first post from the touch
this is a post typed from the iPod touch to see how easy it isto use. Aside from not having a proper keyboard it seems to work fine. Great for blogging on the move.
I was at the World Virtual Reality Forum in Crans Montana this weekend as a volunteer. During this time I was able to try many of the demonstrations and get a real feel for the potential of 360° and immersive videos. I was also able to listen to people comment on what they appreciated about the experiences and what they did not like.
One of my favourite experiences was Vulkane in 3D und 360. I worked at this exhibit two out of the three days helping two people at a time every three minutes experience this. I had watched a number of videos before this one and when I watched this one I said Wow because the experience was so beautiful. The quality is excellent and there are some vistas that are spectacular. We are familiar with watching volcanic eruptions but with this experience we are watching the scene as if we are there. As the volcano erupts we can see the projectiles and follow their course through the sky. This is a novel experience for many of us.
Another experience that I got to try and received good feedback from was the Chernobyl 30th Anniversary experience. In this case you launch an app on the mobile phone and you can see a number of videos. You have interviews, videos of locations and interactive content. With this experience you can listen to an interview with a woman who still lives in Chernobyl. As she talks you can look around the room in which she lives. This provides you with a better understanding of whom she is.
Reframe Iran is another 360° immersive documentary experience. This experience was appreciated by some and disliked by others. If you study documentary making you are familiar with Cinéma Verité, direct cinema and the fly on the wall concept. In this documentary a 360° camera was put in between the journalist and camera crew and the artist whom is speaking. As the artist speaks you can look around the room. You can look at the journalist, at the artist’s work, the couch in one corner or the bookshelf. You are in the room with them, like a fly on the wall. If you appreciate direct cinema and Cinéma Verité then you will enjoy this documentary.
DEFROST – The Series
Defrost was filmed using the Nokia Ozo and puts you in the place of a woman who was cryogenically frozen and then reanimated. For this experience we wore Samsung VR headsets and sat in a wheel chair. We were the re-animated woman. The experience was interesting because it allows you to feel empathy for whom you, as the viewer are meant to be.
The difficult People project has as it’s aim to provide people with an immersive experience in to the world as perceived by people with a different perspective on the world. In the first film we saw the world as someone would with hyperactivity. A second video was produced for the World VR forum and showed the world as someone with OCD would see it. This is a project that I personally contributed to with sound recording. The aim of the video was to provide you, as the viewer, with an experience of what it is like to go shopping with the disorder. You see the coping mechanisms via her interior monologue. You hear her worry that people are watching her, that people will see that she buys three of everything and that she may steal if she is alone in the aisle.
On the first day of the conference I was helping people with this experience and as I received feedback I started to see 360° or immersive videos as literature because of the way in which it enables people to feel empathy for the subject of the video. Some people said that they were curious to see whether they suffered from the same problems.
Viens can be translated as either “come” or “follow me”. I saw this as art, as an experiment which took advantage of what 360° videos have to offer. The camera is hanging from the ceiling and you see a group of people standing around the camera. At first they are hidden behind plastic but as you get further in to the video you see nude people standing. As the film progresses the camera changes position. At one point the camera is lower and you are looking up at giants. At another moment you seeing the action from above.
In each sequence you have the choice of which action you most want to watch. In this experience you choose what you want to see, rather than the camera operator or director. You are in control. You are the camera operator. This video really demonstrates the power of 360° videos. It demonstrates how immersive film making is an opportunity to think about what works well as an immersive experience and what works well as conventional video content.
Immersive video content requires the content maker to think as a camera operator, to think about what is in front of the camera and what is behind it. It requires a new way of lighting a scene and a new way of recording sound. Wireless technology makes this much easier. In hallway conversations I heard people speak about how important it is to think as much about what is going on in front of the camera as much as behind it. If there is nothing interesting to see behind the person then normal video is enough.
Content duration is also relevant. Virtual reality and immersive experiences are still new to people. The experience can be tiring so short content is best, for now. When people get used to immersive story telling program length can grow.
The challenge now is to find subjects that lend themselves well to immersive story telling.
For a while I had been thinking of getting a device to play audible books that was not an iphone. The reason for this is simple. A portable MP3 player costs the same, or less than an iphone battery, and can play audio books, or music for 17-19hrs in a row, if you want to listen for that many hours in a row.
With podcasts you want a device that can sync while you’re walking and listening. With books the experience is different. At most you may need to sync 12 times a year, or 24 times a year, depending on which Audible contract you have.
The first step is to download the files. I copied the aax files to the device but it complained that I had to authorise the device first. I tried to use audible manager but it said “sorry, you need to use windows. I booted up my windows machine for the first time in years and it then said, sorry, we don’t have the device you are trying to authorise. I then considered using iTunes but Apple have destroyed iTunes so it no longer exists.
After an hour or two of trial and error I came across OpenAudible. It plays nicely on mac, linux and windows. It allows you to connect the app to Audible.com and access your book library. You can then convert your books to mp3 or m4b. Once the files are converted you can transfer them to your mp3 player and listen to audible books with ease.
I noticed that you can only download books that you own, not books that you have via the Audible membership plans. I don’t mind not having access to strip the DRM from books I didn’t pay for directly.
The beauty of OpenAudible is that it provides you with a list of all your books. You can see the title, duration, purchase date, release date, rating and genre, and you can use these columns to sort books. You can also select books by whether they are downloaded or not.
With this app you can tell it to download your entire library before converting the files either to mp3 or m4b. Once this is done you can transfer the books you want to an mp3 player, listen to them, and then swap out read books for unread books, and repeat.
I have now been audible for years, and I had the platinum plan for several years. With the platinum plan your collection grows by two books a month. I have over 500 books. If for any reason Audible is abandoned and the DRMed books stop being accessible I will lose at least a thousand francs of books. To keep the “investment” safe it makes sense for me to download and backup these books for my own personal, and private use.
I am not a pirate. The files that I will generate in the coming days will be as a backup library in case Audible and Amazon, for some reason, go bankrupt, or are discontinued. It is also so that I can listen to audiobooks without killing iphone batteries.
My original aim was to transfer my audible books to the sandisk device with the DRM intact. it’s because iTunes was discontinued, and that the Audible Manager App didn’t allow me to do what I wanted to do that I had to go for a third party solution. If Apple and Audible made it easier to use the content that we buy on devices that are not within their ecosystem then I would have needed minutes, rather than hours, to find an elegant solution.It is their ecosystem that encouraged me to remove the DRM.
As I said before, this is for my own private use.
In the space of two weeks I have gone from having just 11,000 views on my youtube channel to over 16,000, thanks mostly to videos I shot with the phone. I went to film the Geneva Lake Parade and then the Paleo. The Lake Parade generated several thousand views and already I’ve had over four hundred views to the Paleo Manu Chao and Tiken Jah… can’t remember the name.
It’s not bad and it demonstrates the trend that I think is interesting. Go out and film, put it online with the right keywords and watch as people flock to see the content that you have offered them. Of course this is just an experiment but it’s increased my visibility quite a bit. I’ll wait to see how long it takes to get to twenty thousand views and more.
What are the next events I could cover in Switerland?
Portable Apps is an interesting option for those of us who use work computers rather than our own. It is also a good solution for those of us who change desktop all the time but can’t play with our phones whilst at work.
A few days ago I wrote about Chrome as a PAF file and things have become more interesting as a result.
What I particularly enjoy are the extensions that you can install within the browser. Anyone who works in an office always faces the challenge of getting authorisation to install the simplest of applications. With google chrome and extensions you regain some of that freedom.
The browser allows you to install the extensions of your liking and use them. Some of these applications are the mobile phone version implemented in the desktop format. The best example of this is the yahoo messenger app. Very similar builds are running on the desktop and mobile phone.
The other features are google calendar, facebook and feedly extensions. There is choice. I have feedly running to let me know how many RSS items are left to read. With the google calendar application I can see how much time is left before my next meeting/time commitment. With facebook I can see how many pending messages are waiting for my action.
The advantage of this way of doing things is that you can cut down on the number of open tabs. It is an on demand interaction. It is only open for as long as you are doing something. That’s like mobile applications.
What we see here is a shift away from the traditional web browser where information is displayed according to a cascading style sheet and towards an application based system. The application is installed locally and the only information that you gather from the server is raw data. As a result even with slower connections you can participate, whether from a mobile phone or whilst travelling where roaming charges apply.
It’s an interesting space to keep an eye on. I like having the ability to customise my web surfing environment whatever the environment and platform. I wish that the app syncing would work for extensions, rather than for bookmarks and certain settings.
While walking and listening to podcasts I kept hearing about NixOS and how good it is for instantiating environments over and over again. What I didn’t hear about, so much, is that there is a steep learning curve, to get started with.
Installing the OS is easy. Download NixOS, flash it to a USB stick, reboot a computer onto the OS on that USB stick and begin installation of the OS.
So far, so easy. I chose to install NixOS with XFCE out of curiousity but once I booted into the environment I felt confused. I struggled to find the way to go from using XFCE to Gnome as an environment. Eventually I managed. You mark the old Desktop environment as false, and add the new one as true. You then send the build command. When you reboot you have the option of booting into the old build, or the new one.
I tried to install Nextcloud and PhotoPrism but that’s where I met resistance. The first challenge is to understand how the configuration.nix file is set out. In the end I managed to get Nextcloud to boot but failed to get MySQL to work properly.
I expected that by switching to NixOS I would find tutorials and it would be easy to transfer from Ubuntu/Debian to NixOS but it isn’t.
The Nix Package manager expects familiarity with NixOS, which I don’t have. I spent time trying and failing, until, after a few searches I found some instructions on how to install Nextcloud on NixOS but I’m only part of the way through the guide.
As I progress I’m running the script, to see that there are no errors before moving onto the next part. I am now on the learning curve, but not very far along.
From what I have heard in podcasts the advantage of NixOS is that it makes replicating a setup easy. If, and when, I get Nextcloud and PhotoPrism to work on an instance of NixOS I can easily duplicate the system as many times as I have devices. Instead of installing Nextcloud, and then installing PhotoPrism, CUPS and other apps I can prepare a configuration.nix file and duplicate that system, over and over.
With some OSes if you make changes and break something it could take hours to recover. With NixOS you make changes but you don’t have to learn to live with them. You can revert to a version that you liked, or move on to a new version that you prefer. If you experiment and fail with something, you can easily iterate, until it works.
Now I have one build with XFCE, another with Gnome, and a third with VIM and Thunderbird installed. There are more versions where I am trying to get Nextcloud to work. Last night I stopped iterating through experiments because it was time to prepare dinner.
Nix Learn exists for those who prefer to take a methodical approach to learning. It has three parts. “Install Nix”, “First Steps with Nix”, and “How Nix Works”, for the more methodically minded learners. I thought documentation would be easier to find, and the OS more intuitive so I tried to sprint before I learned to stand up.
Due to the learning curve I know that I need to devote time to learning to use NixOS properly. I should know most of the concepts from playing with Node, Ruby on Rails and other solutions. It’s a matter of applying that understanding to this context.
I want to spend more time on this in the near future.