PanoVid Test in Second Life

Here are some screen shots of the PanoVid test images in Second Life. I will have it running as video soon.

 

 

Low-level Aerial Photography

I am looking into various options for low-level aerial photography in order to achieve avatar scale. I contacted Southern Balloonworks to ask some specific questions. I am trying to make vertical images only. So I don’t need pan, tilt or even viewfinder capabilities. I just need for the camera to point straight down and level. I asked if they had a system to do this? How large of a ball would I need to work with a standard SLR camera? What I would need to tether the unit? If the altitude is limited by anything other than the range of the remote? What is the highest they have operated one of their units? What the FAA restrictions are? And, they are working with GPS at all?

PanoVid

I found an afordable workable catadioptric solution for producing my own panovid nodes. This lens by 0-360 was under $600. It is built for still photography, but it works fine with HD video. The only people experimenting with catadioptric video are research scientist in CS and mathematics and in surveillance, which is huge but not suited to my needs. I processed the test image with a simple Polar Coordinate filter, which is common in Adobe products including AffterEffects. The resulting 1024×512 pixel equirectangular projection is exactly what is needed for the Imaging Place metaverse. This means that I can pack everything I need in a simple shoulder bag, no tripods etc. The workflow will be substantially streamlined, allowing me to work much faster and more spontaneously. I should be able to have functional nodes working almost as quick as they are produced, making realtime production a real possibility.

 

 

 

 

Resolution Comparison

So I am running some test to decide on the next step strategies for upgrading the Imaging Place project. It used to be that aerial orthophotographic data was produced in the U.S. by a network of skilled aerial photographers working primarily with 9×9 inch roll film cameras through The National Aerial Photography Program (NAPP), an interagency Federal effort coordinated by the USGS. The best of the images which appear on Google Maps are still produced that way. However, with the phenomenal popularity of Google Maps commercial providers such as Digital Globe are able to finance launching increasingly sophisticated imaging satellites such as WorldView-1. Operating at an altitude of 496 kilometers, WorldView-1’s panchromatic imaging system is capable of collecting up to 750,000 square kilometers (290,000 square miles) per day at half-meter resolution imagery. Here in a 1:1 pixel detail of the data set I bought for Imaging from Digital Globe in August 2007.

The resolution is very good and I expect it will be getting better. The detail of 9×9 inch aerial roll film photography is pretty tough to beat, though. As I understand it there are strict standards for altitude, tilt, roll, pitch and atmospheric clarity to qualify for the USGS image bank. I was researching this back in 2000 to see if I could commission images at elevations lower than the standard. I found a photographer/pilot at Lawrence Airport who has a business Four Star Aviation. Here is a shot of his Cessna. 

This is a shot of the camera. 

Here is a full-frame scan of a 9×9 contact C-print flown, I believe at the minimum altitude allowed by the FAA over Cambridge.

 You can see that the detail is quite remarkable.

Here is a comparison with the Mass GIS data set of the same area. 

Here I pasted the two images to 10×10 meter scale in Second Life to approximate 512×512 file textures. You can see from this image that with the Four Star image I could put a pano node on each of the four corners of the street without crowding them. This means I could be working more or less to scale in Second Life.

One last thing. Here is a screen shot for Google of the same street corner using Mass GIS’s 2008 data, which is not yet available to the public.  I scanned the Four Star print at 300 ppi. I will scan it a little higher to see if I can match the 2008 data. 

The goal is to get the avatar to be able to walk across the image in avatar scale.

 

 

YouTube Test

I am trying to get all of the parts up and running. Here is a YouTube test of Imaging Beijing. 

Ryan and Mike Photograph the Installation

I was working in my office this afternoon and Ryan Scianio and Mike Kennedy caught my attention as they were photographing the Mixed Realities installation. I will post the images they made when I get them. Here are some screen shots I made. 

 

 

 

 Also see ghostdad’s flickr feed.

 

Mike Kennedy navigates Imaging Beijing by Ghostdad. 

CraigCam

I think I got web cam functionality working on the main website http://johncraigfreeman.net. Follow the CraigCam and Chat link. I will work on the chat later. It will only work if I am broadcasting. 

 

Yow-Long Lee

Here is a flickr feed of the opening of Mixed Realities from Yow-Long Lee.

 

  

Brooke wrote:

On Feb 12, 2008, at 4:59 PM, Brooke Knight wrote:

I just wanted to bring you up to date with the Floating Points 5: Mixed Realities symposium that happened this past weekend.

In short, it was absolutely terrific.

Having the art located right in the Huret and Spector gallery was a huge benefit to the symposium; both events worked very well in concert with one another, and working with Bob Fleming could not have been more productive or more pleasant.  Being able to leverage the budgets of both events created a real synergy, and for the first time, I really feel as though we did things “right”, instead of piecemeal. 

The artists and invited panelists were all very engaging, and the backchannel question tool we used through the Digital Lyceum project really added to the conversation.  As the work also exists in Second Life, people from around the world could participate.  Among the 52 individual people (though their avatars) who listened to the symposium, I could count people from Canada, France, Germany, and Australia.  A truly international event.

Some of those who participated in Second Life were also there in Real Life, too, so it’s difficult to get an accurate count of how many different people participated. Having said that, there were 35-40 in the Bordy who were there for the whole day; about 25 were there for the morning session only, and about 15 for the afternoon (plus the 35-40 all-dayers).  I would say that about half of the avatars in SL were also in RL (Real Life) as well. If we do the advanced math, that makes the attendance somewhere approaching 100.

What is more important is that these were engaged, active participants.  Although if you entered the room and saw all of these people with their laptops open, only occasionally looking up, you might think that they were not paying attention; in fact, they were posting and voting on questions in the backchannel; they were exploring the work in SL; and they were surfing the Web for related topics.  I truly feel as though we have seen a template for the conference of the future. In fact, Turbulence.org co-director Helen Thorington and I were talking about how the entire exhibition and symposium may, in fact, become an important historical event. Right here at Emerson. 

Of course, Helen and Jo Green from Turbulence (New Radio and Performing Arts) were the ones who conceived of and developed the exhibition, and commissioned the art in it. They were such great partners, as always, in the symposium as well. I treasure Emerson’s relationship with Turbulence.

We should also recognize the contributions of the Media Services dept, who were invaluable, as well as all of IT for the tremendous help with the network and the extensive testing we were able to do, and to facilities who arranged the Bordy and provided power for all of those laptops. We were lucky to have Ryan Sciano on board to help with the technical elements in the gallery as well. Our only technical issue was a slight delay coming from the streaming of the audio for our participants in SL. That’s it.  With all of that technology and all that could go wrong, it really was seamless. Wow.

Many thanks.

Best,

Brooke 

 

 

 

Remote Presence

I am getting the first experiences of having a remote presence at the exhibition. I was able to call Jo Anne Green over to the project and talk to her and an arts writer when I heard them talking about the exhibition.

 

Gallery Director Robert Fleming of the Huret & Spector Gallery meets with JC Fremont (aka John Craig Freeman) at the Imaging Beijing project.