The Insta360 Nano and Air – A climbing test
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The Insta360 Nano and Air – A climbing test

Byrichard

The Insta 360 Nano and Air are two affordable cameras. The first is designed to work with the new iPhone shape as well as a stand alone device. The Insta360 Air works only when it is plugged into an Android device. Both are good for specific uses.

Insta360 Air

The Insta360 Air requests a firmware update the first time you want to use it. This takes a few minutes and then the device uses the phone’s gyroscopes to keep the image stable. On the Via Ferrata I climbed this weekend I used the insta360 Air and Xperia Z5compact phone to take one or two landscape pictures. In these images you can look up at the cliff, look across at the landscape or look down at how far from the ground I am. This is a nice way of giving people a feel for what it is like to practice Via Ferrata. For the use of this system, it is good to have both hands free.

[vrview img=”https://www.main-vision.com/richard/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/export_1496508048682-1.jpg” width=”500″ height=”500″ ]

Use the mouse/trackpad to rotate the image

Insta360 Nano

 

The Insta360 Nano is great because it has an SD card slot. It can be used as a stand-alone device. With the tripod mount and a selfie stick interesting images and video are possible. I tested it on a Tyrolean crossing. That’s where you attach your pulley to a cable and swing across over a waterfall. With a 360 camera you look anywhere you like. Image stabilisation for Tyrolean crossings is essential. When you transition from standing on firm ground to swinging across you move a lot. With image stabilisation this is avoided.

Post production

Post production with the Nano is quick and easy. Take the SD card, read it with your laptop and share. With the Insta360 Air you’re using the phone’s microSD card. You can batch edit and export to the insta360 community sites. I want to bulk export directly to Google photo from an Android device.

Conclusion

For the price of a Ricoh Theta S, you can have two 360 cameras. The Nano is ideal for monopod use and the Air is ideal for web streaming once you find the right phone mount for a professional monopod. With image stabilisation the camera keeps the image centred where the person with a VR headset looks. Without image stabilisation Nano footage would give people motion sickness.

A Plastic Ocean – Recycle more
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A Plastic Ocean – Recycle more

Byrichard

A Plastic Ocean is an excellent documentary detailing the problems and threats caused by plastics entering water systems and eventually reaching the seas and oceans. This documentary starts with a team trying to film whales. When they finally do find the whales off the coast of Sri Lanka they notice that there is a film of oil and plastic build up miles from the shore. They say that this bit of ocean should be clean as the beaches had been unused for years. They suspect that the plastic had been freed after heavy rains flushed them out to sea.

I went to the Graduate institute to watch this film last night and the crowd was already well informed. When one speaker asked, “Did you know that the Plastic Ocean problem was this serious” at least half of the room, if not more raised their hand. When people were asked about the zero waste movement at least a third of people raised their hand. The auditorium was filled to capacity.

Plastic and snorkeling

When I was snorkeling in Spain a few  weeks ago I was looking for fish and I saw a few small fish. In the past I had been scuba diving in these waters and surfaced to be surrounded by jellyfish. If you’re stung by a jelly fish you don’t need to use urine. Olive oil and seawater will calm the inflamation. I thought that I saw a jellyfish but as I swam closer I saw that it was a transparent plastic bag floating near the surface. I grabbed the bag and I placed it in my semi-drysuit sleeve and eventually swam back to come out of the water. As I walked back from the activity I picked up a second plastic bag and threw them away. If these bags were left in the Mediterranean then sea turtles and other animals might eat them.

Environmental impact

When plastics reach the ocean seventy percent sinks to the bottom of the sea and can remain there for centuries. What does not sink is degraded by the sun but it is broken up, rather than broken down. What this means is that you go from plastic sheets to plastic pellets and these plastic pellets outnumber krill and plankton by a ratio of two to one. This means that sea birds, fish and other animals higher up the food chain ingest plastic and it accumulates. Seabirds and whales ingest so much plastic that it fills their stomachs and they eventually die of starvation.

Everyday Recycling

It is at this moment that I am so happy to live in a canton where you can recycle PET in one container and all other plastics in another. This means that almost all of the plastic I use on a daily basis is recycled. It can be re-used for bags, car doors and more permanent uses.

 

Recycling is a simple and intuitive habit to have. My generation learned to recycle as children and we have kept up this habit for decades. It is so normal that we feel uneasy at festivals and events where we don’t have bins for PET, Aluminium and other products. In some cases I keep aluminium or PET bottles on me until I find a place where I can recycle them. I enjoy that at Swiss train stations you can now recycle paper, PET, Aluminium and other rubbish.

The advantage of recycling loops is that we use the primary material more than once. It means that we don’t need to waste energy and money on extracting oil and other primary materials. We simply recycle the materials. The concept of closed circuits was discussed.

An Environmentally Friendly Hike

If this post has inspired you to do more for the environment there is a wehike event organised by the Summit Foundation .

This is a hike inaugurating the partnership between WeHike and Summit Foundation, a Swiss ecological non-profit. The Foundation’s mission is to reduce the environmental impact of human activities -leisure activities in particular- in high-traffic locations like ski areas, by raising awareness and proposing concrete solutions. To this end, WeHike supports the Summit Foundation’s objectives by promoting and organising environmentally-aware hikes and waste collection & recycling operations in high mountains.

This is a two day hike near Les Diablerets.

A plastic Ocean is available to watch on Netflix and from other sources. It is worth watching as it will affect how you use plastic in future.

Ecosia – Planting trees with a search engine
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Ecosia – Planting trees with a search engine

Byrichard

Ecosia is an environmental search engine for those who want to do social good through their web browsing habits. The principle is simple. You go to the Ecosia main page and type in your search engine query. For every search engine query that you do ad revenue is generated. This ad revenue is then invested into tree growing projects in a number of countries.

Deforestation is a threat faced around the world because as trees are removed so the environment of certain species is destroyed and this can lead to the extinction of species. The other consequences of deforestation are that the soil runs off of the land and clogs rivers. It also means that the humidity that was kept around by the trees and plants is now gone.

When I worked as a video archivist I watched news items about refugees and how they were planting trees in their camps. They planted them as an investment in the future. Ecosia produced a video with a similar message which you can see above.

They currently have projects in Peru, Madagascar, Burkina Faso, Tanzania and Indonesia. These projects cover a number of needs. They help to reforest areas where excessive logging has taken place such as in Peru. In Madagascar they are hiring villagers to replant the forests to help preserve biodiversity. In Burkina Faso they are planting trees to try to stop the desert from encroaching on the areas where people live. In Tanzania we find another conservation of biodiversity effort. In Indonesia they are planting ten tree species to stop the spread of Palm oil farming and to save the natural habitat of Orang Utangs.

Europe, North America and other parts of the world were once covered in forests that were thick and full of life. With population growth and development forests were cut down for firewood and to provide space for fields and more. It is nice to know that today there are projects like Ecosia that aim to reforest areas around the world so that future generations may still play and enjoy forested landscapes. Either install the Chrome plugin or bookmark the website.

 

Unhappy facebook users – Marketers and Academics are looking in the wrong place.

Unhappy facebook users – Marketers and Academics are looking in the wrong place.

Byrichard

Unhappy Facebook Users – Marketers and Academics are looking in the wrong place.

Every single day they publish articles about why social media is bad for us. Every day they ignore that we meet people via social media rather than bars. Every day they ignore that those I meet through social media work on interesting projects. Every day they ignore that if it wasn’t for social websites I would not have taken up via Ferrata, rock climbing and other sports.

Every day they assume that we prefer alcohol, weed and hard drugs rather than textroverted conversations with people we get to feel comfortable with online, before meeting them in person.

Do you really think that Facebook users would be happy sitting at a bar with a half empty glass of alcohol?

The findings? Using Facebook was tightly linked to compromised social, physical and psychological health. For example, for each statistical jump (away from the average) in “liking” other people’s posts, clicking their links or updating one’s own status, there was a 5% to 8% increase in the likelihood that the person would later experience mental-health problems.

The article doesn’t spend a single word discussing introversion and geographic locations as reasons for people to socialise more via Facebook than in face to face meetings. If you’re not the happy go lucky, soul of the party, then do you have much motivation to socialising in the physical world where you listen to conversations without being heard?

 

Still, there are some nuances to consider. Why would online social activity be so damaging to health and well-being in this study when the same activity was found to be correlated with longevity in a 2016 study co-written by Prof. Christakis? The bottom line, he says, is that replacing in-person interactions with online contact can be a threat to your mental health. “What people really need is real friendships and real interactions,” he adds.

Online social activity is not damaging to health and well-being. It is not because you socialise online that you do not have fun in the real world. The article ignores that the nefast nature of social media comes from marketing and public relations. Social media is all about the conversations. The more conversations you have with people the happier you are. If you’re a passive follower of people of brands then, of course, you’ll felt left out and alone. Academics, marketers and public relations people should study how best to make brands conversational and warm rather than cold and utilitarian.

Do we want to follow brands on Facebook that post the same message twice a day for weeks in a row? Of course not. We want brands on FB and other social networks to provide us with the adventures they’ve been on. Look at Crosscall, Petzl, Mammut and other brands. I follow them because I like to see the videos, the photographs and the stories they tell. I like it to be an ongoing conversation.

At this moment I have no concrete plans to go to New Zealand and yet I follow Wildwire Wanaka because they reflect my passion for Via Ferrata.

[caption id="attachment_3522" align="aligncenter" width="231"] Social Media are positive[/caption]

Facebook and other social media platforms are conversational tools for people planning trips, preparing for events or simply keeping in touch with university and school friends, colleagues and more. If academics and marketers took the time to understand why people use social media they would see that they are an enhancement to our social lives rather than a replacement. We build relationships and collaborations through social media.

 

The age of Bloggers and Self installations

The age of Bloggers and Self installations

Byrichard

I come from the age of bloggers and self-installations. In fact, I come from the age of HTML pages and static websites. In those days we surfed the web looking for and finding content. We also found interesting bits of code and we added new features to our websites. We would install forums, guestbooks and more. In so doing our static websites became dynamic. At this point, our website could grow a community.

At this time we had our PhpBB forum, our own wiki, our own WordPress installation. When we said, “My website”, “my blog” or “my forum” it was ours. We were the webmasters. We were the ones that had found the code and figured out how to install it on our web host. Communities were small and geographically dispersed across countries, continents and time zones so most interactions were verbal.

Fast forward to today and most people do not have their own web server, their own wiki, their own web page or their own blogs. What they have are social media accounts hosted by others. They are not administrators, they do not have the technical knowledge. According to investors, marketers and other groups, these people are users of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google Plus and other websites but their power is restricted to what they post and whether they delete their account.

They are so disconnected from the mechanics of websites that they say “My Facebook”, “My Instagram”, “my twitter”. Web sites and by extension social media are not like books, mobile phones or bikes. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are not yours. Your influence is restricted to your personal account, no further.

I wanted to have my own microblogging platform, I wanted to have my own diaspora server and more. I never did because my technical skills and budget did not allow it. With both of these, you needed server permissions that I was not willing to pay for. At that time I would have had my own Twitter or my own Facebook. I would have installed them. I would have been the administrator. I would have had the challenge of finding a crowd or tribe to populate it with content.

Recently I was also thinking about the discussion about curation that people were having. There was a time when the idea was to get people to surf the web, find content and organise it in such a way as to make it easy for others to find content. Now that we’re in 2017 the idea of curation has evolved. Everyone shares content so the need for dedicated people has dwindled.

 

The Drapel Climbing wall near Aigle
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The Drapel Climbing wall near Aigle

Byrichard

The Drapel Climbing Wall near Aigle is a nice place to climb. When I was there yesterday we were in the shade of the trees unless we were climbing. The temperature for this week is at around 25-27°c daily which is nice. These are almost summer temperatures, at last. The parking for this climbing wall is

Getting there

The parking for this climbing wall is here. I’m giving a specific location because when I looked at maps I was not filled with confidence. To get to the parking you go to Yvorne and from there towards Vers Monthey. You drive through a narrow gap between two houses and then along a viticultural road towards the forest. You go up a dirt road for a few metres. The parking is a clearing in the woods. From there you walk for between 10-15 minutes. You know you’re at the climbing wall because there is a bench overlooking the castle. Come back a few metres and you’ll see the climbing wall where there are routes.

The Routes

You know you’re at the climbing wall because there is a bench overlooking the castle. Come back a few metres and you’ll see the climbing wall where there are routes. At this wall you have 15 5a to 5c+ routes, 15 6a to 6a+ routes and 20 7a to 7c+ routes. These climbs are slab and overhangs. The places are well equipped. Routes are between 28-50m.

If and when you come to this climbing wall make sure you have a print-out of the routes and their difficulty. The routes are not named so you might accidentally do a 6a route and exhaust yourself immediately, as we did. I would definitely come back to this wall and this time I would make sure to climb routes that are gradually harder as the day progresses.

 

 

Mental Health and Social media
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Mental Health and Social media

Byrichard

There is a lot of discussion about Mental Health and social media because most people are not social media natives. They are either Luddites who do not appreciate playing with technology. They see themselves as users rather than participants and then there are extroverts and other people who see Social Media as a threat to their way of life. We live in societies built for extroverts rather than textroverts. As a textroverts social media is a place for me to have full conversations without having to compete with extroverts who often hijack conversations through charisma and the superficiality of what they have to say. The Royal Society for public health wrote a paper on the topic

It’s amusing that Instagram is theoretically the worst social app because if people use it like me then they would share their hikes, their climbs and their adventures. These would lead to FoMO and a feeling of solitude if people were motivated to do the same activities as me but unable to. Anxiety, body image, depression and bullying are all consequences of how marketers have encouraged people to use instagram. When brands and social media “personalities” post certain images and when brands promote certain behaviours then they encourage people to idealise the wrong things. They encourage superficiality rather than genuine interactions.

It should be highlighted that a lot of people use Instagram for selfies and this leads people to compare themselves to others. If they photograph food, sports, mountains, seasides and more the negative aspects highlighted above would vanish.

It’s amusing that Youtube is the highest and most positively ranked social medium because it is the one that my generation see as having the most negative comments. We often joke that youtube is fine until you read the comments. It’s good that people like Twitter and Facebook because twitter is great for getting to know people and Facebook is a useful way of staying in touch with friends when we travel and move around for work and university.

The Royal Society for Public Health came out with a few recommendations:

1. The introduction of a pop-up heavy usage warning on social media

If social media is an integral part of social life, rather than an addition to it then this recommendation does not apply. If twitter, Instagram, Facebook and other social networks are integrated seamlessly into our daily lives then “heavy usage” would not occur and thus warnings would be redundant. Social media is part of a lifestyle. It is only when marketers trick people into following rather than conversing that it becomes toxic and require time limits.

2. Social media platforms to highlight when photos of people have been
digitally manipulated

If it wasn’t for the selfie and disinformation this recommendation would not be needed. The skills to tell which images are digitally manipulated can easily be taught. This generation grow up playing with the software used to alter these images in the first place.

3. NHS England to apply the Information Standard Principles to health
information published via social media

Media literacy is a skill that should be taught along with reading. As soon as people are able to read they should be taught to discern between reliable and unreliable information. This is a skill that should be taught from the moment someone learns to read to the moment they graduate from university. Media literacy is a very important skill in the information age.

4. Safe social media use to be taught during PSHE education in school

Grown ups are just as likely to suffer from bullying and other behaviour so it does not apply just to children. In the early days of the world wide web we all used avatars and nicknames rather than our real identity. This helped us play online without much danger. We see that safe spaces have been created for people below a certain age to interact online. Now that the world wide web has come of age it is important to work on creating more geographically relevant social environments like this.

5. Social media platforms to identify users who could be suffering from
mental health problems by their posts and other data, and discreetly
signpost to support

The nature of social media can be an introspective one and as such encourages people to be open about how they feel. Aside from signposting people who are at risk social media and social networks could create discreet groups on Facebook and other social networks where people can assemble of their own free will. By discreet groups I mean groups where membership and names are withheld both from within and from outside the group.

6. Youth-workers and other professionals who engage with young people to
have a digital (including social) media component in their training

This point amuses me because when I speak to social media experts and social media professionals I see that they see social media as something to do during office hours as part of their job. They do not see it as an addition to their lifestyle and as such are not natives of the medium. If people have a digital (including Social) media component in their training then they should live and breath it.

Too many people provide the wrong impression of social media and how it can be used. Too many people stigmatise it and this helps to emphasise the negative impressions that mainstream people have of social media. Social media is a lifestyle and only those who see it as a lifestyle should teach social media.

7. More research to be carried out into the effects of social media on
young people’s mental health.

A few decades ago we all lived in villages and everyone we knew lived within walking distance. As time progressed and as trains, cars and jet aviation became part of our daily lives so the village we grew up in became a state, a country, a continent, a planet. If you’re going to study social media on young people’s health then you should not ignore that social media is connecting people living in different villages in the countryside and different streets in towns. As such it means that social media could help people who are geographically distant stay together mentally. What should be studied is the negative impact of marketing on people’s natural use of social networks. Marketing and public relations should enhance, not distract from communicating with people.

The World VR Forum – Year 2 – The Conferences

The World VR Forum – Year 2 – The Conferences

Byrichard

I was a volunteer at the World VR Forum again this year. I was in the conference room providing speakers with microphones before they went up on stage. As a result of this I was able to listen to many interesting speakers. They spoke about a diversity of topics of interest to various groups.

Google Earth and the HTC Vive

Dominik Käser presented Google Earth VR. He spoke about how Google had spent time thinking about how the earth sounds in different locations, from different altitudes and more. He spoke about how they thought about the sound of a dragging rock when the globe is spun slowly and a jet when it is spun faster. He also spoke about the considerations for how to move within this environment. An excellent demonstration of Google earth in VR is included with the video above. It would be a fantastic tool for journey planning.

Club Med and VR

Julien Lebreton spoke about how Club Med was thinking about and implementing Virtual reality and 360 videos in to advertising for events. 360 videos are a great way of getting people to experience what travelling to certain locations are. I am interested in how VR can be used for tourism.

 

Other discussions included the Neuroscience of VR and how the mind perceives the world in VR as well as consciousness and VR. These are interesting talks because the better people understand how the Human mind reacts to virtual reality environments the better experiences can be. To go along with this there was a speech about the Limbic chair and how it provided people with the opportunity to “walk” around in VR more naturally. The full program is at the following link.

2017 World VR Forum Program

Due to the volume of speeches of I heard and because I was busy I was unable to devote my full concentration to every speech. What I did come away with is that people are looking to fund VR content and they do want to be seen as first movers. They want to see up to a 30 fold return on investment multiple funding rounds down the line. Content creators are looking to create a large back catalogue of content so that in future when VR goes mainstream they will have something to distribute on multiple panels. China was given a strong position within this year’s world VR forum and their point of view was expressed by a diversity of speeches.

Conclusion:

During last year’s World VR Forum I tried and enjoyed almost all of the VR experiences, some of them multiple times. As a result of this I really got to grips with the breadth and diversity of opportunities that VR experiences could offer to the user. I met with most of the speakers this year and listened to their speeches. As a result of this my understanding of many topics has increased. I will look at some of these topics in more depth.

My favourite side event was the midnight swim. It’s the first time that I’ve been for a midnight swim in a heated indoor pool in Switzerland. Another moment I really enjoyed as a volunteer was the fondue dinner on the last night. The fondue and the ambiance were really good.

I’ll be back again next year. I enjoy the World VR Forum. It would be fun to go as a content creator next time.

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Shark Reporting.

Byrichard

In the age of drones this is how shark reporting should be done. The Coast guard or local surfing schools should fly a drone around and check to see whether there are any sharks present. If and when they spot a shark or groups of sharks they could temporarily close the beach until the threat is gone. It reduces the need for shark nets. It also reduces the need and desire to kill any shark that is spotted as people are informed ahead of this time.

The report tells us that the sharks in the video are juveniles and that the reason for which they are on this section of beach might be linked to a dead whale floating “about eight miles away in that direction”. There is no sensationalism. We are given the facts. The report then tells people that if they do want to swim or surf and be safe they should stay near the lifeguard tower.

When a whale dies it provides sharks with enough food for days or even weeks. It provides them with food until it looses buoyancy and sinks to the bottom of the sea where crabs and eels eat the remains. I’m sharing the second video because we see divers photographing and filming sharks as they eat a whale carcass. We see how close they get without any difficulties.

There are a number of interesting documentaries to learn more about sharks and I recommend watching Sharkwater because it shows that rather than sharks being a threat to us it is us that are a threat to sharks. By taking a calm and rational approach to sharks we are helping preserve the ecosystem. By learning to cohabit with these animals we are allowing future generations a chance to see these animals. With today’s technology we can monitor risk, especially on calm and clear days.

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K2 With a Drone

Byrichard

K2 with a Drone is a documentary following Petr Jan Juracka, a scientific photographer’s trip to K2 with Klara Kolouchova with two drones. He performed extensive testing before setting off on the trip. He flew the drone in a hyperbaric chamber to see how it would react. He flew it in freezing conditions to check that the batteries would cope and then he flew in other places.

He had already flown his drone in a multitude of countries and Pakistan was the latest challenge. We see the journey to base camp. We see images of the snow and ice, of rivers, of challenging roads and more. The documentary mixes fixed camera footage and drone footage in a pleasant to watch manner.

Thanks to God, to a lot of work of professional kindergarten teachers, great support of my parents and a lot of eye-training I see. And I see perfectly! Since the times my vision went good I enjoy every detail, every color and I admire any type of light. – Petr Jan Jura?ka

For some of the cold weather testing:

As I watched this documentary one question I wanted to have answered is how he powers his drone and other devices. Apparently he has a set of solar panels that he can deploy outside his tent. When acclimating at base camp solar panels would be ideal. There is no need to carry a heavy generator and fuel. You just bring a few weatherproof panels, deploy them on the side of the tent and wait for various batteries to charge. In that shot we see that the weather is overcast.

Overall this is an interesting documentary that I would expect to see at events  such as the Alpine Film Festival in Les Diablerets or the Montagne en Scène events. Combined with more footage of the climb of K2 it could provide for a more complete documentary.