Viewfinder is a collaboration with Michael Naimark and Erik Loyer, as well as with the Institute for Creative Technology. It was funded by a Google research grant. The basic premise is:

Viewfinder is a novel method for users to spatially situate, or “find the pose,” of their photographs, and then to view these photographs, along with others, as perfectly aligned overlays in a 3D world model such as Google Earth. Our objective is to provide a straightforward procedure for geo-locating photos of any kind, and our approach is to engage a community of users for a certain amount of human help. We specify that a 10-year-old should be able to find the pose of a photo in less than a minute, and we are convinced that this goal is achievable. While we are not entirely there yet, we are getting closer. This is our progress report.

My main role on the project was building out web and flash UIs that interacted with a google earth "server," which we built to fundamentally fake the idea of a google earth image api. Using the UIs we build, people could fine tune where their photos were taken in google earth. Think clicking on a map, then seeing a street level view from that spot within google earth.

Links

• New York Times writeup
• Youtube videos

Excited to see this happening.

Speculation points in the direction of Apple TV going for a casual games approach rather than the hardcore, but since Nintendo has been tremendously successful with the casual titles they have released for the Wii, it seems it may be a good direction to head in for Apple. The most interesting related comment of all in my opinion came from Greg Canessa of PopCap games, who mentioned Apple TV as a platform for casual gaming in the next five years.

This speculation is fueled by a patent filed by apple that would create a wii-mote style controller to be used with the TV. From my own personal experience, any different interfaces for these experiences are steps in the right direction. I love my AppleTV but I hate the remote control.

At the beginning of the year, I started working at a mobile services agency as their Director of Technology in the US.  I took the job pretty reluctantly, but did so mostly on the idea that I'd be able to steer the US technology division in a direction that was more in line with my interests than what was going on there at the time. Well, after 4 professionally frustrating months, I've left the company and am thankfully back in the slipstream, back to choosing my own adventures.  

Without detailing my exact frustrations, it goes without saying that it's hard to foster any innovation at a company that isn't welcome to it and works exclusively with clients that aren't willing to take risks.  Nothing inherently wrong with that scenario, but it just wasn't for me.  I spent longer than I would have there based on the fact that fundamentally the people there were really great, nice, hard working folks.  As it stands now, I'm going to help them close out a couple projects this month, working a few hours here and there as a freelancer.  

But the great thing is that releasing myself back into the wild has put me back into doing what I love doing: scheming up ideas from the near future and making them work in the present.  Hopefully this space will be chock full of transmissions from such endeavors in the coming months.

Great Dowd piece again today... her op eds on this campaign have been the only good part of the whole ordeal.

It’s hard to believe that this Hillary is the same Wellesley girl who said she yearned for a more “ecstatic and penetrating mode of living.” What would that young Hillary — who volunteered on Gene McCarthy’s anti-war campaign; who cried the day Martin Luther King Jr. was killed; who referred to some of her “smorgasbord of personalities” in a 1967 letter to a friend as an “alienated academic,” and an “involved pseudo-hippie”; who once returned a bottle of perfume after feeling guilty about the poverty around her — think of this shape-shifting, cynical Hillary? 

 

Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne has a nice piece about the just-opened Americana shopping/condo/ersatz/apocalyptical mall.  The project, developed by Rick Caruso of The Grove (in)fame, is a huge high end shopping complex that transitions between various las vegas like takes on "american" architecture, even though most of them are not really american at all (well, maybe only in their ostentation).  However, this shopping mall is also home to equally high end residential complexes, as well as a 2 acre park that is owned by the city of Glendale.  At Hawthorne notes, this creates an interesting question about public and private space.  

[This] makes the distinction between public and private in the final product almost impossible to untangle. At the Americana, the park is public space masquerading as private space that is masquerading as public.  

So will Caruso's security folks allow typically normal public behavior like skateboarding, walking dogs, etc?

According to Dave Williams, Caruso's executive vice president for archi- tecture, they will not. "The open spaces will be handled the same way they're handled at the Grove," he told me. "Operationally, we have a safety threshold we want to maintain." That means no bikes and no skateboards, no dogs heavier than 25 pounds, plus a slew of other restrictions.  

 Hawthorne raises a bunch of other interesting questions regarding these complexities.  The article is here. * also of note: Caruso's chef-d'oeuvre The Grove draws 3 more million visitors each year than Disneyland.  Unsurprising, maybe, but further proof of how the country's collective model of fantasy has shifted towards consumption narratives.

Found a nice writeup of the upcoming Lego Universe on rock, paper, shotgun, (via Mike Migurski).  From the descriptions given by the project lead, this sounds like they are headed in a really interesting direction.  The best quote:

The more a child plays, they collect more coins and more bricks. The more you play, the more you get to build things.

 That last bit- The more you play, the more you get to build things - seems to be a particularly fun and engaging play mechanic.  At the same time, it'll be interesting to see how well it plays, seeing that the whole idea behind legos themselves is that you get this blank canvas and you can do whatever you want.  In fact, my fondest experiences with legos were after I'd accumulated a number of different sets, and the mechanic really was more like the more you build things, the more you play.Nonetheless, the *effort* currency is certainly picking up steam these days.  In some ways, Warcraft always seemed to me primarily rewarding effort over any specific fine tuned skill.  At the same time, even with highly "skill" based games, effort and time are often still the main currency, even if it's not as explicit.

Rolling out a few changes to hauntedcastle in the next few days.  Wordpress is becoming increasingly frustrating to work with, but I guess I'll manage.  For now though, some links may be fracked up, or things otherwise may feel a bit unfinished.  Oh well.

Just got out of the Henry Jenkins keynote/conversation at SXSW, and am always amazed (slightly alarmed) how well Jenkins is able to speak articulately about complex issues in a way that makes them seem like such no brainers.  Lots of the stuff he's talking about is familiar to those of us who follow his blog, but of particular interest to me was hearing him speak about his stance on Obama, and how Obama speaks in language consistent with the idea of the Wisdom of Crowds.  I won't go too much deeper here, just point to this post on Jenkins' website, which contains a wealth of great thinking on these political issues.

Stumbled upon (the actual phrase, not StumbleUpon™) The Big Word Project today, and was immediately bummed out. There's something kind of cool and grandiose about the name.  Big Word Project.  Sounds important, meaningful, literary, new.  But, not unlike the Alan Parsons Project, like of left me with nothing after exploring for a bit. The idea is simple enough - charge people to attach their websites to a word, then if someone goes to the big word project and clicks "yoga" for instance, or "podcast," they get directed to whoever paid for that word. This is the stupidest, most annoying idea ever.  First of all, I mean - it's useless.  The people who are paying for these word links are most likely not the *best* place to be linked with the word.  For example, is Titlyhouse.com really *the* place you want to go if you're interested in podcasts?  Probably not - if it was, the operators probably wouldn't have much interest in paying for whatever minimal uptick in pageviews might result.  So as a search tool, it leaves little to be desired. But maybe it's not about search, maybe it's just browsing for stuff.  But if it's just that, aren't there a ton of other places that would be better to browse, with better features and more diverse content? But the part that upset me was not that it wasn't useful.  The problem here is that it's not fun or interesting, either.  I typically judge things by A: is it fun or interesting, B: is it useful.  A alone is great.  B alone is great, too.  A+B is most excellent.  But this is neither.  It's commerce without anything else wrapped in there.  It's trying to create a bogus *need* and solve that *need* with it's own dubious solution. To be honest, I'm not sure why I even really care about this, or am taking the time to write about it.  I guess I was hoping for one thing, and got this really lame thing instead.  It's not that I don't think there's some kind of idea there, it's just that the idea that's there strikes me as rather mercenary, and at odds with the general spirit of the interweb.

But I think it should reboot with a link to the new bionic commando game (for xbox live arcade.. not the new 3d one...).

Wow, indie 'zine LMNOP just posted a sweet review of the new The Very Hush Hush album, giving it a 5 1/2 out of 6.

A cool, mentally absorbing album that doesn't sound like anything else currently on the horizon

I'm excited to see the rest of the reviews start to roll in for this record.  I think the next few months should be pretty exciting.

Screenshot from Ambrosia's Defcon.

A Quick little study of about 1.5 Million Locations from a source I can't disclose. The timing of these things was pretty perfect with Tom Carden's thoughful post about avoiding potentially bad cases of accidental visual resonance. These sketches are probably pretty egregious examples of what's he's talking about :-) To me, the interesting part of doing all this was just figuring out the best way to cope with all the data.The visuals are really simple, just colored dots animated in a raindrop fashion. The hue & saturation values of the dots are derived from the date & time, respectively. Small, fun sketches!Watch a video by clicking here or on the image.

I love Adam Greenfield's writing, and am happy to be reading his recent confrontation with social networking systems. Obligatory choice quote, which is more dramatic than the rest of his well reasoned, skillfully constructed post:

The only way to win is not to play

The reason his stuff is so great is because he makes really clear, logical points that are refreshingly contrarian, aimed squarely at the standard operating procedures of web & technology culture.

Browsing through the NYTimes Magazine's 2007 Year in Ideas, I came upon this article regarding the "Cat Lady" Conundrum. Seeing as my Mom is kind of slowly turning into a cat lady, and my next door neighbor, by all accounts, is the Cat Lady prototype, this article really hit close to home. According to some research by the CDC, there's a common parasite (Toxoplamsa gondii) that may migrate into the brain and may - wait for it - make you more likely to be eaten by cats. This parasite starts in cats, but can be transfered to humas through feces (what else?). Then, according to the article,

Toxo must find its way back to a cat’s stomach to survive. So the parasite has evolved a complicated system for taking over its hosts’ brains to increase the likelihood that they’ll be eaten by cats.

In rats, this parasite has caused a stronger attraction towards cat urine, so there's a chance that so called "cat lady" types are actually picking up increasing numbers of cats in order for this parasite to actually somehow find it's way back into one of those cats, and thus survive. Of course, not many parasite researchers are speculating about such matters at this point, but I think anyone with any Cat Lady experience would feel far less apprehensive.

Marc Hedlund's radar post about Tab Bankruptcy yields a great snippet on what to pay attention to, and more importantly - what to ignore - when going through the daily churn of information.  Coming from the perspective of milling & cultivating ideas & such, this struck me as the absolute correct course of action (or inaction, as it may be).  As a side note, posts like these are the reason to keep radar in the old feed reader.

Running a startup is a great way to learn how to, and how not to, ignore the right things. You should mostly ignore your competitors and mostly ignore the minor ups and downs that feel fantastic or terrible when they happen. You should pay a huge amount of attention to the unbiased people who are actually using your product or service -- not friends or enemies or professional commentators, but people who show up through a search, sign up and give it a try. Ignore everything that makes you miserable, pay tons of attention to everything that makes you happy and productive.

passage.  review here. game here.

from wfmu, this preposterously funny rap from 1989 shows Brain Wilson at his most manic.