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Virtual Reality Goggles and multicamera Production

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

I have worked with video cameras, from hi8 to MiniDV, Beta SP, SX, DVCAM, XDCAM, AVCHD and other formats. Cameras have grown and shrunk, controls have changed from manual to partially automated to fully automated. Television news and Studio camera productions have gone from three or four camera operators to needing a couple and then a single camera operator sitting in a side room with controls for all three cameras. Crane and jib moves are programmed so that the same action is performed at the start of each news program.

Virtual Reality technology and Virtual reality headsets are going down in price. Apps provide mobile phone users with 360° videos in normal vision and 3D. The technology we use to watch 360° content and immerse ourselves in the VR world could be adapted and made suitable for multi-camera production.

It would be nice for software to be written that moves the camera as we move our heads. This technology is already used by gunners flying in Apache helicopters. The point would be to adapt this technology to camera operating. I would manual controls for zoom and focus and a control  to lock off the camera once the desired shot is ready.

Imagine how much simpler controlling drone and crane cameras would be. Imagine also how much nicer it will be for conference attendees, concert goers and UN delegates if a smaller remote controlled camera could be used. Camera operators often obscure people’s view. This technology would be less intrusive. Camera operators could sit rather than stand for hours at a time, barely able to move.

VR goggles and the technology they contain should not be used just to consume a finished product but should instead be used as a creative/production tool. VR goggles and related tech could be used to simplify people’s work, to make it more intuitive. Multicamera production with VR goggles would reduce costs and make high-quality video coverage achievable even for modest budgets. The excuse for using a single webcam to Livestream an event will be gone making virtual attendance of events more enjoyable.

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The small matter of Cairo

Byrichard

What makes the situation in Cairo so interesting is the number of media outlets that you can use as sources. From 24 hour news channels like France 24, Al Jazeera, BBC World and others to individual people with mobile phones. For France 24 you have three languages to chose from, with Al Jazeera to you have three languages to chose from. With Sky News you have the choice between Standard definition and High definition.

You have live cameras looking into the square. There is no lag time between the acquisition and distribution of images. There is the challenge of aquiring images from the ground though. Journalists have been attacked, as reported on twitter, and through interviews once they arrive in their home countries.

Tweets have told us of arrests of certain individuals, of attacks on certain media offices etc. It means that whilst those within the country may not have access to this information we on the outside see it.

One of the aspects that is so interesting is the way in which people have been able to organise themselves. Facebook, twitter and other social websites have been important, like Bambuser and flickr. Mainstream as well.

I am looking forward to the literature that will come out from this event, especially if it successful. Imagine comparing a situation like that of Tomas in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” to this situation, especially if the end result is greater freedom.

Battery Powered Transportation And Fitness

Battery Powered Transportation And Fitness

Byrichard

Every time you go for a walk, bike ride or run you encounter people being moved along by something using electricity.  The most common of these forms of transport are the electric car, the electric bike and the electric foot scooter. People want to be more environmentally friendly in their way of getting around but they use something that has to be recharged. 


Quick to Adopt


Electric bikes, foot scooters and cars are a shortcut used by plenty of people. The beauty of the three methods of transportation listed above is that they’re relatively easy to use. Charge them, and then go for a ride. 


A break From Driving


A few years ago I lost my driving licence for a month so I replaced the car with a foot scooter that I had to propel myself and public transport. At the time I was happy because I was bored of driving. I was happy to be lazy for one month. That’s not the point. 


The Less Strenuous Solution


The point is that we see plenty of people use electric foot scooters because manual ones require a good level of fitness. Using a scooter requires strong leg and back muscles, as well as endurance. Going downhill is easy, you just stand on the scooter and gravity does the work for you. Go the opposite way and that unpowered foot scooter becomes so tiring that you ever walk, to save energy, or work on your fitness, to get up the hill. 


As Fast as an Electric Bike


Yesterday I went for a bike ride at an average of 25.9 kilometres per hour. This is a foot powered bike and I was going as fast as an electric bike, without any assistance. Electric bikes are wonderful. They are a short cut. With an electric bike you are as fast as someone who has spent years training to be fast. It provides people with a short cut to getting around on a bike, without the need for physical training. 


The Need to Replace All Cars


In theory electric cars are fantastic because they pollute less, and they’re better for the air we breath. As a person who walks and cycles between villages electric cars are as threatening and dangerous as petrol powered cars. I feel that instead of electric cars, especially for short hops, with single occupancy we should think of skate boards, rollerblades, foot scooters and more. 


And Finally


Now that I have sold the petrol driven scooter I am thinking of alternative solutions. In theory the most practical is the bike, but the problem with bikes is that they’re easy to steal, and in theory it’s expected. The alternative, the electric foot scooter is tempting but I worry about balance, when carrying shopping. The second concern is that by getting an electric scooter I might walk less, due to the convenience and lazy enticement of letting a machine do the work. 


Electric seated scooters would be fun to drive but with a range of just 37km I’d be stuck locally. I’d like the range to get to Geneva and back, without recharging. It makes the electric scooter absurd, for my use case. A pedal bike is fine, with my level of fitness. I have demonstrated to myself several times that I can go back and forth with ease, without adding the day of work in the middle. 


Conclusion


Although I was tempted by an electric bike for a long time my level of fitness increased to the point where I saw the electric bike as a luxury, rather than necessity. I could be tempted by an electric scooter, but to get to the train station in a quarter of the time that it would take to walk. It’s a twenty minute walk to the train. I don’t need an electric scooter to take me in five minutes or so.

The Site Has Migrated

The Site Has Migrated

Byrichard

Although it is absurd i decided to migrate the blog from https://www.main-vision.com/richard/blog/ to https://blog.main-vision.com/. It is absurd because the website has been at the same URL since 2004 or so, and to move it is to lose years of hyperlinks. At the same time the updated URL should be preferred by search engines.

The Blog Is In The Fediverse

It is also part of the fediverse now, which means that every post can be followed by people natively on the fediverse, rather tha via RSS, Jetpack and more. In theory this should make the site more visible. It will take a little time for search engines to update their links but when they do things will be back to normal.

WordPress Doesn’t Like To Be In Two Places At Once

Wordpress doesn’t like to be in two places at once, which is why I was forced to ship or get off the pot. I might have modified one word to make it more family friendly. The point is that plugins hate when they find that they are at two URLs. You fix the blog in one place, and the second place will break the place you just fixed. The result is that you’re forced to choose one, or the other. WordPress is fine in being in two or three places, but plugins hate being in limbo.

Discontinuing the Hugo Version

Although I really like playing with Hugo, the static website generator I dislike how slow it is to update a website with so many pages and hyperlinks. Generating the site takes a short amount of time, but updating the website online takes ages, and because of this it has become unsustainable to continue the experiment. When I find a more efficient way of updating just the pages that have changed, on the server, I can revert to playing with Hugo.

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Squadron Scramble – book review

Byrichard

Squadron Scramble is an interesting book to read in post-BREXIT England because it highlights aspects of the Second World War that BREXITers forget about. It looks at how the main character had to flee France via Dunkirk as well as the situation that Polish airmen had found themselves in. First they lost their homes, then they had to flee France when it was invaded and finally they went to England via North Africa.

You can read more about Polish Air Forces in France and Great Britain following this link for factual rather than fictional information and context. The book provides us with an easy to read, easy to understand scenario. If you had lost your country and you were flying for a third country would you want to shoot pilots as they parachute to safety or would you allow them to live.

If you were in England during the Second World War at what point would you have felt secure and confident that Germany would be overwhelmed and beaten. When would the battle shift from a fight for survival to a fight for supremacy?

This book focuses on the air war during daylight hours when Hurricanes and Spitfires were in their element and only glimpses at dog fighting at night. The book touches superficially on a number of topics without providing as much depth and context as it could.

This is an interesting documentary about the Polish contribution to the Battle of Britain. It shows how effectively they helped to fight the German Luftwaffe and how they were betrayed by the British people once the war was over. They had fought to defend England and defeat the Germans in order to ensure that their country would be freed from the Germans only to be betrayed when their country was handed over to the communists. Some of them went back to Poland but had to flee to other countries. They were not honoured in the victory parade either. The documentary is interesting as it provides its viewers with a good account of the Polish contribution to the British and Allied war effort.

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Mapping wifi availability easily

Byrichard

Wifi is something that should be ubiquitous so that our digital lifestyle may not be limited to being online at home or at work. It should include, bars, restaurants and city squares. In some cities wifi is easy to find but in others that’s not the case.
The lazy way to do wifi mapping could be with the geo loc software on the n95, a flickr account and free wifi. Everytime you find free wifi, get the GPS co-ordinates, include them in the exif and upload them to twitter. Once that’s done get the rss feed of the geo tagged images and feed them to google earth.

Learning and Consolidation
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Learning and Consolidation

Byrichard

Learning and Consolidation are important to me. Over a year ago I wanted to learn Laravel and Angular but when I started to study them I felt lost. I felt that I didn’t understand the topics well enough. I went back to the basics. I followed several courses about JavaScript and how it works. I typed out all of the lesson codes, and debugged it until it worked. Some bugs took three or four hours to fix, but eventually I got there


As I followed two or more courses on the topic there was quite a bit of repetition. Another word for repetition is consolidation. By studying the same topics, taught by different people I consolidated my knowledge. I filled in the knowledge gaps and eventually I began to understand how the code works, even if I can’t write it from scratch yet.


The aim isn’t necessarily to be able to write a web app from scratch. The aim is to understand how all the elements work individually, as well as how they work together in an app.


Today for example in the Let’s Learn Laravel course I followed the lesson on form validation, with mention of Bcrypt and Node.js. This feels good, because I see how frameworks help to save time. For years I was happy to use WordPress as a user, because it works well as a blog and CMS. Now I have studied enough to build my own, although my greatest concern is safety. I want to migrate the static part of my website to Laravel, but I want to do so when I feel confident that it will not be hacked. I also want to do this without destroying the rest of the site in the process.


That’s where the current course comes in. I need help in understanding the process and the steps for setting up a project in Laravel, taking advantage of the tasks that it does for me. When the effort is ready I will deploy it to a web server and see how well it works.


One of the reasons to follow courses, even if they are filled with plenty of repetition, is to learn about concepts. I knew about include but I didn’t know about layout. By understanding layout you can prepare a template, where the elements that change are individual pages, and the layout does the rest, to keep the entire site looking the same. This will become my “portfolio”.

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