Top five sci-fi/fantasy moments evoked by the iPhone buying experience
Fun, iPhone
Posted 7/15/08 by Erik Loyer
View from the front of the line at the Sherman Oaks Apple Store.
Motorola v600, this is the last service I shall require of you.
So, even though I told myself on Saturday at the Glendale Apple Store that to stand in line for 5+ hours for an iPhone was patently ridiculous, somehow I ended up doing it myself yesterday at the Sherman Oaks Apple Store. At first, I was suckered in by a line that initially seemed to be moving briskly, slowing down only after I had invested too much time in the experience to give up. Ultimately, however, waiting inside the Fashion Square mall with the encouragement of my wife and kids and some pleasant chaps to chat with (even if mall policy required the security guards to prevent us from sitting down) was just way more pleasant than standing inside the Glendale Galleria parking garage next to some obnoxious dude bragging about his romantic exploits.
During my extended stay on the polished marble, I kept finding myself reminded of seminal moments in sci-fi and fantasy movies and TV in which anticipation and revelation play a major role (usually with unhappy results!). So, without further ado (and with thanks to linemate Nathan Bowers for suggesting item number two), here are my Top Five Sci-Fi/Fantasy Moments Evoked by the iPhone Buying Experience:
5. “Mr. Roth, will that be the 8 or the 16 gigabyte model?”
Perhaps we were all waiting in line to “go home” like poor Sol Roth in Soylent Green, shuffling off this mortal coil to a glorious montage of the 1984 commercial intercut with endless musings of Mac Guy and PC Guy. iPhone is… do I have to say it?
4. “An entrance, Captain, but no exit. They go in, but they do not come out.”
At one point we heard that activation could take as long as two hours for one person. Why? Perhaps in reality the whole iPhone line had been declared dead in a simulated war like the one fought in the classic Star Trek episode ”A Taste of Armageddon,” and nobody was coming out… ever.
3. “Farewell, my friends! I go on to a better place!”
If death was to be our fate, it didn’t have to be an unhappy one. What about the cute little green aliens from Toy Story awaiting selection from the divine claw? They had a great attitude about the beyond. Of course, it was completely naive and unjustified, but…
2. “How would you like your earthlings, Supreme Commander Jobs?”
Great user experience, powerful applications… the iPhone is all about service, right? Serving Apple’s customers? Serving mankind? In fact, you could say that Apple’s unspoken mission statement is ”To Serve Man”… hmm… wait a second…
1. Worst. Unboxing. Ever.
Finally, if we did ever manage to get our hands on an iPhone after spending ridiculously long amounts of time in line, what was likely to occur? Technological bliss, or… divine judgment? Raiders of the Lost Ark offered one scenario. “Don’t look at the light, Marion, keep your eyes shut!”
BAVC’s Producers Institute kick-starts innovative online documentaries, serious games
Events, Games
Posted 6/27/08 by Erik Loyer
I was recently invited to be a mentor at the Bay Area Video Coalition’s Producers Institute, a week-long intensive workshop in which teams of independent documentary producers are immersed in interactive technologies and techniques and then develop pitches for interactive projects based on their work. At the end of the week the project teams pitch their ideas to potential funders and hopefully get a kick-start on the path to getting their proposals underway. Though I was only able to help out for two days towards the end of the workshop, it was still a pretty amazing gathering to see and be a part of.
The main project I was involved with at the Institute was the forthcoming work from Take Action Games (TAG), the company best known for Darfur Is Dying, a game about the crisis in Sudan which received a lot of media attention and helped to put serious games on the map for many people. I’ve had the pleasure of consulting with TAG team members Susana Ruiz and Huy Truong before, and have found their professional style to be a wonderful mix of a strong vision combined with a genuine excitement about the medium and an openness to new ideas. Looking forward to finding out more about their latest project, In The Balance: The Death Penalty Game, I wasn’t disappointed, as Susana, Huy, and Ashley York are again bringing their talents to bear on a challenging social issue and stretching the boundaries of the medium in the process (the project was recently written up in the Washington Post).
I met with a number of project teams while at BAVC—the whole atmosphere of the gathering had a lot of camaraderie and intensity as the various groups, flush with new information from the Institute’s various speakers and events about leveraging documentary content online, sought to assemble compelling pitches for a host of fascinating projects. For a taste, check out the following video from The Drax Files, whose creator Bernhard Drax was documenting the goings-on. This clip touches briefly on In The Balance during a chat with Tony Walsh, a veteran BAVC mentor and founder of the game development firm Phantom Compass. Drax filed a number of reports from the Institute, so check out The Drax Files if you want to see more.
An inspirational gathering for lovers of electronic literature
Electronic Literature, Events
Posted 6/17/08 by Erik Loyer
I’ve had peripheral contact with the Electronic Literature Organization over the years (including a public reading of unpublished chapters of Chroma at the Hammer Museum which was a blast), but never attended one of their conferences until this year. Blue Velvet was accepted in to the Media Art Show at this year’s Visionary Landscapes conference at Washington State University Vancouver, which afforded me the opportunity to attend. I’m glad I did—it was a wonderful experience.
The ‘Early Authors of Electronic Literature’ exhibit at the Visionary Landscapes conference.
Having so many luminaries in the field in one place was enlightening in and of itself, especially because the attendees were a mix of both scholars and artists, making for a lively interplay between theory and practice. In many cases, I ended up meeting people for the first time whose names I’ve been aware of for years. Gratifying as well was the chance to connect with a number of folks who were early fans of The Lair of the Marrow Monkey and Chroma. New faces were abundant as well—people excited by the potential of the medium who were either taking their first steps in this world or doing important research to push the form ahead.
I was particularly impressed by the work being done in generative narrative by D. Fox Harrell, Kenny K. N. Chow and Jichen Zhu at Georgia Tech. The GRIOT system originated by Harrell and Joseph Goguen takes what I found to be a very refreshing approach to dynamic narrative—I can’t say that I have a strong grasp of the technical aspects of the engine, but there was a kind of fluidity of scale and affect involved in the formal elements the system generates that felt far less “brittle” than other generative approaches I’m familiar with. The fact that GRIOT immediately appeared in my mind to be well-suited to cinema, poetry and comics simultaneously was an intuitive whisper for me that Harrell and his collaborators are moving in a very productive direction.
The recent release of the Electronic Literature Collection: Volume One also seemed to mark a milestone for the field, being the first of a proposed series of collections of seminal e-lit works. Each volume is published on DVD and online under a Creative Commons license to encourage the widest dispersal possible. The conference at times felt like an implicit celebration that e-lit has managed to survive long enough to make such collections possible. While the boundaries defining exactly what e-lit is remain porous and will rightly continue to be so, the fact that a gathering dedicated to the field could engender the sense of cameraderie that it did is certainly something to celebrate. Thanks to Dene Grigar and John Barber for putting on such a great event.
Viewfinder, Precision Targets shown at HASTAC II Conference
Digital Humanities, Events, Flex, Viewfinder
Posted 6/5/08 by Erik Loyer
HASTAC II, the second annual conference of the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, was held at UC Irvine and UCLA on May 22-24. The theme? “Technotravels.” Unfortunately scheduling conflicts prevented me from checking out many of the sessions (would love to have seen Brenda Laurel’s provocation, as her book Computers as Theatre was an early inspiration for me), but happily I was able to attend Curtis Wong’s presentation entitled “From Beethoven to Betelgeuse, 20 Years in the Quest for the Holy Grail of Interactive Storytelling.” It was great getting to hear about what Curtis has been up to since the Voyager days, and to get an introduction to his latest project, Worldwide Telescope—a kind of Google Earth for the sky that seamlessly integrates astrophotography from a variety of sources into an experience with lots of hooks for user-generated content.
The scene at HASTAC II; getting the Viewfinder presentation set up on the HIPerWall.
I presented two projects at HASTAC II, the first of which was Viewfinder. The presentation was done on UC Irvine’s HIPerWall, the extremely high resolution display consisting of 50 30-inch Apple Cinema Displays linked together. I was able to distribute the presentation materials (slides, two videos, the Viewfinder web interface, and Google Earth itself) across the width of the screen, and while we weren’t running at the native resolution of the display, it was still pretty cool to be able to play with a visual field of that size. During the show I was able to give a look at the evolution of the Viewfinder web application UI since our initial release—in this version, we had the complete workflow running as a Flex application using the new Flash Google Maps API released the week before. The first session was very well attended, and I’m told there was some lively discussion afterwards. Thanks to David Theo Goldberg for inviting me to present on the HIPerWall, and Sung-Jin Kim for invaluable help with the presentation logistics.
Caren Kaplan and I presenting Precision Targets at HASTAC II.
The following day, Caren Kaplan and I presented our upcoming piece Precision Targets as part of the demo sessions at UCLA. Precision Targets combines six narratives about GPS and its movement from military to civilian use in a comic-book-inspired format (featuring art by Ezra Claytan Daniels) that places the narratives inside a navigable 3D cube with commentary written by Caren. The work was very well received—we got a lot of great feedback that we aim to translate into momentum to complete the project in the next few months.
Next up: A report on the Electronic Literature Organization conference in Vancouver, Washington…
Viewfinder: Your photos, seamlessly aligned with Google Earth
Announcements, Flash, Flex, Viewfinder
Posted 4/4/08 by Erik Loyer
Over the past six months I’ve had the privilege of working with an outstanding group of folks from USC’s Interactive Media Division and the Institute for Creative Technologies on a new project called Viewfinder, directed by Michael Naimark. It’s a departure from my usual work in that it’s more of a pure research project—the goal being to make it easy for people to place their photographs into a 3D world model like Google Earth so the the image is perfectly aligned with the model. We launched the piece this week with a website, demo video, and coverage on the NY Times Bits technology blog.
As part of the project, we developed a browser-based 2D method for lining up a photograph with a Google Earth screen shot and then doing the necessary calculations to correctly “pose” the photo in Google Earth in 3D. This involved a Google Maps/Earth mashup developed by Will Carter that allows you to pick a point on the earth in Google Maps and see the resulting location in Google Earth (a navigation method which turns out to be much easier than trying to move around at ground level in Google Earth itself).
The second part of the 2D method was a Flex application I developed that allows you to drop a photo on top of the Google Earth image and alter its scale and position until the two are aligned as closely as possible. Some trigonometry is then applied to generate the KML code that correctly places the photo in Google Earth. Once we got the workflow up and running, it was pretty interesting to try posing different kinds of images—my personal favorite was the high angle matte painting of the United Nations building from Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (see below). It’s amazing to see how closely the painting matches the Google Earth image (especially considering the angle). I’ve posted a few more stills from the project as well.
If you check the “Results” area of the website, you’ll see that we also developed a proof-of-concept for a 3D posing method in which the user drags 3D geometry around to match the photo while an algorithm interactively solves for the correct pose. This is hardcore computer science stuff and it was great to see the folks from ICT put this together. A fascinating experience overall.
