television

Data wars

January 11, 2010 in Data

The NYT writes about the military’s data problem:

Air Force drones collected nearly three times as much video over Afghanistan and Iraq last year as in 2007 — about 24 years’ worth if watched continuously. That volume is expected to multiply in the coming years as drones are added to the fleet and as some start using multiple cameras to shoot in many directions.

A very interesting read for the dataheads among us. The comparison to football broadcasts also caught my eye – televised sports are so frequently compared to battles and war, and here we see the army coming to the athletes for advice:

But while the biggest timesaver would be to automatically scan the video for trucks and armed men, that software is not yet reliable. And the military has run into the same problem that the broadcast industry has in trying to pick out football players swarming on a tackle.

So Cmdr. Joseph A. Smith, a Navy officer assigned to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which sets standards for video intelligence, said he and other officials had climbed into broadcast trucks outside football stadiums to learn how the networks tagged and retrieved highlight film.

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Bloomingdales’ hi-tech showcase?

October 26, 2009 in Technology

Confession: I got lost in Bloomingdales.

This turned out to be a Very Good Thing, because it’s how, way in the back of the women’s cosmetics department, I discovered that Bloomingdales has a glasses-free 3D television set.

The screen itself is unassuming, and positioned as the backdrop to a small un-manned display table, just like countless other promotions throughout the store. But as I walked by, it literally jumped out at me. It’s a hard effect to describe, and obviously a photo wouldn’t do it justice – but there’s a clear sense of depth in the screen’s moving images. It’s very impressive.

The screen itself was one of the parallax-barrier types, but much bigger than I had heard of before (it looked to be about 32″). There were a couple of “hot spots” in front of it from which the 3D effect could be viewed properly. Standing outside a hot spot resulted in an image that seemed to float in an impossible dimension which, while eye-catching, quickly gave me a headache.

I spent about ten minutes staring at the thing from different angles, while many women in search of perfume went by and didn’t give it a second look (though I earned a few confused glances). To each his – or her – own.

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DVNO: Four Capital Letters

May 2, 2009 in Internet

The music video for DVNO by Justice is a well done homage to animated TV logos from the 80′s (you know the ones – the production company logos that played directly before or after a show):

http://www.vimeo.com/744583

Font Feed has the complete breakdown (albeit from a typographical standpoint).

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Is TV getting LOST?

March 1, 2009 in General

The NYT has an interesting roundtable up on whether network television has a future.

One interesting comment was on the power of characters vs gimmicks:

Some worry that the big network shows aren’t developing great characters that will last. I’m not so sure about that. “Lost,” when you get right down to it, is a character study. We put up with the monsters and time jumping because we want to know what happens to the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815.

Lost has some of the best characters on TV and certainly they are its focus. Seasons 1-3 were premised almost entirely in gradually revealing each character’s story, details which made the 4th and 5th seasons even more captivating as the character arcs continued to intersect and develop.

But who are we kidding, I want to learn all about the monster too…

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