The Refined Geek

With CGI being par for the course these days any you can’t be blamed for thinking that anything you see is fake. I think that’s why effects that are achieved without the use of computer trickery are so impressive, much in the same way as games that forego modern graphics but still manage to create an intriguing experience. Probably one of the coolest effects I’ve seen recently is the use of sound waves that are at a very similar frequency to the frame rate of the camera being used which ends up producing some pretty weird and wonderful effects.

Below is the latest one I’ve come across, and it’s pretty awesome:

As the video alludes to the effect would appear to stem from the rolling shutter that CMOS based cameras use to create images. What’s happening is when the image is read off the sensor its done line by line and then reconstructed into a full image. However because of the way the sensor is read this allows the image to change during exposure which gives rise to all sorts of weird and wonderful effects. In this particular video it has the effect of making the speaker cone appear to have a wave travelling through it, rather than it slowly moving in and out like the creator expected. This has since been confirmed in other videos as rotating the camera shows the effect tracking the camera’s point of view.

Other interesting effects you can get is “freezing” the motion of water using a similar technique. If you fool around with frequencies slightly you can also get all sorts of other weird behaviour like water appearing to defy gravity. These are all based on sound waves however but anything that has a periodicity to it will allow you to make some really cool effects with cameras that use a rolling shutter.

As most readers are aware I’m an incredibly amateur photographer having dabble in it on and off again for the past 5 years but only really started taking it seriously towards the end of last year. I’m still very much in the early stages of my understanding as whilst I can produce some pictures that I (and others) like my hit rate still feels incredibly low, especially when I set out to create a very specific image. A lot of that is comes from my still nascent understanding of how to light subjects properly and how the direction/intensity changes the resulting image.

Now whilst the following video isn’t exactly the greatest introduction on how you should go about lighting your subject (in this a model’s face) it does showcase just how dramatically you can change the resulting image simply by moving the light source:

Showing this to my wife she was adamant that they were splicing video together with different models as the changes are quite dramatic. It is the same person however as if you look at the eyes you can see the light source rotating at a rather impressive clip which is what gives rise to the dramatic changes in shadows. Pausing at different sections also makes it quite clear what the impacts of the direction of light are and how they are reflected in the final image.

I wonder what the effect would be if instead of moving the light they used multiple sources then just cycled through them. Hmmmmm…….

On recommendation of a friend I recently watched a documentary called Side by Side which details the history of the primary technology behind the cinema: the cameras. It starts off by giving you an introduction into the traditional photographic methods that were used to create films in the past and then goes on to detail the rise of digital in the same space. Being something of a photographic buff myself as well as a technological geek who can’t get enough of technology the topic wasn’t something I was unfamiliar with but it was highly interesting to see what people in the industry were thinking about the biggest change to happen in their industry in almost a century.

Like much of my generation I grew up digitally with the vast majority of my life spent alongside computers and other non-analog style equipment. I was familiar with film as my father was something of a photographer (I believe his camera of choice was a Pentax K1000 which he still has, along with his Canon 60D) and my parents gave me my own little camera to experiment with. It wasn’t until a good decade and a half later that I’d find myself in possession of my first DSLR and still not another few years until after then that I’d find some actual passion for it. What I’m getting at here is that I’m inherently biased towards digital since it’s where I found my feet and it’s my preferred tool for capturing images.

One of the arguments that I’ve often heard levelled at digital formats, both in the form of images and your general everyday data, is that there’s no good way to archive it in order for future generations to be able to view it. Film and paper, the traditional means with which we’ve stored information for centuries, would appear to archive quite well due to the amount of knowledge contained in those formats that has stood the test of time. Ignoring for the moment that digital representations of data are still something of a nascent technology by comparison the question of how we archive it has come up time and time again and everyone seems to be under the impression that there’s no way to archive it.

This just isn’t the case.

Just before I was set to graduate from university I had been snooping around for a better job after my jump to a developer hadn’t worked out as I planned. As luck would have it I managed to land a job at the National Archives of Australia, a relatively small organisation tasked with the monumental effort of cataloguing all records of note that were produced in Australia. This encompassed all things from regular documents used in the course of government to things of cultural value like the air line tickets from when the Beatles visited Australia. Whilst they were primarily concerned with physical records (as shown by their tremendous halls filled with boxes) there was a small project within this organisation that was dedicated to the preservation of records that were born digital and were never to see the physical world.

I can’t take much credit for the work that they did there, I was merely a care taker of the infrastructure that was installed long before I arrived but I can tell you about the work they were doing there. The project team, consisting mostly of developers with just 2 IT admins (including myself), was dedicated to preserving digital files in the same way you would do with a paper record. At the time a lot of people were still printing them off and then archiving them in that way however it became clear that this process wasn’t going to be sustainable, especially considering that the NAA had only catalogued about 10% of their entire collection when I was there (that’s right, they didn’t know what 90% of the stuff they had contained). Thankfully many of the ideas used in the physical realm translated well to the digital one and thus XENA was born.

XENA is an open source project headed by the team at NAA that can take everyday files and convert them into an archival format. This format contains not only the content but also the “essence” of the document, I.E. it’s presentation, layout and any quirks that make that document, that document. The viewer included is then able to reconstruct the original document using the data contained within the file and since the project is open source should the NAA cease development on the project the data will still be available for all of those who used the XENA program. The released version does not currently support video but I can tell you that they were working on it while I was there but the needs of archiving digital documents was the more pressing requirement at the time.

Ah ha, I’ll hear some film advocates say, but what about the medium you store them on? Surely there’s no platform that can guarantee that the data will still be readable in 20 years, heck even 10 I’ll bet! You might think this, and should you have bought any of the first generation of CD-Rs I wouldn’t fault you for it, but we have many ways of storing data for long term archival purposes. Tapes are by far the most popular (and stand the test of time quite well) but for truly archival quality data storage that exists today nothing beats magneto-optical discs which can have lives measured in centuries. Of course we could always dive into the world of cutting edge science for likes like a sapphire etched platinum disc that might be capable of storing data for up to 10 million years but I think I’ve already hammered home the point enough.

There’s no denying that there are challenges to be overcome with the archival of digital data as the methods we developed for traditional means only serve as a pointer in the right direction. Indeed attempting to apply them to digital the world has often had disastrous results like the first reel of magnetic tape brought to the NAA which was inadvertenly baked in an oven (done with paper to kill microbes before archival), destroying the data forever. This isn’t to say we don’t have anything nor are we not working on it however and as technology improves so will the methods available for archiving digital data. It’s simply a matter of time until digital becomes as durable as its analogue counterpart and, dare I say it, not long before it surpasses it.

Want to feel really insignificant for a bit?

I don’t know what it is but things like the galaxy IC1101, VY Canis Majoris and all other heavenly bodies that are just beyond anything that I’m capable of imagining captivate me completely. I think it’s probably due to the possibilities that arise from such scale. Just think about it, if one planet in one lonely solar system was able to produce a species like us what kind of life could have formed in these other places. Could it even happen? Would we be able to recognise it if we saw it? The possibilities are nearly endless and that, for me at least, is wildly fascinating.

It’s that desire to find out what’s out there that fuels my passion for transhumanist ideals. Whilst many will argue that ageing and death are a natural part of life that should not be circumvented I instead ask why you want to limit your experience to one life time, especially when the universe is so vast as to provide nearly limitless opportunities for those who wish to explore it.

Some find that incomprehensible scale intimidating, I find it invigorating.

Things like this never fail to bring me to tears:

It’s not the most original video on the planet (or off, as the case might be) but it’s probably one of the most memorable ones of these edge of space type deals. The train’s face is CGI but the rest of it is completely real, done in a process that can be replicated on the cheap if you know what you’re doing. There are however a couple nits that I like to pick about videos like these mostly around what people tend to classify as “space”.

The international defined standard for being in space and not in Earth’s atmosphere is defined as 100KM above sea level, referred to as the Kármán line. The most exotic of helium ballons will only manage to make it about halfway to that point before bursting and falling back down to earth. Whilst the atmosphere at those heights wouldn’t support life for any length of time and you can clearly see the curvature of the Earth it’s not in space unless you’re past that point. Even saying you’re at the edge of the space is a little on the nose, but I’ll usually let that slide.

Despite all that I still love videos like this as they really put the whole world in perspective. That feeling has a name too, the overview effect, which many astronauts have reported feeling upon seeing the Earth from space or on the lunar surface. It’s my hope (and running bet with a friend) that I’ll one day see the earth from that perspective too.

I usually reserve these kinds of things for a quick tweet or Facebook post but I figured it was time I actually explained the creation of these particular videos. Shown below for your viewing pleasure is yet another Curiosity descent video that makes for some incredible watching:

For starters the first thing I’ll let you in on is that all the sound you hear in this video is 100% fake as Curiosity does not have a microphone on board. That may seem strange, I mean what camera that can take video doesn’t have one, but they’ve launched craft to Mars with microphones before (the Mars Polar Lander was one, although it was tragically lost, with the Phoenix Lander being one that actually made it) and the recordings made back then weren’t particularly interesting. Most of the noise that they recorded was akin to static and really didn’t have much use scientifically so future Mars craft like Curiosity don’t carry them so they can use the payload space for more experiments. Additionally the actual sound would probably be a lot more harsh (ever heard a microphone in high wind?) as at this stage Curiosity was rocketing towards Mars at a pretty decent rate.

The original video, shown here, is based off the images from the MARDI camera that’s on the bottom of the rover specifically for this purpose. Now I’ve heard differing reports as to what the actual frame rate was as the original video says it’s somewhere on the order of 2 FPS (297 images over 150 seconds) but most are quote as saying its 4FPS. The imager itself is capable of doing up to 10FPS but I don’t believe it was for this particular video. How then, you might be wondering, do they manage to get something like 20 FPS like the video does above? Well the original video is probably the best candidate for something called Video Interpolation (or inbetweening as its usually referred to).

In essence the additional frames are generated from the frames either side of it and the algorithms are essentially guessing what’s going to come next. For the MARDI images this works quite well as the amount of change between frames is quite low and thus the interpolation between frames looks quite good.  Most of the better ones of these also have a lot of hand work with them as well to smooth out some things (like the heat shield falling motion). If there’s a lot of action between frames you tend to get smudging  which you can actually see hints of in the video (look at the landscape shifting about as it gets closer). It works on any kind of video too and a lot of enterprising YouTubers use it in order to get that slow motion effect without having to spend the untold thousands on high speed video cameras.

I find the videos interesting both because of what they are (technical achievements in both their creation and interpolation) and what they represent to us as species. The response to the Curiosity videos has been nothing short of amazing and it makes me so happy to see so many being inspired by it. It’s things like this that spur on the next generation to become the kinds of people capable of making things like this and it never fails to impress me time and time again.

Ah, another day another simple demonstration of physics:

This video is awesome not just because they built a water slide that lets you do a loop the loop but because it’s a very simple demonstration of the centripetal forces that are in play. You’ll notice that there’s quite a bit of lead up to the actual loop itself, a requirement so that when you start to loop up the sum of the forces ensures that you can overcome the effects of gravity. Too little and you’d only find yourself getting part way around the loop before tumbling down. Too much and you’d risk breaking the supporting structure but you’d have to be going at quite a clip to accomplish that.

If you want to see a good demo of the forces in action the Physics Classroom has a good post on it.

You know how I’ve got a thing for simple demonstrations of physical/scientific laws? Well check out this one:

I believe most people are familiar with the concept of a gyroscope: a spinning object (usually a disk) that exhibits some counter-intuitive behaviours like appearing to defy gravity. The above demonstration show cases the mechanism by which a gyroscope functions quite aptly in that the torque from the spinning wheel is applied perpendicular to its surface. This has the effect of making the heavy device seem almost weightless. It would seem to be defying gravity but in fact the act of lifting the wheel up will drain it of some its kinetic energy and as the professor alluded to it could climb about 200ft in the air before it ran out of puff.

Simply amazing, isn’t it?

It’s getting close to 2 years ago now that I was waiting in Orlando desperately hoping that I’d get to see the Space Shuttle Discovery launch in person, only to have it ripped away from me. I take solace in the fact that it was one of the longest launch delays in the Shuttle’s long history and whilst I didn’t get to go and see it when it did launch all those months later I did watch the online stream and my heart was renewed. Ever since then I’ve wanted to know what the experience would have been like and today it looks like I got my wish.

An enterprising  YouTube user has set out to accomplish just that, and it’s magnificent:

Playing it back on my meagre Logitech speakers was impressive enough so I can only imagine how it will go with a proper sound system. I’ve scared the cat enough today with just the first play through so I’ll probably lay off it for a little bit but suffice to say it’s an impressive recreation of what it would be like to be at a shuttle launch. I certainly got nerd chills listening to it.

I remember buying my first high definition TV way back when my wife and I moved into our first house. Back when I was living in a share house (this was around 5~6 years ago now) one of my room mates made the decision to get one. After moving out I figured that I could go without one for a while since I had a relatively large CRT screen that I could use in the interim. It didn’t take long before the urge hit me and I set out to get one for myself.

My requirements were simple: I wanted a LCD that could do 1080p so that it would last me a fair while. Back then you were lucky to find any content that was greater than 480p that wasn’t on a DVD so I figured a 1080p screen would suit me for the foreseeable future. I had a budget limit too, $3000 was the top price I could pay and not a cent more. Of course all the sets that had my required feature set were well out of my price range, but I eventually lucked out when I found one that had a “bonus” 27″ set that I convinced them to take back and remove the price of it off the larger set. Flush with victory I walked out of there with a brilliant Samsung 46″ LCD display that still sits prominently in my living room today, and probably will for a few more years to come.

Now I consider myself something of an audio/visual buff (not to the point of stupidity, mind you) so there was another reason why I wanted something capable of 1080p. You see our eyes, well ones with 20/20 vision at least, are able to perceive details down to a resolution of about 1/60th of a degree of an arc. With this information in mind we can then extrapolate whether or not a screen of a certain size at a certain viewing distance will show any perceivable difference. At the time I relied on some helpful forums that had rough guides as to what resolutions needed to be viewed at what distances but I just recently found this chart which demonstrates the principle much more clearly:

Looking at my choice of screen (46″, 1080p) with my view distance (around 6~7ft) it’s clear that I made the right choice. Interestingly enough though should I want to go for the next resolution up and get the full benefit of it I’d have to get a screen that’s almost triple the size, which makes sense considering just how much higher resolution 4K footage is compared to 1080p. I’d strongly recommend using this as a guide if you’re considering buying a HDTV in the near future as there’s simply no reason to go for the biggest/highest resolution screen you can get if you’re not going to be able to tell the difference between it and a cheaper set.

This is all rendered somewhat moot by the fact that a set that’s very comparable to mine now retails for just $799 thanks to Kogan. Back when the choice between the biggest/best and the appropriate was on the order of a couple thousand dollars it really did matter. Today it’s not so much of a big deal as a very nice set can be had for under a third of the cost that it used to be and the differences between them are usually limited to the screen size.

You’d think that this kind of price differential would make my blood boil but it’s just the way technology works. If you want something like a HDTV there’s really no point in delaying it for the next model as there will always be something better and cheaper just around the corner. I committed to the purchase fully aware of what I was getting into but I also made sure that my cash would see use over many, many years. So in reality I’ve pretty much came out even and I have never felt wanting for a new HDTV.