Major Script and Filming Shoot - all in 2 weeks!

Wow, what a couple of weeks... So much has happened since the last posts but it was for this reason that we never got around to updating the blog! Firstly our 'Script', the single biggest submission before the finished project itself, was due on Wednesday this week. It was almost 100 pages long, and detailed every single aspect including Narrative, Interactivity, Programming, Audio, Application Design, Video Production etc etc... A massive body of work; and my thanks to the rest of the team for putting so much into it (Especially Ben who took the awful job of searching through headings looking for every small 's' and 'r'... long story!).
Secondly we had our major shoot this week, on Wednesday and Thursday, in the Marshes SC down town. We shot with no less than 8 cameras! Fantastic work, and despite many dropouts and struggles with castings, we even managed to finish a whole 9mins ahead of schedule! A big thanks go out (in no particular order) to Leah, Randal, Alan, Roger, Eamonn, Ronan, Gocky, Karl, Peter, Fin in HMV, the Marshes management, Roy for doing CSI Dundalk perfectly, Ben's bro and Keith's Dad for trusting us with their shiny cars, and I'm sure I'm forgetting someone else, for all the help during the shoot. And of course to the Obsurveillance lads, well on the way to Best in Show!

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.

An update on current progress;

We are taking a new line with the narrative; one that has been finalised this time! We will highlight the extent and dangers of information-gathering and people-profiling in the inline domain by creating a real-world analogy of similar tasks being carried out by a surveillance team which the user is part of.

Ben and myself are drafting up scripts at the minute and hope to have one ready at the end of the week, at which time we will post ads for auditions and begin the rest of the preproduction. Keith is flat out programming working prototype programs for the interactive application and Baptiste continues to research the extent of what THEY KNOW ABOUT US...

Things are developing quickly...