Documenting the research and production of interactive network based media. By David Wolf
This is the latest version of my Quicktime vj/image search app. It now works as two separate movies which talk to eachother. Click on each of the images above to load in Quicktime Player.
More details, instructions etc soon (i’ve gotta race to the library to return some very overdue books!).
I recently came across a copy of Ben Hammersley’s presentation on the ‘Semantic Web’. I’d heard the term a few times but never really looked into it. This was an excellent introduction to the concept. Also impressive is the Quicktime movie itself which features a small view of Ben giving the presentation, along with a larger view of the slides he is referring to. Here is Ben’s comment on the presentation: The Sporting Gentleman’s Guide to the Semantic Web and other such Technological Marvels of the Modern Age – remixed. from Ben Hammersley’s Dangerous Precedent
And here is the file: Quicktime (38Mb)
As a follow up to the TV series “24″, Fox is releasing a series of one minute ‘Mobisodes’ dubbed “24: Conspiracy”. These new micro-episodes are to be distributed (sold?) to Vodafone customers’ phones. I didn’t really get into the show when it was on TV but I think the subject matter would be ideal for an alternate reality style game.
I think the key to making this cooler would be using the fact that the playback device is a phone. This means ‘Mobisodes’ could be broadcast at any time of day or night with a 100% chance the audience will see them (even if they check their messages the next day). Users/viewers could send information back to the producers and/or to each other to select a character or plot thread to follow or just to comment.
I doubt that this will happen, but still, its is an interesting move for a major studio to start producing content for 3G capable phones.
More info:
MSNBC – Fox to create TV series for cell phones
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | TV and Radio | 24 being made for mobile phones
24weblog.com – Vodafone lures 3G customers with 24-inspired drama
Yahoo! News – Fox to Create Series for Wireless Phones
via SG and Boing Boing
I recently completed work on an experimental internet radio program with Hannah Miller and Kate Eccles. Hannah and Kate are final year Media students at RMIT majoring in Radio and TV production. My role in the production was to take various pieces of audio, video, still images and text, and create an interface which would allow the user to mix and match the elements in an exploratory, non-linear way.
The result of this work is a program called “Inspiration”, which features interviews, live footage, sound recordings and lyrics from Reset://0 a Japanese influenced Melbourne band.
The program was authored in LiveStage Pro and is a Quicktime file that consists of a sprite track, several movie tracks and a text track which features lyrics. The above image shows the partially completed work as I was assigning sounds to various non-square shaped roll-over buttons. The idea was that rather than presenting the user with a list of options, or even a grid of non-labelled options, the work should encourage the user to explore the screen space with the cursor, almost like they are feeling their way in the dark. To give the users some feedback, and a little direction as to where may be a good place to explore, I used Hanna’s fire twirling image as a guide. I placed invisible sprites over the background image which reacted to the “MouseEnter” event, triggering sounds which played in specific movie tracks, and changing the sprite image for the background so that different parts of the fire twirling would be illuminated and hi-lighted.
You can view the completed work in context on the interadio site. Or, to go straight to Inspiration(requires Quicktime, a fairly recent computer and a decent broadband connection – 15Mb)
In Flickr each image tag has an associated RSS feed automatically generated from a URL with the following structure:
http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=###&format=rss_200
where ### is your search tag.
So to do a search for “factory” I take the string “http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=” and add it to the contents of the text box and then add “&format=rss_200″ to the end. This give me the URL of the feed. I then use the “LoadQTListFromXML” command to load it into the movie. The RSS file is structured as below, it has a lot of information for each picture.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/42039133@N00/560315/
/><br />I’m not sure whether the quotation marks
add to the effect, or detract from it.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rae/547742/
/><br />Watching the precious bottles of Cascade beer get packaged up.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rae/547738/
/><br />Apparently this cat lives at the Cascade factory. It was there the last time
Tony visited.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rae/547736/
/><br />The Cascade beer brewery in Tasmania. Yum!
…
If you compare this with the previous XML example you can see some similarities. Where I have the whole list surrounded by the
Ok I just realised it would have been much easier to find the image details from in the enclosure tag, but I used the description tag. I’ll change this next version. Anyway…
For each item, there is a url for a medium sized jpg image. After some quick snooping around I found that the images are coded with a letter to describe their size. For example here is an image from DocManhattan‘s Flickr photostram showing the various sizes and their urls (note the how only the last letters change):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/550041_75d3362292_s_d.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/550041_75d3362292_t_d.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/550041_75d3362292_m_d.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/550041_75d3362292_d.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/550041_75d3362292_o_d.jpg
The RSS points to the “m” sized image but what I need is the “t” thumbnail sized version so I remove the last few letters and add “t_d.jpg” to the end.
This post is getting really long so I’ll continue with part 3 soon. Please leave a comment if I need to explain anything more clearly.
Vidget 3 reads from a very simple XML file to load thumbnail images, this file is structured as follows:
…
Each of the clip names refers to the name of both the thumbnail and its associated video clip. For example, when
Loading the Flickr thumbnail images is a little more complicated.
This is the latest version of my interactive networked video project.
Click on the image to load Vidget 3 in Quicktime Player. (It is quite small but very processor intensive – especially as it first loads)
This version is a mix between the my first vidget which featured a text based interface for mixing up to three video clips on top of eachother, and my Quicktime Flickr photo viewer which let you search for and view images based on a search word.
The interface has been redesigned and now features a grid of 25 draggable images which represent video clips. These may be dragged and dropped onto three coloured ‘layers’. The blue layer is the uppermost with green below and red at the bottom. Each of these layers has a number of ‘graphics modes’. Like Photoshop layers, these may be combined in a number of modes, ranging from fully transparent to fully opaque. Each of these layers also has a number of playback controls which allow the user to play the clip faster or slower, forwards or backwards and step through frame by frame.
To the right of the three colour layers and their controls is a small white text field. This allows the user to search for images from Flickr. The ten most recent pictures tagged with the search word entered are loaded as thumbnails below. These thumbnails may be dragged and dropped onto any of the layers and combined with other moving and still images.
I have resized the output movie area so that everything fits on one screen.
Behind the scenes, the vidget has also been greatly updated. Rather than being limited to a set number of video clips determined at the time of authoring, this version dynamically loads all content including thumbnails. The names of these files are drawn from an XML file. This file may be updated with a simple text editor to add or delete more clips. The movie automatically loads the first 25 thumbnails from the XML list as it initially loads but may load the next 25, and the following 25 via the 1, 2 and 3 buttons at the top right of the controls.
At the moment the whole movie pauses whenever thumbnails are loaded, either via a Flickr search or by skipping to the next 25 thumbnails of video clips. I am working on ways around this.
The LiveStage Pro source files may be downloaded here: vidget3.zip
I had a quick play with del.icio.us today. It’s like a public bookmarks list, they call it ‘social bookmarks’. Its also like a stripped down blog engine with two key features that I think are very cool.
1. It generates RSS feeds of bookmarks.
2. Each entry can be ‘tagged’ and categorised – mmm, metadata 
1+2 = It can generate RSS feeds for each tag.
So I was thinking, what if rather than linking to web pages I link to video files. And what if rather than giving a text description, I include a reference to a jpeg thumbnail. Now I could theoretically link to any piece of video I find or generate on the web and find it by searching for its tag. This would work just like my flickr viewer except for video/sound/anything.
A few people have recently commented that my poster movies weren’t working properly. I think this was due to the fact that I was using .jpg images as the poster movies. While Safari and Firefox had no problem using the Quicktime Plugin to view the .jpgs, Internet Explorer didn’t like them. I have now replaced the .jpgs with .movs of exactly the same content so hopefully the problem has been solved.
A survey of the consumption habits of my neighbours. The other day I ran around the block with my camera phone taking a quick snap of the contents of each recycle bin as I passed it on the street. I fixed the jpegs up a bit in Photoshop and opened them all in Quicktime Player, copying and pasting them into a new movie and exporting at half size (320*240).
As usual, click to load. It’s a bit bigger than my recent posts because I wanted each frame to be clear. I used the photo jpeg codec for this reason – it uses only spatial (not temporal) compression.
Once the movie is going you can click to pause and use the left and right arrows to advance frame by frame to inspect the rubbish closely 
Click image to load in Quicktime Player (it seems to be a little funky in a browser)
This is a little Quicktime movie that lets you view photos from Flickr, a photo sharing and social networking site. When users upload their images they associate them with tags, so a picture of a tree may have the tags ‘tree’, ‘green’, ‘eucalyptus’ etc. The entire database of photos is searchable by tag, by author, by series and other organisations. Each of these has a RSS or ATOM feed associated with it. This is what I am using here to access the 10 most recent uploads for a given tag.
To search the site and view the photos, just type a tag, say “cow” (no quotes) into the small white text field and press return. If you press return without entering any text you get the 10 most recent uploads from any category. Once the thumbnails load you can click to view at a larger size on the right.
The movie uses Quicktime’s ability to read and parse XML files such as RSS feeds and access files from the network.
Source files and more detailed explanation soon…
Andreas at solitude.dk has set up a system on his videoblog whereby anyone can leave video comments which are added to the end of his video piece. I’ll have to find out exactly how it works but it Adrian says it is a combination of scripts which generate a SMIL file with Quicktime content.
You can find it here.
I just added a comment and it worked SO easily! The theme is confessions so I made a quick voyeuristic noir piece with my phone camera and some of my friend Elaine’s music on the stereo. Check it out as part of the video comment thread, or below.
[update- just as I posted this my neighbour actually came into the room I was filming and started singing in the shower!]
I see that Adrian has found some useful info on embedding QuickTime movies in web pages. It is very cool how you can set up a series of individual movies to play in sequence using the embed tag alone. I think this is particularly useful in the context of moblogging/videoblogging.
One of the characteristics of video taken with a camera phone or digital still camera is that it tends to feature one continuous shot. While Quicktime Pro allows for fairly easy basic editing of shots, by using the embed tag to string the shots together the user can create separate annotated permalinks for each shot (say videos from a holiday) and string a selection of shots together for a ‘hilights reel’ at no extra storage cost and with very little difficulty. Tools like QT HTML help too.
Some more snooping around the Apple developer site reveals some of the other network friendly abilities Quicktime has. QuickTime XML Importers describes how a basic xml text file with the ‘.mov’ extension can be used to do a number of handy things. For example, if you are using a new codec or component in your movies which are not yet common, such a file can be used test for its presence and ask the user if they want to download it.
The ability to read xml files also means that you can set up a ‘Quicktime Link File’ (.qtl) to do things like: open a movie in the Quicktime Player application, play at full screen, and then quit when the movie has finished. ‘.qtl’ files can be written by hand in any text editor, generated by script, or created using Quicktime Player’s XML Exporter.
Another flavour of XML is SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) which provides a standard cross platform way to create playlists and presentations combining discrete content (interestingly, the MMS standard for mobile multimedia messaging is based on SMIL). For example a SMIL file can source a slide show of JPEG photos from one server and display text annotations for each photo, while playing an accompanying MP3 from another. SMIL also allows multiple visual sources to be arranged on screen and played independently. Quicktime and SMIL provides a detailed run through of the functions available and how to apply them, while Embedding SMIL Documents in a Web Page describes that process.
This video was recorded during a lunch break at work. Michael (one of my work mates) is showing me the new automated self-checkout at Chadstone Coles. While there are still human checkout operators there too, and It does seem to take longer to go through the self-checkout than it would be to go through an actual person, I don’t think I’d like to be one of checkout operators who has to watch as they are slowly replaced.
Click to view video (1.5Mb).
This is a homage to Michel Gondry’s awesome music video for Chemical Brothers: Star Guitar with all of the coolness surgically removed. Also I am travelling in the wrong direction. Enjoy. I definitely recommend the original
P.S: the Quicktime plugin didn’t seem to like it when I used the .3gp extension so I saved the movie as as .mov and all seems well. Weird.
Click to view video.
Ok, I’ve been inspired by the Videoblogging crew to start posting some video blog entries and now that I have a new phone which can record video and send it to my computer via bluetooth there’s no excuse! I think these posts will be mostly everyday snapshot type content which I can remix and manipulate in my interactive works.
This was recorded on Swan Street in Richmond with my shiny new phone (a Sony Ericsson K700). Over the last couple of weeks the speed limits on inner suburban shopping streets seem to have all dropped from 60kmh to 40 and these flashing signs have popped up all over the place. I think they look cool, but with cars going slower pedestrians seem to cross the road whenever they want to (creating some near-misses).
Twitter