David Kelleher: Blog
SXSWi: Music Visualization
This post summarizes the session presented at SXSW Interactive, Austin 2011
Paul Lamere from the Echo Nest company discussed the tools available for for exploring music using visualization techniques.
SXSWi: Gesture Interfaces
This post summarizes the session presented at SXSW Interactive, Austin 2011
The XBox Kinect designer was a no-show for this panel. The remaining presenter was a futurist who provided a good overview of computer interface technology.
Peripherals, including keyboards and mice, were the first stage of interface development. Touch screens were next. Gesture interfaces are in the near future, but not fully refined yet. The Wii is a peripheral that incorporates gestures. Kinect, a webcam add-on with a motion sensor, has been very popular but can be inaccurate and clumsy, and suffers from latency. More complex movements required for gesture interfaces will be performed by fewer users. In the future, improved gesture interfaces will reduce wild arm waving by fine tuning with additional inputs. Recognizing voice, eye movements, facial expression, and body language are possibilities for enhanced multi-modal gesture interface devices.
SXSWi Object Databases
This post summarizes the session presented at SXSW Interactive, Austin 2011
Nearly every database-driven, dynamic website uses a relational database like MySQL or Microsoft SQL Server. The relational model stores information in predefined table structures, and includes a query language to join and search tables for data retrieval. The major disadvantage of this model, as explained by the presenter, is we don’t think about data that way when considering real world problems. For most applications, with the exception of perhaps accounting, an application designer can’t know in advance all the data that will be needed and how it will have to be structured. Relational databases, unfortunately, lock applications into structures that are very difficult to modify later.
deviantART muro
I visited the deviantART room between panel sessions, and met the developer of deviantART muro. deviantART originated as a website for traditional and digital artists to share their work. The business now supports the community of artists by promoting, exhibiting, and selling their work.
Their muro program was developed in HTML5. The drawing program is an early success for the future web scripting language, and does NOT use Adobe Flash. The project highlights the difference between HTML4, which is just a basic tagging language, and HTML5, which defines the programming APIs necessary to create highly interactive applications.
SXSWi: Space Visualization
This post summarizes the session presented at SXSW Interactive, Austin 2011
NASA releases an enormous amount of data and images from their space program. Enthusiasts around the world are busy stitching photos, mapping, animating, and sharing their work. The results of many efforts in the area of space visualization were presented by the panel including representatives from NASA, JPL, a PBS reporter, and an admin from Unmanned Spaceflight.com.
Design Across Disciplines
This post summarizes the session presented at SXSW Interactive, Austin 2011
An intriguing panel at SXSW Interactive attempted to find lessons from disciplines established thousands of years ago, such as architecture, event planning, and speech writing, and apply them to the very young field of interactive design.
SXSWi: Social Networking in the Middle East uprisings
This post summarizes the session presented at SXSW Interactive, Austin 2011
Journalists from the New York Times and Al Jazeera attended this passionate discussion about the role of social networking in the recent Middle East and North Africa uprisings.
Some fascinating success stories were told. Tunisians tweeted the location of government sniper nest locations. Syrian teachers who beat students were fired after a video was posted on Facebook. Egypt, trying to stop social network communications, shut down Internet services. That only fueled the protests, as the population then had nothing else to do except go into the streets. Social networking also had a role in organizing people after the revolutions occurred.
SXSWi: Mobile Accessibility
This post summarizes the session presented at SXSW Interactive, Austin 2011
The challenge of hosting a conversation about mobile accessibility is that few people know or care much about the issue. An IBM technical staff member was tasked with the problem, and there were some good insights at this session.
First, audience members emphasized an important principle – that making an interactive project accessible to the disabled will result in improved usability for everyone. For example, many could benefit from a live web transcript at a noisy conference. Solutions to accessibility problems help in many ways. Correctly tagging content for the blind who use a screen reader will result in better organized, more search engine friendly code. Larger buttons for users with motor control problems could help an aging boomer population.
SXSWi: Social Television
This post summarizes the session presented at SXSW Interactive, Austin 2011
Interactive television is a catch all phrase representing media companies’ desires to more actively engage their audience. ITV experiments dating back to the 1980s focused on expensive, proprietary technologies, but today’s producers look to leverage existing interactive platforms. The love for Twitter at SXSW was evident in this Twitter-centric panel, not surprising for a service that broke out at the conference a few years ago. Fortunately, CNN was also on hand to discuss their more sophisticated social television work.
AMODA Digital Showcase
AMODA is the Austin Museum of Digital Art, a roaming nonprofit group organizing showcases, performances, and screenings of digital art in the Austin area.
On Friday night, the film, music, and interactive SXSW crowds and hit the downtown Austin streets, and a good crowd made it to AMODA’s 10th anniversary digital art showcase at Mohawk. The open air venue had two busy stages, more than a half dozen projection screens, and a cyberpunk poetry reading.
SXSWi: Social Photography
This post summarizes the session presented at SXSW Interactive, Austin 2011
While there are many social photography sites and startups, like Flickr, Tumblr, and Instagram, Facebook is by far the biggest player in the field. Billions of photos are uploaded to Facebook every month, more than a typical social photography site like Flickr has in their complete database, and one wonders what they’re doing with the largest collection of photographs in the world.
The Future of Interactive Radio
Pandora radio classifies songs using hundreds of musical attributes, and uses a mathematical distance function to determine the similarity of songs.
The list of attributes in Pandora includes structure, rhythm, genre, tone, instruments, groove, recording techniques, lyrics, and vocal style. Interactive controls are minimal, limited to the selection of songs/artists to seed a station, and a short menu of options for training the application. The level of control is at least far more than traditional radio, where listeners are limited to selecting stations based on genre or radio formats like adult contemporary.
The question for the future is how could the next generation of interactive radio be superior to Pandora’s offering? Maybe thousands or tens of thousands of data points could be collected per song, and crowdsoucing could be used to enlist the efforts of the entire listening audience. They could do far more than a handful of Pandora employees. Release year, popularity, and mood are a few attributes that Pandora is currently not using. Also their distance function calculation seems limited. Fuzzy logic, artificial intelligence, and data mining offer more advanced techniques for analyzing music that might group well together. Finally, giving users greater control should be possible, without tripping the legal requirement that users cannot select specific artists or songs.
"User Generated Features"
I’m continually amazed by the pace of change in the web development business. At a recent PHP meeting in Boston, I witnessed a presenter create a complete PHP/MySQL site using the Symfony framework in less than 30 minutes. He didn’t even need the full half-hour, spending much of the time explaining the Model-View-Controller concept and the architecture of the Symfony framework.
Many of my basic website building skills have been irrelevant since the introduction of Facebook pages, WordPress blogs, Twitter, Youtube, and other services that allow businesses to create an online presence and interact with their customers, without any knowledge of graphic design or authoring software. These platforms based on “user generated content” transformed my freelance business, forcing me to focus on projects with requirements for more complex functionality.
Now, I wonder how long before my current skills are obsolete. If a complete database driven website can now be generated in under half an hour, then it won’t be long before we have services allowing users to create features and functions with the same ease they currently create content. The next great startup may very well be a service that allows people to instantly generate their own startups, with no million dollar or even thousand dollar investment required.
I call this “user generated features.”