Media Technology

Reporting on Kodak’s retiring of their famed Kodachrome film, NPR’s All Things Considered, Melissa Block interviewed photographer Steve McCurry (emphasis mine):

I’m looking at one of your most iconic images, this is the photo of a young Afghan girl… she’s wearing a brick-red head scarf and there’s a green background and her eyes are just popping off the screen…

I think that just about says it all. You can also view an online gallery of what some of the great photos taken with Kodachrome look like after they’ve been scanned, digitized, and re-rendered on whatever computer monitor you happen to have. Such vivid colors!

Taiwanese display company Prime View International announced today it will be purchasing E Ink for about $215. PVI has been a long-time partner of E Ink, and supplies the backplane for the Amazon Kindle and Sony’s eReader, which use E Ink’s ink technology.

TechCrunch has a nice video showing off Plastic Logic’s new prototype e-reader based on E Ink. Plastic Logic’s main advantage is their plastic backplane (rather than glass) which is lighter and less fragile. They’re also pitching their interface to focus more on business use — in particular the ability to annotate documents (using a touchscreen) and a sidebar that allows them jump to different pages more quickly.

This is just a prototype and so probably an unfair criticism, but I do note that when the demonstrator selects a different document and says “we are able to quickly move from any of the last five documents you’ve been reading” there is an 8.5 second delay before the new document comes up.

I missed Obama’s press conference on Wednesday and wanted to listen to it on my long commute home yesterday. To my surprise, it was easy to find full video and typically a full-text transcript of the conference from sites like The Huffington Post and NPR.org as well as YouTube and directly from the White House Blog, but no audio-only sources. Eventually I had to use Farkie, a free online video-converter to download the Youtube video and convert it to MP3.

Am I missing some obvious source source, or has video made such headway now that nobody even bothers making audio-only versions available anymore?

Microsoft Office Labs has come out with a very nice “vision of the future video” called “2019” — Long Zheng over at iStartedSomething has posted both a short montage and longer 5 minute version (I recommend the longer).

I’ve always loved these sort of concept videos from corporate reserach labs, and as the medium goes I’d rate this one pretty high. The production value is top-knotch (as are most other such videos from Microsoft). As you’d expect, there are many kernels of ideas that have been around — I was especially reminded of Hiroshi Ishi’s ClearBoard, Jun Rekimoto’s Pick-and-Drop and various aspects from Bruce Tognazzini’s Starfire concept video — but there were still many concepts that were new to me. And unlike so many concept videos out there they seem to have mostly avoided the trap of assuming that devices will have a combination of strong AI and psychic powers.

Nicholas Carlson at The Silicon Alley Insider does the math.

Very cool article and movie about how the makers of Coraline used 3D printers to create individual facial expressions and other effects. So would that make Coraline a CG stop-motion animation?

Typealyzer claims to be able to determine the Myers-Briggs personality type of someone just by analyzing their blog. It’s still in beta, which may be why they list me as an ISTJ (“The Duty Fulfillers”) — the exact opposite of how every other Myers-Briggs personality test classifies me.

Medialogy.net is a new media criticism blog started by Geoffrey Alan Rhodes (my brother), Blinxia Yu and Christopher Ernst:

:|: Medialogy.net is a new net criticism initiative publishing micro-essay insights into current trends in media and visual culture. It is an open forum for new critical voices; we are continuously seeking articles and comments with fresh perspectives on emerging media phenomena. Medialogy.net was begun with the desire to distribute, expand, and textually manifest a rolling conversation between young media researchers and artists globally networked through the university and gallery system. We seek to match a cynical perspective with critical intelligence, and a constant willingness to pull down old paradigms and icons of media philosophy and cultural criticism.

It’s especially interesting to see discussion about the same media trends and subjects I tend to link to (OK, when I’m posting at all), but from the perspective of people who come first from the media side (in this case film) and second from the technology side rather than the other way around.

My lab has just released a beta of iCandy, an application for Mac and PC that lets you associate an image and a two-dimensional QR bar code with any iTunes song, YouTube video or Flickr photo, and to print them out as postcards, business cards, posters or photo albums. Then you can just hold the barcode up to a webcam to automatically bring up the photo or play the song or movie.

The app itself is pretty cute (we’ve been using it internally for a few months now) and they’ve recently set up a community network site for sharing your playlists and media pics with others too. The online Flash-based version seems to be broken at the moment, but check out the app.