I first became aware of non-photorealistic rendering in 2000 when Alex Mohr, Christopher Herrman and some other students at the University of Wisconsin created a non-photorealistic rendering version of the popular first-person shooter “Quake”, NPR Quake. NPR is simply taking tools that are commonly used to create “photo-real” images, think cameras or software, and creating something that looks like it isn’t photo-real. Images can appear as drawings, paintings, cartoon cells or sketches… only no pencils were harmed in the creation of the images.

A couple of days ago, I stumbled upon an app for the Apple iPhone called ToonPAINT, and it’s rocked my world. ToonPAINT takes any of the pictures on your iPhone, or the camera itself, and allows you to create images that are startlingly cool. Cool because they can take most mundane subject and render it as beautiful art.

The team behind ToonPaint is headed up by Dr. Bruce Gooch, who specializes (among other things) in Computational Aesthetics. His vision is to create tools that engage and inform the artistic process, and with ToonPAINT, they have a winner.

The thing that I like about NPR is that it allows the creation of an image that suspends disbelief. The more photographically real something becomes, the more our brains try to reconcile, what Jeff Hawkins refers too as, our invariant model of the world. In other words, we compare what we think something *should* be, with what it is. If they don’t line up, somewhere in our consciousness, there is a disconnect. In 3D computer graphics and robotics this is called the “uncanny valley“.

Moving away from the “known” allows the mind to accept imagery that is more “mythic”, less literal, and potentially, more narrative. Black and white photography has occupied this space for the past 150 years, as the primary tool that photographers had to create images that convey another time or place.

This is also the power of comics and animation. Now, thanks to ToonPAINT, anyone with an iPhone can create stunning effects in a short time. Check it out, it’s really fun!

Here’s an article from canonrumors about the the CMOS Sensor Squared [CR2].

Robin McShaffry, Marc Jackson and Mary Margaret

I ran into some VERY COOL folks from at the 2010 Computer Game Developer’s Conference, and heck, they interviewed me… right here! Big thanks to Marc Jackson!

Hopefully, the reduction in tuning cycles will allow developers to innovate faster, and that innovation will make it into the marketplace. Unfortunately, it may just allow many publishers to simply use the technological advantages to shorten development cycles, eliminating the late stage tuning that makes good games into great ones… we will see…

A few weeks ago, I went to Yosemite with 69 other xRez photographers to shoot what will become one of the largest digital images ever shot. I brought a 9′ seamless and a couple of C-stands with me, to the campsite and tried to shoot all the participants. Here’s some of the best images.

It started me thinking about the relativity of the whole left/right debacle. My friend, Max Keiser, styles himself as a moderate [sic] or socialist (depending upon the circumstance, while espousing the  destruction of  modern capitalism. Max and I originally bonded over the concept of Meritocracy, however our interpretations of how meritocracy is best served are pretty radically divergent.

It is too easy and convenient  to put Max and myself on a linear scale of left and right, in fact it’s ridiculous.

My first realization of this was in 8th grade. I had a GREAT history teacher named William ‘Bill’ Stack. Bill was the W.C. Fields of history teachers. He leaned back in his chair and spoke with an affected New England Irish drawl. (I used to imagine him with a cigar and a shot of whiskey, saying “I was in Philadelphia once, it was closed”). Anyway, one day he came into class an drew a single line across the three blackboards that covered the front of the classroom. As he finished moving from the right side of the class, to the left, he wrote the word ‘communist’ on the left side of the line. He moved to the far right side of the line, and wrote ‘fascists’.

He asked the class where they thought Democrats and Republicans belonged. After some discussion, he wrote the two names, next to each other in the center of the board. His point was that everything is relative. If the only part of the political ‘spectrum’ that one considered, was from  slightly right of Republican to slightly left of Democrat, then the difference between the two are radical. But if one looked at the whole spectrum, the differences are minor.

Clip Cloud Idea

Professor Clayton Christensen (Harvard Business School) points out, in his classes on “Disruptive Innovation”, that when a technology “is not good enough”, that vertically integrated companies can sustain innovation along a linear path, better than competitors.

When those companies overshoot the requirements for a base of unserved consumers, and the technology becomes modular enough to become a commodity, then there is an opportunity to enter a market with a less functional product, that can disrupt companies that practices “sustained innovation”.

In the missive “In the Beginning was the Command Line”, Neal Stephenson points out that the Microsoft Operating System, has achieved a defacto vertical monopoly in the User Experience Mediation layer of the desktop technology business. Recently however, companies like Google, have demonstrated that entire horizontal segments of the users experience, e.g. Search, can be removed from the auspices of the traditional vertically-integrated operating system and moved out onto the web.

The functionality for many of these new web-based offers is being facilitated a suite of open standards known as “web services”. Services like del.icio.us and Bloglines have demonstrated lately that other traditionally base-line operating system services like bookmarks, and news aggregation can be moved out onto the Internet cloud.

clipCloud is an idea for an online enabled web-service that allows machine-specific clipboard operations (cut/paste) to be moved out onto the Internet “Cloud”. Ostensibly, the utilization of this function would allow people who are working on disparate platforms and machines to access the most basic editing functionality on any operating system. Once again, in the case of collaboration and multi-machine utilization, moving an entire horizontal segment of operating systems out onto the cloud.

Services like File Sharing, Instant Messenger and File Sharing, all add an unnecessary step to many collaborative endeavors, that could be facilitated with a shared clipboard environment. Workflow, Productivity and Platform Interoperability can all be enhanced, in a meaningful way by the creation of a web-services enabled shared clipboard environment.
clipCloud scoPe

1. Sharing information between computers or users in a collaborative environment can be problematic if those users are on disparate systems and environments. Instant messaging, email and file sharing are all solutions, but the most common way that computer-users move information around is with cut/paste. clipCloud, simply, extends cut/paste concept to the web.
2. clipCloud is a web-enabled clip-board for computer users that share computers, or are working collaboratively with others. The functionality of clipCloud is identical to to the clipboard functionality of all current GUI-based operating systems, with the exception that the clipboard data is stored on the web, instead of on the local computer.
3. Like other clipboards, clipCloud items can be can be added by either right-clicking on a selection, and choosing an item from a pull-down menu, or by hitting a combination of keys on a keyboard (ctrl+alt+c, etc.).
4. Unlike other clipboards, the selected clipCloud items are posted to a personal Internet webpage, allowing the user to retrieve the information from another machine.
5. The clipCloud account has a first-in, first out protocol, that will store items up to a default amount of storage/bandwidth. (Additional file-types/storage/bandwidth may be purchased as an upgrade.) Once the limit is reached, the first-in data will be purged.
6. Users will have the option to edit and organize their clipCloud, in order to manage space and hierarchy. Clipboard items can be tagged and organized using user-defined keywords (tag / folksonomy)
7. clipClouds will have Private and Shared areas.
8. Private are only available to the user via username/password.
9. Shared clipClouds can be assigned a username/password, or be left public (open).
10. clipClouds will have RSS (2.0) feeds that will allow interoperability with news reading software for client-side management.
11. Client side application development will consist of installable mini-applications that add context (right-click) menus and keyboard configuration control panels for the following browser applications and operating systems:

Browsers:

* Mozilla/Netscape (Firefox) (extension) 1.0x Win32, Mac OSX, Linux kernel – 2.2.14
* Internet Explorer v6/7 – Win32, v 4.5 Mac OSX
* Safari OSX

OS Level Apps:

* Windows XP(with service pack 2) OS Level context menu
* Macintosh OSX OS Level context menu
* Linux kernel – 2.2.14 OS Level Open API

Applications:

* Open-Office

Server-side:

* Open-source XML-RPC API (requires sign-up to get API Key, with some restrictions)

Notes:

* Data structure needs to be able to support binary large objects (BLOBs) just like the OSs (Berkeley DB?).
* Application Architecture and Environment needs to scale (redundant inexpensive machines).
* File integrity needs to be maintained across platforms (Unicode and multi-byte systems).
* Sign-up will require functionality that prevents automated hijacking of the system (CAPTCHA).
* EULA needs to make clear that the company/system will not support, condone, or allow piracy.
* clipCloud needs to avoid firewall issues as a high order of priority (port 80)?

Known issues:

* There’s all kinds of formats (BINHEX,UUENCODE) for taking binaries and turning them into ascii. What if our app turned binaries into ascii and shipped it over an open port as XML/ASCII, post it in that format, and then put it back together again the next time its on a client? There are obvious security concerns, that would need to be built into business rules, which is probably why a big company, with well know security issues would not do it… Performance is an issue to, but machines are pretty fast now days…

Example:
(This file must be converted with BinHex 4.0)
:$f*TEQKPH#jdCA0d,R0TG!”6594%8dP8)3#3″!&m!*!%EMa6593K!!%!!!&mFNa
KG3,r!*!$&[rr$3d,BQPZD’9i,R4PFh3!RQ+!!”AV#J#3!i!!N!@QKUjrU!#3′[q
3″&4&@&483N)f!3#Xaj6bV-H8mJ!!!B3!N!0″!*!$[3#3!cR@iiY)!*!’[I%4!!J
Fp$X%X3@J!mZE6!GRiKUi$HGKMf0U61S46%i1″AB!TI,fLl!d1X3RDDE8ALfTCbM
8UP9p4iUqY-0k4krHpk9XK@`rbj2Ti’U@5rGH@+[fr-i4T6-qXpfl26,k!H5$Nml
TIkI’(l3GI4)f8mII&01CNEbC2LrNLBeaZ1HG@$G8!Z6″k)hh,q9p”r6FC*!!Se”
(ic,Pd(4(b`pflKC`H1&JN5)GVX3mREdH55[l`%`Yhp%q092c`A(hPV)!83Dr&f4
$$L#I1aM-”VjqV-q$34KQq6$M$f8#,Zc,i),!(`*ZN!$K$rS!LA%3cL+dYi”@,K(
Z”`#3!fKi!!!:

(clipCloud is an original idea by Peter Duke, copyright 2005.)

It is one of those books where you read a few pages, and then you need to go lay down.

It puts a zap on your head.

Anyway, he talks about Rodney Brooks’s generic recipe for distributed control:

1. Do simple things first.
2. Learn to do them flawlessly.
3. Add new layers of activity over the results of the simple tasks.
4. Don’t change the simple things.
5. Make the new layer work as flawlessly as the simple.
6. Repeat, ad infinitum.

Kinda Zen.