Work: Through a Google Glass...Darkly

Pic: xkcd

In 1996, noted science fiction author David Brin wrote a non-fiction piece for Wired called The Transparent Society in which he peered ahead into the new future and the lives of two cities; one where surveillance cameras on every street corner were the absolute norm, another where their use was tightly regulated. Neither seemed particularly palatable.

"A few voices out there...have begun pointing out the obvious: that those cameras on every street corner are coming, as surely as the new millennium. Nothing will stop them," he wrote.

He wasn't wrong.

Fast forward to 4th July 2013 and PR consultant and filmmaker Chris Barrett is walking along the Jersey Shore Boardwalk when he sees a fight break out and a subsequent arrest. Nothing atypical for the time and the place that's for certain, but Barrett was one of the first wearers of Google Glass as part of its Explorer program, and that scene was edited and uploaded onto YouTube a day later, where so far it has been watched 982,000 times and counting.

You may not be familiar with the term sousveillence, which considering how ugly it is is not much of a surprise, but it is a useful term. It unpacks surveillance — from the French sur, meaning "from above”; and veiller, "to watch” — and substitutes the prefix sous, "from below”. The cameras, in other words, are everywhere…

There has of course been much angst about the development of citizen journalism over the years, but none of that seems to have stopped its continuing use as the voracious maws of the 24 hour news channels gobble up content. Indeed, any trade show you cared to attend over the past years has likely featured new tools for ingesting and processing video sent in from viewers’ camera phones along with the prerequisite software for regurgitating Tweets and other socially-generated material on screen.

Google Glass though feels like a tipping point into something else entirely. A five megapixel camera is capable of recording 720p video and, as Barrett observed to website VenutreBeat, “I think if I had a bigger camera there, the kid would probably have punched me. But I was able to capture the action with Glass and I didn’t have to hold up a cell phone and press record.”

Google Glass hits the mass market in the spring according to the company’s own estimates and there are already news outlets prepping for it. CNN has an entire citizen journalist service, iReport, ready to go for it, which already features an assignment desk for mobile phone users, and there are any number of start-ups looking to aggregate cloud-sourced video of events automatically into a single video narrative with no editorial input whatsoever. Check out the likes of Ushahidi, which allows thousands of people to report on an event and place their reports on an interactive map.

In the spirit of Brin’s essay it’s almost pointless asking whether this is a good thing or not: to coin a phrase, ‘the avalanche has started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote’. What may hold Glass back from actual news organisation deployment just now is an under-specced mic for broadcast work, plus the fact that without the physical presence of even a cameraman reporters find themselves jostled, separated from their interviewee and generally swallowed up in oblivious crowds.

As far as the public and potential citizen journalists are concerned though, little holds them back apart from the law. And while it is moving fast — the UK’s Department of Transport is already implanting a ban on Glass-wearing while driving, for instance —whether it is moving fast enough to catch up is another matter entirely. There may well be another explosion of citizen journalist-sourced content on its way.

TWTIBCTW - That Was the IBC That Was

So, what was that all about then?

Well, for a start it was more of an IBC that confirmed things we all already knew, rather than one of the shows that turns things on its head. Both on the showfloor and in the Conference it sprung very few surprises but it did at least console those that have backed a mix of 4K/IPTV/companion screens as the future of broadcast that they’re largely on the right track.

The show floor was packed with new 4K products and upgrades of existing kit at all stages in the production chain, happily which also seemed to be pitched at a much lower price point than could have been predicted a year ago. It is finally starting to worm its way into all the niche areas that will help build a complete workflow too, such as the ultra slo-mo units and video servers that will drive sport  production workflows in the format. And in the conference that manufacturing effort translated into the will to establish HEVC-encoded 4K services into the home as soon as is technically feasible.

When will that be? HBS’ Francis Hellier confirmed that next year’s World Cup final, and possibly other matches too, will be captured in the format, while there are also plans to capture events from the Sochi Olympics at the start of the year. TX of all this is more of an issue, with both projects talking about cinema and cinema-style events rather than any pipeline that ends in domestic homes. For that, the consensus seemed to be we will have to wait until the Rio 2016 Olympics....which considering that HD adoption turned out to be a 15 year project, seems almost indecently rapid.

Arguably the companion screen plans for next year’s tournament are more exciting, and will offer a huge degree of app-based personal interactivity, from choosing camera angles to cueing up replays, accessing ultra slo-mo and more. This whole area is steadily getting more sophisticated and essential to event television plans; something probably reflected in IBC’s launching of a new event, IBC Content Everywhere, that replaces the old Connected World and will become peripatetic after debuting at next year’s show.

Preoccupations at the Conference were: Big Data and how broadcasters can mine it to maximise revenue and start targeting ads at specific customers or demographics – or indeed change the mix of adverts in realtime depending on who’s watching (a much easier task now that companion screens offer a data return path); Spectrum and the diminishing amount thereof; and the perils and opportunities that the currently booming market of India represents – leavened somewhat by the fact that average wages are so low and that broadband on the subcontinent is defined as any connection over 256k. Money and time will be required.

Picks from the showfloor? It was a quiet year to be honest, but ARRI’s documentary-style Amira camcorder was probably the talk of the show, Avid had a new scalable modular control surface on display for its audio line, and BBC R&D’s IP Studio demonstration in the Future Zone was interesting enough on the surface, but then got really intriguing once you dug under its surface and grappled with its new concept of treating content as dedicated elements termed ‘grains’ (white papers are available online and well worth a quick search via Google).

Work - IBC = Insanely Busy, Ceaseless

Really, it is this year. Huge amounts of logistics planning and subbing on the IBC Daily, and then a lot of work on behalf of the good people of IBC itself, and on top f that the odd IBC-related feature. As such, the poor blog tends to get neglected, so here's something I did for Red Shark a month or so ago about the growing use of cheap drones for filming by way of recompense...

Drones reach take-off

We have become a bit addicted to UAV or drone flying videos here of late, partly because they produce some astonishing images and partly because the skill of the pilots involved is occasionally phenomenal. The good news is that it’s a field rapidly taking off (ahem) and prices are tumbling, all of which makes it easy to get involved yourself.

Of course it’s the ubiquity of the GoPro camera that has brought the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle out of the realm of the military and into the range of not just the broadcaster but the hobbyist as well. Now, for somewhere under £1000 – and that covers camera and vehicle – you too can start flying your own semi-pro rig.

DJI’s Phantom Quad probably represents the low end of the market at the moment. It flies right out of the box, meaning that all you have to do is attach the four propellors, charge the LiPo and install the transmitter batteries before use. Control distance is roughly 300m (it operates in the 2.4Ghz ISM band) max speed is 10m/s horizontal and 6m/s vertical, and a fully charged unit will give you somewhere between 10 to 15 minutes of flight time. It also features a host of flight aides to help the novice pilot, probably the most useful being a Return to Home function aided and abetted by its inbuilt GPS which triggers when it flies out of control range.

The price for all this? Around £500.

If you want to step things up a notch, the company also does a hexa-rotor platform which can carry loads up to 2.5kg and adds another £1000 to the price. As is usual with a rapidly developing market, there are a serious amount of different systems available now in this mid-price range with four, six or eight rotor blade configurations. Equally they are capable of carrying a variety of different weights for a variety of different durations. Still, at least the research process if you’re looking to buy one should be fun.

After that, things ramp up a bit. If you really want to invest in improving your aerial images stabilisation is key. Of course, this can be done in post with varying degrees of success depending on the quality of the original images and how much grunt you can throw at the problem. Or you can invest in a gimbal whose inbuilt server motors react quickly enough to damp down any image vibration. This is a particular problem for live TV, and the reason why so many sports events use blimps as they provide a stable, if immovable, image platform, Gimbal prices start at around £2000 for a model lightweight enough for aerial work and head rapidly north from there very quickly.

Of course, at the hobbyist end of the spectrum you can’t typically lift enough weight to be looking at live video (though Parrot’s tablet and smartphone controlled A.R.Drone will stream live video via its internal 720P camera with a few hacks over the Wi-Fi hotspot it generates for itself for control purposes – look to pay about £250). For that you need something like Freefly Systems’ CineStar 8, an octocopter that will set you back somewhere in the vicinity of £6000 – more with gimbals etc - but has a payload capacity of 2.3kg, which is big enough to mount a camera such as a RED Epic or all the various electronics you’d need to be beaming back a live signal over RF.

In fact, there is a sometimes happy/sometimes incandescent subgroup of fliers online busy explaining and investigating different tweaks, hacks and modifications so that they can pull enough juice out of various vehicle’s batteries to power more onboard kit for longer without melting things or crashing. The whole scene really has a fecund Maker/Hacker vibe going.

Above that, things start to get seriously expensive. Flying-Cam’s SARAH 3.0 is a single rotor electric machine that filmed the opening bike chase over the roofs of Istanbul’s Grand Bazar for ‘Skyfall’ with an Epic and can take a maximum payload of 8kg up into the atmosphere. The company has also developed a Pilot in Relay system, which allows a second pilot to take over operation of the craft if it moves out of its 400m flight control envelope. Cost for that? Considering that the only things that take to the air between it and the full-sized, manned helicopters with the £200k FLIR gimbals are military UAVs capable of doing rather more (and sometimes rather more lethally) probably more than most people will want to spend.

Life - Ow

Completed Nightrider 2013 at the weekend with my chum, Andy Hayford, managing to raise £1800 and counting for the CF Trust as we did. Maybe it was the weather (dawn just changed the quality of the grey essentially) but it was more exhausting and way less exuberant than last year's efforts.

Hence the shortness of this entry...For entertainment I recommend last year's writings: I'm a Nightrider (Asleep in the Day)

Life: with pops and crackles

[Posted as part of a debate on digital vs analogue and what we lose over on the Red Shark website]

Have a very non-technical argument to throw into the mix: one thing that we lose [with digital] is our history with the media in question. Pops and crackles and distortions accrue over time, giving us a sense of time passing and a sense of ownership. I have digital versions of albums that I owned as a teenager which my brain still inserts a scratch or a jump into, because that's the way I remember it. It makes it mine, it makes it unique, in many respects it makes it alive - not in the living and breathing sense, but in the sense of change being possible.

In the same way that I've given my Kindle away so I can read books again, maybe I'll soon go out and buy a turntable and start getting some of my special favourites (Dark Side of the Moon, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Raindogs, Permanent Waves) back on vinyl. Might wait till my daughter's slightly older though. There are pops and crackles, and then there is someone covering everything with a thick layer of crayon...

Life - another way to look at it (and death)

By Aaron Freeman

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.

And at one point you'd hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.

And you'll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they'll be comforted to know your energy's still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you're just less orderly. Amen.

Life: Golden boys and girls...

...all must/As chimney sweeps come to dust.

That's Shakespeare that is. That's literature...

Seems he was talking about chimneys and architecture in general too, as the selection of photos that appears over at a list of 30 Abandoned Places That Look Truly Beautiful attests. A website that very much does exactly what it says on the tin...