Programming and Interaction

Hi everyone, just a small update on the programming and interaction. Currently making great advances with the programming and are very happy with the progress.

Still researching into the interactivity side of it and what form of interactivity our exhibit will have.

At the moment gestural movement seems a great possibility and also tactile interactivity is a definite.

Below are a few links to what we are currently looking at so feels free to have a look to get a better understanding of what were talking about.

More updates soon!

Laters

Gestural Movement

Head Tracking with wiiMote

Finger Tracking with wiiMote

Multi-Touch screen projection

Project Maestro

Time to put the head down... and not up again til June!

Things have been busy over the Xmas period, but unfortunately not all on the Obsurveillance front! It's time to get going again now though, and we have a new (and appropriately condensed) schedule in place to catch up.
We will be shooting in 3 weeks, and we almost have our locations finalised. Talent acquisition is in progress, and preproduction in full swing. Once we get a start on the post-prod before Rag Week we will be back on schedule in terms of the video production. Then we will be ready for the rush to Fis in getting everything working together. Don't worry the schedule also allows appropriate hangover time from Rag Week... Keep posted!

Programming

Just a quick update on the programming. We are currently placing HD video footage into flash to see how much it can take basically. By this testing we can determine what compression has to be done to the footage before importing it into flash. Also by doing this we can determine what processor will be needed to run all our footage without glitches, (more than likely a powerful one). We are recreating cctv footage so the HD aspect of it is not an essential. So for the moment we are just testing, testing, testing.

Will keep you posted with any more progress!

Data Mining

So what is data mining? Data mining is basically advertisers autonomously gathering information about people as they search though the web. The best definition I could find for data mining was actually on wikipedia (not a site I like relying on but how and ever). It defines data mining as "the process of extracting patterns from data. Data mining is becoming an increasingly important tool to transform this data into information. It is commonly used in a wide range of profiling practices, such as marketing, surveillance, fraud detection and scientific discovery". The main goal of advertisers who use data mining is to create a world thats like that scene in Minority Report where every time tom cruise walks by a shop it recognizes him and offers him products based on his previous purchases. So while this might look like an awesome sci-fi way of shopping it actually requires people giving personal information to unknown sources, not something we'd do happily to some randomer on the street. Anyway the article below (which isn't too long) is a good description of data mining and points out its advantages but also its obvious potential pit falls, enjoy.

http://findarticles.com/p/news-articles/buffalo-news/mi_8030/is_20100716/growth-data-mining-threat-privacy/ai_n54461179/

Anyone can play detective...

A friend of mine told me about this website www.spokeo.com. It basically markets itself as a kind of online phonebook so if you type in your name or email address it basically searches throught the internet to pull up any data it can find about you. Now it's an american site so typing in your name probably won't do any good, but your email address is worth a shot. When he typed his email address it pulled up some of his facebook photos (his privacy settings shouldn't allow anyone to see his photos though even on facebook). So I typed in my email address but it found nothing on me. Baptiste though typed in looking for info on a friend of his in america and it pulled up family members, phone number etc. the kind of stuff that shouldnt really be made public. Once the site pulls up information about you it then says that you can pay to find out more! Its crazy that search engines like this exist, where their sole purpose is finding out information about you. Obviously it started with great honest intentions but it can lead to your personal details ending up in the wrong hands. The main fear I have with sites like this is that this is just one we only discovered recently, how many more similar sites are online which give anybody the ability to easily determine someones personal information, without having to 'friend' them on social networking sites. Our lives are becomming more and more public and without our knowledge, scary stuff.