How to Teach Photography to a Room of 100 Students?

In a recent post I included some videos discussing depth of field and how it can be affected by aperture, focal distance and distance of the object. The question that came to mind however is that of how could I demonstrate elements of photography to a group of about 100 students. Often you may gather a small group of half a dozen crowded around a camera to show them something, however this doesn’t really scale well to a group on the order of 100 or so.

To solve this problem I made use of technology to help them see the live interaction I performed with the settings on the camera itself and remotely using Canon’s EOS Utility. The room in which the students were, contained three projectors, one more or less in the middle of the room with the others at either end. To allow them to see the interaction I made use of the EOS Utility in conjunction with Microsoft’s PixelSense (Samsung SUR40) providing a table top interactive surface with which to interact with the settings of the Canon 600D. In front of the camera I placed two tables covered with some green cloth and a number of objects at different distances to focus on. You will also notice from the images below I also included a tape measure running down the length of the table.

Located next to the Camera and the PixelSense table I added a HD TV so I could readily see the interactions I was performing. Floating a few feet over the PixelSense SUR40 hung a Sony NX5E video camera suspended in space in a under-slung position with the help of a Libec Swift Jib 50 Kit (comprising the arm, T102B tripod and DL08 dolly).

The HDMI video feed from the camera was fed to a splitter box with one input and two outputs. As you can guess one of the HDMI outputs fed directly into the HD TV, the other via the use of a HDMI to VGA adapter went off to feed the three projector screens.

All in all I was quite pleased with the overall result especially as all the students could see what I was doing first hand, moreover there was no need to repeat the processes a dozen times or more to a set of small groups all crowded around the camera. After I demoed the variables affecting the depth of field I let the students to come up and have a go with altering the settings such as f-stop and focal length themselves. They all really seemed to enjoy interacting with the Camera through the use of the surface and whats more all the other students could see what they were doing as well. They also had a good bit of fun just playing with the controls of the Jib and operating the REMO30 pan/tilt head. Concurrently after I had demoed the use of the system I got them to do some multiplicity photographs in our green screen room. The others who were waiting of course to get their chance to interact with this equipment and take some photographs were busy working their way through some photoshop tutorials. So that kept them busy with three distinctive tasks to carry out.

Once they all knuckled down to work, a few 3rd year students dropped by the lab to give me a hand in moving our OptiTrack Flex 13 motion capture system to another room, thereby freeing up our green screen room purely for photographic and video effects work. All it all it was a busy morning, with lots of equipment being moved around. Fortunately I had moved all the equipment you see in the images below into place the night before. You will notice that a shadow is cast by the Sony NX5E video camera and the REMO30 tilt/pan head. I am sure with a bit of shuffling of elements around this can be eliminated for the next time. In the final photograph of the set below, you can see the setup with the projection being displayed on two of the three screens, though the far off screen is quite a distance down the lab. I had hoped to record some video of the system in use, but didn’t get around to it due to the rehousing of the motion capture system, so may give it a go the next time with the elements rearranged is a slightly better manner. I guess the question for the next class is what will I demonstrate next? Some panoramic photography with the use of a Manfrotto QTVR 303Kit was something I had considered as a possibility.

Treknology – Are we there yet?

At present in the early part of the second decade of the 21^st century we have now become heavily dependent on technology. The rate of technological advancement in the past fifty years alone has been incredible, particularly since in development of the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004 in 1971. Since the first incarnation of Star Trek in the 1960’s audiences have been amazed by the technological wonders that seems to be available in the 23^rd &   24^th centuries. What’s more amazing however is the fact that many of these technologies are now a reality and yet we are still in the infancy of the 21^st century. If the advancement of technology continues to increase at its present rate then it is almost impossible to imagine what the world will be like in fifty or even a hundred years, never mind what it may be like in a few centuries.

Tractor Beam Technology
Recent weeks have seen some interesting technological advances. Just a few days ago (25^th January 2013) it was announced that a Star Trek “style tractor beam” had been developed by scientists, the project being led by researchers from the University of St Andrews in Scotland. This work makes use of lasers to attract microscopic particles. A simple example of a Star Trek tractor beam in operation on a small-scale can be seen in the S1E3 Episode “The Naked Now”, where Wesley Crusher develops his own “hand held” tractor beam capable of moving furniture and other small objects. In the very same episode he scales up and “reverses fields” on the Enterprises Tractor Beam to help give it a push-off from another starship thereby saving it from being destroyed from an oncoming star fragment.

 Organic Data Storage
Just a few days earlier (23^rd Jaunary 2013) a BBC News story discussed another development in Nature showing that DNA would be “perfect for digital storage”. A selection of media types were encoded within the DNA including an image, text and audio. All were read back with 100% accuracy. The article states that “One gram of DNA ought to be able to hold about two petabytes of data”. DNA is also a great way to archive data capable of reliably storing information for a much longer period that any technologies we currently have such as hard disks or CDs/DVD’s.

In Star Trek of course we often hear the term “Isolinear Chip” being used, capable of storing 2.15 kiloquads of information. In terms of the use or organics within Star Trek the one thing that immediately comes to mind are the Bioneural Gelpacks featured on the USS Voyager.  One disadvantage with the organic nature of the Bioneural Gelpacks was their susceptibility to bacteria and viruses. On the positive side they were able to make a “best guess” rather than computing the solution in a more linear manner.

Transparent Aluminium
I am sure you are all well aware of Star Trek IV the Voyage Home, particularly of the scene where Scotty divulges the formula for transparent Aluminium to a scientist in the 20th century. The interesting thing of course is that a material with very similar properties has already been developed (see this article dated 12 Jan 2012). The material is called Aluminium Oxynitride or ALON & is capable of maintaining structural integrity in temperatures up to 1200 degrees C.

 Touch Screen Technology
Touch Screens have become very much the norm and are standard on all smartphones of today. I am sure that everybody thought the touch screen consoles in Main Engineering of the Enterprise NCC1701-D shown in the mid to late 1980′s were really amazing.

 If you were lucky enough to have attended CES 2013 in Las Vegas they you would have probably seen Panasonic’s 20inch 4K Tablet PC, so certainly table top computing is well on the way.

 Another nice example of table top computing is the Microsoft/Samsung SUR 40 capable of sensing up to 52 concurrent touches. Quite appropriately in the vein of Star Trek and exploring the University the application demonstrated in the video below is called NUIverse that allows one to explore the likes of our solar system and star constellations.

 More Science Investment in the News
A BBC News Article dated 28th Jan 2013 discusses the investment of two billion euro into two research projects. The Human Brain project will seek to develop a computer-based copy of the human brain allowing scientists to understand neurogical disorders and the effects of drugs. The second project will look at the use of Graphene – a material with amazing properties such as being stronger than steel and having conductivity better than copper. The “Possibilities” to quote Spock are seemingly limited only by our imagination.

Some other recent developments of interest includes the news of Intel investing four billion USD to build a 14nm chip manufacturing plan in Ireland helping to keep Moore’s Law going strong.

Has Film/TV Influenced Technology?
This post is of course not an exhaustive list of Star Trek type technologies that are currently in existance. I am sure you can think of many more exampes. An interesting question to pose is –  has the technology we have seen in film influenced the evolution of actual technology? Certainly every single time I see a Tablet Computer of today I think of the PADD from Star Trek, and similarly with Mobile Phones becoming almost akin to Tricorders with the ever increasing computing and sensory systems that are now onboard.

 So are we there yet?
To Answer my Initial question – Are we there yet? Well certainly from the examples mentioned above it looks like we have already developed many of the technologies that mesmerised us for so many years in the Star Trek TV shows and movies. Perhaps the Final Frontier is closer than we think!

If you would like to find out about some more technologies then you may enjoy watching the documentary below.

Setting up a Motion Capture System – Twelve Camera Flex 13

Back in June funding was made available by the University for the purposes of capital asset acquisition. The School of Computing put in a number of bids for equipment ranging from Eye Tracking and Networking to Video Production and Motion Capture. Two years ago when a similar opportunity came around, I suggested the idea of acquiring a Motion Capture System.  It really boils down to a question of cost benefit analysis. At that particular time any reasonable system would have been very expensive, so we ended up purchasing a Render Farm instead as we had quite a few students doing work in 3DS Max and the extra horsepower to quickly render out thousands and thousands of frames of animation seemed like a far more useful resource to have. I spent quite a bit of time during the summer of that year looking over render farm specs along with our Computer Systems Manager, we eventually settled on a 64 Core system.  At that very same time as well, we also purchased a fairly high end 3CCD video camera, about 6500 watts of lighting for the Green Screen Room, and a few other bits and pieces.

With this year’s funding we finally decided to take the plunge and get a Motion Capture System. Quite a bit of work has been done in the past two years regarding 3D modelling and animation. So a motion capture system would greatly add to this, providing us with the ability to readily animate the 3D characters produced by our students.

The time frame for putting the documentation together for the funding bid was quite tight so it transpired that I ended up putting the material together for the Video Production and Motion Capture System whilst I was out-with the country on holidays. Towards the end of August the proposals were signed off and approved, so I spent a fair bit of time putting together a finalised shopping list that should provide the school with some really interesting equipment to work with. Throughout most of the month of September various suppliers were found and the various items put in for purchase, with the last item (a piece of equipment for camera stabilisation) being finally sorted out just a few days ago. Colin our Computer Systems Manager tracked down a company selling the Flex 13 Camera system. It came on the market around April 2012, and has some interesting specs such as 1280 x 1024 resolution running at 120fps. After quite a few emails it was finally decided to go with a 12 Camera system with a Medium & Large MoCap Suit.

On Wednesday 26^th Sept the Motion Capture System finally arrived, so I spent the afternoon going through all the parts and checking all was ok. On Thursday evening Eyad (a fellow lecturer) and myself went about setting up the system in our Green Screen Room. We got all the stands setup, cameras mounted, and all the cabling in place. Then we set about installing all the necessary software on one of two new Z400 workstations that we had purchased just a few months previously. The software installation was quite straight forward, but we ran into a problem with the registration of the software license. The error was that it couldn’t find a network. It was around 21:00 in the evening so we decided to leave it for the day and get it sorted out when the Systems team were in the next day.

Friday morning I called in to see Colin and Tommy to see if the software license issue could be sorted out. We first of all began by transplanting the workstation from C5 into the Green Screen Room, it was then necessary to enable some of the network ports in the room so we could get the machine up and running on the computer network. All went well and within a short while we were able to try getting the license sorted out. So with the Motion Capture system now powered up and connected to the Workstation and network connectivity established we tried entering all the license details, but ended up getting the very same error as encountered by Eyad and myself the night before. We were finally able to register online through a web browser and received the license key via email.  Within minutes of saving the license key to disk, the Arena Motion Capture Application was fired up, and the video feed from all the cameras started streaming in. So with the full system now operational we left it at that for the time being.

Yesterday (Saturday) Eyad and myself spent the afternoon at Uni aligning up the cameras correctly, calibrating the system, donning the motion capture suit and carrying out the first test of the system. Calibration consisted of Wanding the area to establish the capture volume, followed by the establishment of the ground plane and then the final phase of Skeleton Calibration i.e. getting the system operational for a specific individual. At the time we left the building (just before closing), we had managed to capture a bit of movement, I tried out the standard Calibration T-Pose followed by some golf swings (even though I don’t play golf).

As of now, the system is working well, though it will be necessary to go through the final Skeleton Calibration for myself, before it is finally configured correctly to accept motion data generated by my movements. It will be great to complete this final stage and see what the system can really do. All in all Eyad and myself have spent in excess of 20 man-hours (excluding the time spent going through documentation / tutorials) getting the system to its current operational state. Overall it was quite simple and straightforward to setup, just needing some time and patience. A large portion of the video production / graphics equipment on order is still in the process of being delivered, so hopefully it will all be in place within the next week or so. Sounds like an exciting semester ahead between now and Christmas.

The following videos above and below should provide an overview of some of the steps involved in the process. Quite a few more can be accessed from the following playlist showing most of the steps involved. Enjoy.

Intel Core i7 3930K Processor Unboxing LGA 2011

Unboxing video of the Intel Core i7-3930K Sandy Bridge-E 3.2GHz (3.8GHz Turbo) LGA 2011 130W Six-Core Processor, towards the end it is also compared with an Intel P166 Processor from 15/16 years ago. As can be seen the overall footprint / surface area hasn’t changed that much and in the case of the i7 3930K I have heard of many people saying that it is quite large in size, especially in comparisson to the 2600K. If you are wondering what CPU you should purchase yourself then take a look at http://www.cpubenchmark.net additional information about the processor may be found on Intel’s website.

Next-gen supercomputers have huge energy cost

Reblogged from tesampu:

Warehouse-size supercomputers costing $1 million to $100 million can seem as distant from ordinary laptops and tablets as Greek immortals on Mount Olympus. Yet the next great leap in supercomputing could not only transform U.S. science and innovation, but also put much more computing power in the hands of consumers.

The next generation of "exascale" supercomputers could carry out 1 billion billion calculations per second — 1,000 times better than the most powerful supercomputers today.

Read more… 923 more words

It is always interesting to see the balance between the cost of electrical energy versus the amount of compute power than can be achieved. For many years we have seen the clock speeds of CPU's increase rapidly, though this has reduced somewhat in recent times in favour of the multi-core architecture, where we can make use of a number of low power consumption cores to effect the same result, with significant power savings. The higher clock speed we go the greater the demand on electrical power, we are now approaching an impasse where energy costs are now the main driving force behind supercomputer installations. GPU's have become a very popular high performance computing tool in over the past few years with their move to multicore architectures on the scale of 512 cores and upwards. It is now becoming a question a balance between CPU and GPU computing. We are now living in a world surrounded by low energy consumption mobile devices, many of the processors are moving into the Gigahertz range, and dual / quad-core phones / tables are becoming the norm. Can the computation power of these be somehow harnessed for scientific purposes whilst they are charging. When you think about it all those billions of mobile devices around the world just sitting there using just a fraction of their actual capabilities - is it an untouched computational resource just waiting to be discovered.

Interactive Wall at UD // openFrameworks ✛ Kinect

Reblogged from Future-Giraffes:

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Few months ago Flightphase were brought to this project by HUSH Studios as an Art and Technology Director to create, in collaboration with HUSH and 160over90, the image-based responsive environment at the University of Dayton. The 36-foot wall at the admissions center was to become an interactive attractor for the prospective students and their families. The result is an engaging live surface driven by simple elements beautifully choreographed.

Read more… 411 more words, 2 more videos

This looks like a really interesting use of the Kinect to create an Interactive Wall. We are certainly beginning to see the future of Human Computer Interaction coming to the fore, by means of hands free whole body interaction. The styles of interaction we have seen in such films as Minority Report and Iron Man are moving from the realms of science fiction and research to the hands & body of the consumer. How will we be interacting with our computer systems in five or ten years from now?

Death of Physical Media Say Hello to Streaming on Demand

Have finished watching Click on BBC the growing trend seems to be moving away from physical media like DVD & Blu-ray in favour of streaming on demand options. If you have a really good speed broadband service with an unlimited download quota then this is certainly an option. We are seeing our televisions, XBox’s, PlayStation’s all being Internet capable – so why would we ever want to use physical media anymore. Just turn on connect up (either cable or wirelessly) and watch whatever movie or TV show you want when you want, making use of recommender systems to suggest other shows you may be interested in. According to Click – Netflix in the states is the most popular as it as available on virtually every device, we can expect them to make significant inroads in the UK and Ireland in the near future.

So – the next time we are fitting out one of our computer labs should we just do away with the need of having a DVD drive? At present we are looking at getting some new high-end workstations for Video and 3D work. Perhaps we should forget about a Blu-ray / DVD drive and invest in something else.

Another interesting online tool mentioned is a service called Join.me. This allows one to share their desktop screen with up to 250 people simultaneously for free. One of course can upgrade to a paid pro account for additional feature and security. This could perhaps be a very useful tool for both in and out with the University Computer Lab. Streaming Video – Streaming Labs / Lectures – the Future?

3D Facial Database at London’s Science Museum

A new attraction has opened up at London’s Science Museum whereby visitors can have their faces scanned in 3D. It is envisaged that this will allow for the creation of the largest 3D facial database in the world. The exhibition is called “Me in 3D” and is open until 10th April 2012. So if you want to see a 3D scan of your face the pay a visit to the Science Museum before the exhibit closes up shop in April.

For many years 2D facial recognition systems have been the norm, but research into 3D facial recognition systems is now where all the work is really being done. If you are interested is learning more about presently existing 3D facial databases then take a look at (http://www.face-rec.org/databases). One quite popular and freely available dataset is GavaDB (http://gavab.escet.urjc.es/recursos_en.html) which contains 549 3D facial scans. I would imagine that within a week or two the installation at the Science Museum will have created a database of 3D scans that far exceeds the size of many detailed in the above links. According to the website the whole process takes just five minutes.

To see further information about the 3D system take a look at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-16519269
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/mein3d