All Things Visual

Crowd Sourcing vs. Tribe Sourcing

July 10, 2009

Google Maps new geolocation feature -- now you can share your location on Google Map

Yesterday, Google Maps launched a geolocation feature. When you click on the small blue dot on the upper-left controls, it will try to figure out where you are using Wi-Fi. It’s a pretty darn cool feature. Well, Skyhook’s been doing that much longer than Google has and definitely has a better product at this point (your Google Map on your iPhone uses Skyhook! Things that make you go hm…). Hold this thought. I’ll return to my point about this in a bit.

This blog is not about Google getting their tentacles into many different markets. (We had that experience and Galen Moore of Mass High Tech quoted me quite well in his article.) That’s definitely a multi-part blog for some other time.

I want to talk more about crowd sourcing vs. tribe sourcing in this blog. I think people have a decent idea of what crowd sourcing is. So, what is tribe sourcing? Tribe sourcing is when you have not everyone involved; much less but focused set of folks doing the sourcing. Crowds can create lots and lots of data, but have many different intensions — their “intension vectors,” if you will, are not aligned, hence creating lots of noise as well. So, in order to gather what you want from this vast amounts of information, you have to filter accordingly. Meaning, make some assumptions, process, and potentially make some guesses as to what that means.

Now, let’s take the example of what I initially mentioned about Google geolocation vs. Skyhook geolocation. Sources say that Google’s geolocation feature is not as good. It turns out that’s because they are crowd sourcing their info. From Wade Roush’s article:

“[Google] quietly gathers local readings every time someone uses a Google app on an iPhone or a Blackberry, or some other mobile device.”

As opposed to Skyhook’s tribe-sourced data:

“Skyhook’s own approach is to send Wi-Fi-sensing vehicles down every highway, street, and alley, methodically establishing the position and strength of every access point they pass.”

Skyhook may have much less quantity of people contributing to their data, but they have a very focused tribe gathering the right data. Their intension vectors are very well aligned in collecting the data in a structured and optimal way for this particular application.

So, which one’s better? It’stoo early to tell but my bias is Skyhook (and has nothing to do with the fact that I know Ted Morgan and folks at Skyhook fairly well). Is tribe sourcing better than crowd sourcing? Vice versa? More specifically, when will Google’s data/product be better than Skyhook’s? I don’t know, but time will tell.

Yet another question: Why combine and do both? Google’s everywhere (including Android) and seemingly has unlimited resources, so they can. I think Skyhook can too. Perhaps the answer lies in somewhere in the balance between the crowd and the tribe.

Leave a Comment » | maps | Tagged: Google, maps, geolocation, skyhook wireless, tribe sourcing, crowd sourcing, crowdsourcing, tribesourcing, intensions | Permalink
Posted by Mok Oh

What About the Inside?

July 9, 2009

About a year ago in 2008, I had the privilege to speak in front of the Where 2.0 2008 audience. The topic was titled, “What About the Inside?” (Online video link here.) I’m bringing this up again since the question is still valid — in some sense much more valid now than before. What was the context? It was a question meant not only for the Where 2.0 audience, but also meant for the GIS, mapping, GPS, 3D/2D imaging, government/civic, architectural and urban planning, and any community of people who were doing any work that gathers information and interacts with interior places and spaces we live.

The premise was that we have an unnatural bias towards mapping the outside spaces more so than the inside. Perhaps it has some historical significance, where outside spaces were the final frontier. Well, that’s no longer true, since much of the earth’s outdoors has been mapped, explored, marked. GPS, satellite and aerial imaging, smart software algorithms (e.g. image registration), and the Moore’s Law definitely changed the landscape of how we can gather information for the outside. Now we even have ground-level imagery from Google, EveryScape, etc., and we can zoom around places virtually.

But what about the INSIDE spaces? I surely don’t want to stop at just the entrance to a place I want to visit. I want to go INSIDE! Perhaps the right question is: How can I experience of the inside spaces of every interior space I’d like to visit? Yeah, it’s a big question. And in this context, by “I,” I mean for every single person who uses the internet. There are definitely issues such as privacy, no GPS, no aerial photos, multiple floors/levels, etc. that question existing technologies and solutions, since they don’t seem to “map” that well for the interiors.

Please check out my Where 2.0 2008 presentation video and I would love to hear your thoughts. And below is the clip of an EveryScape eye-candy commercial.

4 Comments | Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by Mok Oh

2D, 3D… 2.5D??

July 8, 2009

EveryScape's "2.5D" Local Business Webscape Demo

When I say “2D,” people understand. When I say “3D,” folks get that too. But when I say “2.5D,” I either get a “huh?” or a “hm..” Yes, dimensions are typically in integers, so it’s a fuzzy description for sure. When I say 2.5D, I mean visual representations that look almost 3D but not quite. More specifically, in my context, I mean immersive panoramas.

Ok, some nerdy stuff (but don’t fall asleep). Typically, 3D in our context means three orthogonal axes in space, let’s call them X, Y, and Z — hence, the 3 dimensions. When a first-person or a camera or a viewer is involved, we need to add a couple more dimensions Phi and Theta for looking up-down and side-to-side. So position (x, y, and z) and some viewing direction (phi, theta) consist of 5 dimensions (also called the extrinsics). Yes, there’s something called the intrinsics as well, but that’s for some other discussion — it just means what type of camera and lens you’re using.

So, what’s my point? My point is 2.5D really is just a figure of speech. But more interestingly, I think that 2.5D way of representing our world in a digital fashion is really useful.

I gave a talk at an O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference early this year titled “2D, 3D… 2.5D?” The abstract was as follows:

“Historically, 3D on the Web has always been associated with difficulties. Although 3D has been around for decades, from research labs to gaming to visualization of a 3D earth, there are numerous reasons why 3D is still having majority adoption challenges. On the other hand, digital photography (and video) have blossomed well into the world-wide consumer market, from both hardware (e.g., cell phones with cameras) and software perspectives (e.g., Flickr, YouTube).

In this talk we delve deeper into the benefits of a “2.5D” representation of our world, leveraging both 2D photography and 3D graphics and vision techniques. We open up a discussion for why such difficulties in 3D realm exist, what/how we can benefit from digital point-and-shoot photography, and further discuss the benefits of creating a “2.5D” representation—more specifically from the mirror world and web perspective (e.g., Amazon A9, Google Street View, EveryScape).

We will discuss the pros/cons of 3D using specific examples (e.g. Google Earth, MS Virtual Earth, Sketchup, Maya, etc.), 2D (e.g. digital photography, photoshop, jpeg, flickr, etc.), and 2.5D (e.g. EveryScape, Google Street View, MS Photosynth). Below is a table where we compare the each of the 3D, 2.5D, and 2D with some parameters, in which we argue all must be in the “easy” category for mass adoption success. Mass adoption of 3D may be years (or even decades) away, and various 2.5D solutions are filling in some of the needs now. We further discuss EveryScape’s specific journey in research and development—how and why we ended up where we are today.”

The point is that while scalable 3D isn’t quite here yet for the web and mass adoption, 2.5D technologies are filling in the gap (e.g. EveryScape, Google Street View, Earthmine, Mapjack). They are emerging indeed!

If there’s enough interest, I will put up my slides. Pls let me know.

8 Comments | panorama | Tagged: 2.5D, 2D, 3D, Earthmine, ETech, EveryScape, extrinsics, Google, intrinics, Mapjack, web | Permalink
Posted by Mok Oh

I Want My 3D!

July 5, 2009

3D Operating System from Jurassic Park

Remember in Jurassic Park (yes, the first one) when the little girl character sees the computer system and says something like, “This is Unix! I can do this!” and she navigates the database in 3D? (Screenshot above). Well, to me, that was pretty darn cool. I thought then, wow, this is how the future of OS’s will be like. That was around the time first web browsers began to surface as well and the future looked bright for 3D.

Fast forward to present day. Why aren’t we browsing the web on 3D? Why aren’t the Operating Systems more 3D? Where the hell is Virtual Reality that I was promised? WTF happened??? I WANT MY 3D!!!

I’ve been in the 3D world (both in academic and industry) long enough to have an opinion, and I would be very interested if someone’s done some survey or deep analysis on this. Let’s go back and check with my last blog on 3D for a framework on this discussion.

Content authoring in 3D is hard.

To incorporate 3D into feature-length films cost millions of dollars and tremendous amounts of 3D brain power (lots of expensive PhDs). 3D games also take a long time to create, lots of $ and resources, and take some very smart and experienced folks and tools. I don’t think 3D authoring will get that much easier any time soon, but as long as some people are spending enough $ and putting enough resources and brain power into this problem, shouldn’t there be enough to bring this to the mainstream?

Content distribution for 3D is hard, but getting better

We used to need to buy a set of CDs or DVDs to get the 3D content (let’s say a game) into our computers way back when. These days, pretty much everything digital is delivered via the internet — even 3D content. Google Earth and Virtual Earth both have tremendous amounts of images and 3D content, but not all need to be delivered at once. In 3D lingo, level of detail algorithms enable “on demand” content delivery. For example, if you are using Google Earth or Maps, the right images are delivered to your viewer depending on your zoom level. But still, it takes quite a bit to load a 3D city in Google Earth or Virtual Earth.

Need a 3D viewer on the web browser

No one downloads a plugin. Well, very few. And without a “standard” 3D viewer on the browser it’s still hard to see 3D content. I think Flash will change everything. 3D can be displayed using Flash 10, and although it’s got some performance limitations so far, it can bring the 3D experience to your browsers now, and much improved versions for the future. Very exciting.

3D User Experirnce (UX) is getting better

I think that one of the detrimental things that happened to 3D was that the user experience of 3D were initially done by engineers (and therefore usable only by engineers). Yeah, sure there are engineers with design chops, but that’s for some other blog. 3D UX in my opinion was hard, and I still think it’s too hard. I’ve seen a recent 3D demo by one of the big players and even he had a hard time navigating the 3D scene. I think we can get there by getting more designers in the loop (and engineers out of the loop . Think Apple.

8 Comments | 3D | Tagged: 3D, flash, Jurassic Park, viewer | Permalink
Posted by Mok Oh

Thoughts about 3D (part 1) — The Framework

July 4, 2009

The 3D Axis -- Yep, 'Y' is up.

In the past few blogs, I’ve focused on the state of panoramas as visual medium. There’s still quite a bit to talk about there, but I’d like to shift gears to discussing 3D. 3D is a big topic and there are lots to discuss, so I will break down this blog series into specific topics within 3D — hence the “part 1.”

Let’s first discuss a framework from which we can breakdown 3D into various sub components:

3D content authoring – This refers to the content authoring; how they are made (e.g. tools to automation), file formats
3D distribution – Here, we’ll talk about how the content gets to the users, file formats, algorithms, etc.
3D viewer/player – Once the data reaches the user, a viewer or a player is necessary to see and interact with the content
3D application – Finally, there should be a reason for creation of the 3D content; we discuss UI, UX

So, moving forward, we can categorize our discussions into one (or more) of these buckets to give us a good basis for a decent framework. There may will be more, and this is not an exhaustive list, but it’s a good start (and I ain’t waiting for this to be right to blog).

1 Comment | 3D | Tagged: 3D, application, authoring distribution, file format, framework, player, UI, UX, viewer | Permalink
Posted by Mok Oh

Flash Making a Difference in Panoramic Viewing

July 1, 2009

In my mind, panorama viewers — just the viewer part — were one of the biggest hurdles in making panoramas more prevalent on the web (pls read Thoughts About Panoramic Photography (part 2) ). Even if you have an eat-your-heart-out-Ansel-Adams panorama shot, if you couldn’t share it on the internet then you’re screwed. And unfortunately, people are not trusting of plug-ins or standalones – it had to just work (I will talk about that in a bit). If you had to download anything, then the chances of someone seeing your content are slim.

I believe one of the first, if not the first, commercial/consumer panorama viewer was QuickTime VR by Shencheng Eric Chen. He published a paper in 1995 in SIGGRAPH describing QTVR. Another notable is Helmut Dersch, the creator of Panorama Tools in 1998. Focusing on just the viewer part, he had a PTViewer which was java based.

Unfortunately, neither QuickTime VR nor Java had (and even the present tense “has”) the penetration to enable users to view the panoramas. (If 1 in 3 or 4 cannot view your content on the web, it looks broken.) Check out Rich Internet Application Statistics page — got some pretty wonderful numbers there.

Now let’s talk about Flash and how it made a difference. I will go as far as how it has changed the (panorama) world.

I remember the early days of Flash when it was mainly meant to be a vector animation and viewing tool. And slowly, but surely, version after version, it started to morph itself into a much more versatile language for photos and videos. (Wikipedia rocks — found the history of Flash releases.) Once Flash Player version 8 came out in late 2005 with an ability to affine warp photo textures, that got a few smart folks working on Flash-based panorama viewers. I found one of the first viewers here. (If you can find more, PLS comment!) Just so that I am clear, by panorama viewer, I mean correct perspective warping, not those cheesy viewers where straight lines are all sinusoidal and sh!t.

First Flash Panorama Viewer (?)

So, what did this mean? With Flash Player penetration of ~95%, that meant most people could view the panoramas and hence brought the content/media to the realm of “mainstream!”

Believe it or not, this has changed our world. Thank you MacroMedia for that small innovation that made a difference.

5 Comments | Photography, panorama | Tagged: flash, helmut dersch, java, quicktime vr, viewer | Permalink
Posted by Mok Oh

Mobile Reality Demo

June 30, 2009

I was privileged enough to be a part of a panel in Mobile Reality at the Where 2.0 Conference this year, chaired by Brady Forrest. Here’s the short description of the panel:

“An emerging class of smartphones including location-based services and persistent data connections are lenses by which we can effectively view data layers atop physical space. What was once only available from tethered desktop computers is now possible from pocket-sized companion devices that travel with us. We are seeing examples of this in their earliest incarnations – social networking, gaming, reference and commerce.

Opposed to looking far into the future, this panel looks at examples of this technology in use and available today to consumers on a variety of smartphone platforms, including the Apple iPhone and Google Android. Panelists will provide short demonstrations of this technology, followed by a topic discussion and Q&A.”

The reason for sharing this is to show you EveryScape’s initiatives towards mobility. I believe EveryScape has one of the coolest and most useful visual platforms around (in my unbiased opinion), and you can see a glimpse of what’s being worked on in the video below (starting at the 2:3o mark).

2 Comments | Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by Mok Oh

The Era of Post Processing (part deux)

June 30, 2009

I’ve opened up a can full of thoughts and ideas with my last blog on Post Processing. So, imagine this: What if you can create a 3D model out of any image? What would you do with it? How would you use it and for what?

This is work I did at MIT with Max Chen and Fredo Durand many years ago.

Leave a Comment » | Photography, post processing | Tagged: Dali, depth maps, image-based modeling, post processing | Permalink
Posted by Mok Oh

VideoScapes: Storytelling with Panoramas

June 29, 2009

EveryScape's VideoScape Authoring Tool

Videos have an inherent aptitude and tendency to want to tell a story. Its nature is to capture light and sound along a flow of time. Photos on the other hand typically capture light a slice in time. A single picture can tell a story (since it’s worth a thousand words). But often times, a series of photos are used in a slide show to tell a story.

So, the obvious question is — What about panoramas? Of course, a single panorama can tell a story, but it always helps if there’s a time component involved.

EveryScape Inc. created what we call VideoScapes. VideoScapes are authored and edited in a WYSIWYG way to tell a story using a series of connected panoramas in space. It’s quite cool in my unbiased opinion. I believe it is a powerful and easy way to create dynamic videos and stories. You can pause at any given time, look around, and press play to continue.

Some cool example links below.

Audio and background music are coming soon.

Leave a Comment » | VideoScape, panorama | Tagged: great wall of china, panorama, south beach, storytelling, the breakers, VideoScape | Permalink
Posted by Mok Oh

All Things Visual

Crowd Sourcing vs. Tribe Sourcing

What About the Inside?

2D, 3D… 2.5D??

I Want My 3D!

Thoughts about 3D (part 1) — The Framework

Flash Making a Difference in Panoramic Viewing

Mobile Reality Demo

The Era of Post Processing (part deux)

VideoScapes: Storytelling with Panoramas

Mok Oh

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