a decent CD-ROM output as well. That would perhaps solve a problem we had with a job beefing up a M$ Powerpoint presentation with video. The New York Times used Flix with its Millennium Series to function on all platforms and through corporate firewalls. I'm slightly sceptical about the quality, however we're gone give it a try, since the regular remake of the TextLab website is due anyway.
(August 24., 2001, mh)

IE on Windows no longer supports embedded Quicktime media - Arrgggghhhh!! MS did it again, but Apple has responded quickly.

An message to the QuickTime Developer mailing list confirms earlier reports that Apple has developed a workaround for users of Internet Explorer on Windows systems to combat issues where IE 5.5SP2 and IE 6.0 do display QuickTime content in the browser.

The workaround is here on the Apple site.

[ update, via Judy & Robert ]: further details

• A CNET article, "IE upgrade cuts off QuickTime".
  
• Reader reports at Macintouch "IE 5.5 and the Netscape Plugin API" ,
  
• Macinstein commentary ("Why Trust MS With QuickTime or Anything Else" and
  
• "MS Halting QuickTime. Accident?")
  
• An article by Robert Cringely "Making Lemonade: How Microsoft Is Using Its Own Legal Defeat
  to Hurt Java".
  

A more responsive Web - Imagine you write a story and it gets onto Google in the next couple of minutes.

This would possibly change information retrieval beyond recognition. Some short articles discuss this topic:

[ news.cnet.com ]: Eric Schmidt earlier this week was selected to become the chief executive officer of Google. Here's how he envisions Google's future: "We've discussed this question at length, and our conclusion is that we would not become a portal. It's all going to be search...and search." [ more... ]

[ blogorama ]: " Forget about e-commerce. Forget even about supply-chain management. [...] Weblogs and search: there is still so much to be done."

[ DaveNet ] Quietly, without much fanfare, Google is upgrading the Web. They're indexing lots of weblogs, including Scripting News, every day.

[ NewsIsFree ] has a search engine that lets you search through the last two days of harvested headlines from 1800 news sources. This is very handy. NewsIsFree also installed Drupal, a content management/discussion engine, which expands this site to provide site news, discussion forums, and, most importantly, weblogging capabilities.

[ÊJD's Blog ] with JD's reports about the Search Engine Strategies 2001 conference in SF with a bunch of forwarding links.

Unsurprisingly, I found this article by using NewsIsFree's headline search engine. A nice way to lose yourself in a loop of news. (August 20., 2001, )

IP-Music - Das finde ich besonders schön: Musik aus IP-Nummern und URLs.

Lars Kindermann lässt auf seiner Site reglos.de das Internet singen: online werden aus IP-Nummer oder URL mit Hilfe eines fraktalen Kompositionsprogramms kleine, manchmal erstaunlich melodische Melodien. Man kann sie auch herunterladen oder anderen zuhören. (August 19., 2001, ub)

QuickTime Movie tidbits - A bunch of news from the digital media department.

Judy and Robert's Little Quicktime Page is published in its sixth year. The Grandmaster among "Theme Blogs"!

ZyGoVideo, a good codec for low bit-rate video, is now part of the QT component download program and will be automatically downloaded for viewing a ZyGoVideo compressed QT movie. E.g., for ISDN 128 Kbits/sec, ZyGoVideo claims to produce 320 by 240 pixels and 7.5 frames/sec. Which is nice and will be tested here soon. This Apple page lists all not included components that QuickTime seamlessly retrieves from a server and installs it, then proceeds to play back the media.

streaming media has tutorials about working with QuickTime in Flash, combining Flash intros with streaming videos, and how to set up a Darwin streaming server on Linux. .

Webreview also has a detailed tutorial about combining Flash and Quicktime.

The "Los Angeles Final Cut User Group" or LAFCUG Create has a guide to adding interactivity to a movie. Using Quicktime Pro, the guide shows how to produce random access stories where the viewer can choose the order of the scenes, create alternate language tracks and subtitles , or create interactive stories.

Another good reason to visit the BMW film site.

Here's Macaw, a useful free tool that helps add synchronized text tracks or subtitles to QuickTime videos. There's also a tutorial and a guide to add the text track to the video.

From the family album: this shot shows a very (uch!) early morning set up in the CeBIT Congress Center for the premiere of the videos we made for the German Internet Prize show in March 2001.

And finally: we are awaiting a new video edit machine, a dual processor G4/800 DP PowerMac with almost 12 Gigaflops, to be delivered within the next 2 weeks.
(August 18., 2001, )

Hollywoodâs Digital Future - From casting calls to digital dailies, streaming media is being utilized inside Hollywood to save time, improve visual effects and get the creative juices flowing.

[Êstreaming media ]: "Film is a hugely collaborative medium - the long-rolling closing credits of an animated or effects-driven Hollywood feature testify to the creative interaction that drives such a production. The hundreds of credited artists, technicians and staff involved in a feature film typically have worked together on the project for up to a year or more, often in geographically distant facilities. This, however, presents fiscal and creative difficulties of its own. The answer is being found in efficient, cost-effective methods of digital media distribution." [Êmore... ] (August 14., 2001, )

[ÊContent Wire ]: "The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) last week released the SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) 2.0 specification. This allows authors to write interactive multimedia presentations.

It's no longer simply television on the Web that end users are seeking; people are looking for information and experiences that take full advantage of the Web's technical capabilities - interoperability, flexibility, device choice, and searchability.

"SMIL 2.0 enables authors to bring rich content to the Web in a format that is easily written and reused" explained Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director. "SMIL 2.0 avoids the limitations of traditional television and lowers the bandwidth requirements for delivering multimedia content over the Internet." [Êmore... ]

(August 14., 2001, mjh)

Tschüss, SCSI! - Das wars: eine Ära geht zu Ende. Jedenfalls bei uns.

Heute, beim Schneiden von ein paar Videoclips, fiel es mir auf: wir sind komplett SCSI-frei. Auch die Editsuite mit Media 100, die bisher von einem teuren (und lauten) SCSI-RAID gefüttert wurde, wird nun über Firewire von einer großen IDE-Platte versorgt. Die neuen Oxford 911 IDE/FireWire-Bridge-Chips bringen so um die 30 MB/Sekunde und das reicht allemal für 2:1 komprimiertes, sendefähiges Video. Ob es für unkomprimiertes Video auch ausreicht - vor allem bei der Dauerleistung -, werden wir noch testen. Ich weine der SCSI-Technologie jedenfalls keine Träne nach. (August 10., 2001, )

[ The Times ]: "The Greeks had a word for it. In the fifth century BC, the citizens of Athens decreed that there should be a "seeing place" where they could meet in the shadow of the Acropolis to watch plays, dances and the offering of hymns to the gods above. That word, theatron, has entered our language as theatre - and thanks to new technology, advances in archaeology and more than a little detective work, the world's first theatre has been recreated by researchers at Warwick University. Welcome to the Theatre of Dionysos."

[ VisNews, HPCN ]: "Theatron is a 3D software application that is used by theatre history students at the University of Amsterdam. Theatron was developed in the past three years with a subsidy of the European Commission. Eighteen theatres from antiquity until the twentieth century have been reconstructed. Each theatre is represented in an equal manner." (we would like to give you credit, guys, but you don't give any information on your newsletter.)

On the Theatron web site, some 3D VRML models are showcased that require the Cosmo Player Plugin.
(August 10., 2001, fw)

Radio ist Drama, Leidenschaft, Glamour, Risiko -

[ radio im netz ]: 'Das Jugendmagazin jetzt der Süddeutschen Zeitung bietet jetzt (man beachte das Wortspiel) auch ein Webradio an. Nett gestaltet (wie die gesamte SZ bzw. jetzt) mit akzeptabler Playlist, die Soundqualität läßt allerdings etwas zu wünschen übrig... Aber ansonsten: wunderbar.'

[ jetzt ]:'Drama, Leidenschaft, Glamour, Risiko: alles was in jetzt steckt, ist auch alles, was wir uns vom Pop erwarten, aber leider so selten finden. Das wird nun anders. Mit jetzt-radio. 24 Stunden täglich Musik für die beste Zeit des Lebens.'

Playing on http://217.110.107.38/jetztradio.pls. Bei mir funkte es erst mit direkter URL-Eingabe in iTunes. (August 7., 2001, )

Handmade media - Hawkin's Bazaar : an intriguing mixture of what you thought had gone forever and what you never knew existed.

Everyone has tried to create figures out of shadows cast by hands on a wall. In the 1920s in America a book was published on how to achieve quite exceptional results in this most ephemeral of arts, and here we have reproduced its thirty-two examples. It amuses almost everyone, irrespective of age. B117 - £0.99 (August 5., 2001, majo)

Walking with Vermeer - Dutch scientists have created a 3D walk through Delft as Jan Vermeer, the great Dutch artist, painted it.

Walking with Vermeer' depicts a walk through 17th and 18th century Delft. A number of movies, based upon original master drawings, show the area in Delft which Vermeer painted in his famous 'The View of Delft'. (click on any of the painters' easels on the map to start the movies).

The Vermeer project has been executed by the Department of Industrial Design of the Delft University of Technology. There are more links to other wonderful 3D walkthroughs, e.g. of the Amiens Cathedral, the Dome in Utrecht or the Notre Dame.

This is one of the many results of HPCN, a large Europe wide supercomputing project that we helped to get into press and media. Some years ago, TextLab had produced a 3D walk through the ancient city of Cologne, and so we know about the efforts for the Vermeer movies. (August 3., 2001, fw)

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