Prompt's Blog

By now, you’ve seen Avatar, now the most lucrative film ever. You looked through your awkward 3D glasses, gazing past its Fern Gully-meets-The Last Samurai-meets-Dances with Wolves plot straight into the vivid world of Pandora. Avatar’s astronomic box office figures ensure one thing: we’ll see a lot of the technology that made it a success in some very unAvatar-like places very soon.



When South Africa and Mexico kick off the 2010 World Cup on June 11th, you’ll be able to watch it in the same stunning 3D. ESPN’s new 3D venture (unsurprisingly named ESPN 3D) could purportedly change the way we watch sports. It could even more easily not change a thing.

Most sports broadcasts make use of the same camera angle: at the midfield (or midcourt or midice or midanything) line, perched high above the action. While Avatar was urgent, yanking viewers by the collar and dragging them through Pandora, the traditional sports broadcast is more passive. During the run of play, viewers watch games unfold from this one, distant vantage point, taking stock of the entirety of the action, not just a few protagonists. Only in replays can producers find the right angles for the right plays, immersing viewers in the action from field level. Cameras can’t shift in live coverage from a player curling a free kick into the box to a goalkeeper rising to grab the ball during the run of play. They don’t know that it will happen. They didn’t receive a storyboard before the match started.

The medium, as it stands, isn’t ready for 3D. Sports broadcasting conventions don’t allow networks to make the technology worthwhile. That high-above-the-action camera is a staple because it works, consistently capturing the whole of the game. Jerking around viewers with constantly changing field-level shots will enhance the 3D experience, but take away from the game experience. High costs won’t dissuade early adopters, who’ll need to buy 3D TVs, the premium channel, and glasses. ESPN needs to make sure that an unexciting product doesn’t either.

Labels: 3D, Avatar, ESPN, TV

Technology is a perpetually engaging and fascinating subject because of the extremes with which it deals. It continually throws up new perspectives on both the minutiae and the monumental of human experience, the overwhelmingly public and the deeply personal. It's all things to all people, and for this we love it and loathe it with fickle abandon.

As monumental endeavours go, attempting to map the entire planet in 3D is right up there. And it's not just the boys at NASA who are informing our topological and geographical view of our world. Bhuvan, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO)'s answer to Google Earth and Wikimapia, was made available for public download earlier this week. Sanskrit for 'Earth', Bhuvan is a 3D online satellite imaging and mapping tool that has been in testing and tweaking since the Spring.

According to The Times of India: "If Google Earth shows details up to 200 metres distance and Wikimapia up to 50 metres, Bhuvan will show images up to 10 metres." It continued: "Imagine if you could count the lions in Gir or let fishermen find concentrations of fish in the sea, just by dragging a mouse on a computer screen."

Of course it's actually camera resolution, application stability, speed of manipulation, regularity of updates and robustness under load that really count when it comes to public digital imaging on this scale, but we're delighted to see ISRO expand its portfolio of 'space applications' in such an ambitious direction.

The other story that really caught my imagination this week crossed boundaries between the public, the personal, and the political.

"On a happiness scale of 1 to 10, the world scored a 6.16 on Monday, according to Emotionr." This is how the San Francisco Chronicle opened a report this week which discussed online services that purport to gauge how happy our population is feeling.

Some might argue that emotions are intangible, and that attempting to overlay metrics onto the landscapes of 6.8 billion complex minds is always going to be an inexact science at the very best. But if pressed over how we're feeling on a scale of 1 to 10, most of us will begrudgingly offer up "about 6 or 7?" - and that's pretty much the level of data that services such as Emotionr and others feed upon.

Emotionr is a free online tool with an emotional slider that submits individual scores to the global happiness pool, while also allowing you to track your own state of mind over time. TweetFeel claims to use "insanely complex analysis" to examine tweeter attitudes to anything you care to type into a search box. Google Insights for Search compares search volumes and patterns for the marketing community. Our emotions, it seems, are not only measurable, they can be 'monetized'.

As The Chronicle pointed out, even President Obama's chief economic adviser Lawrence Summers recently cited the decline in Google searches for "economic depression" as a sign of optimism.

But are the Googling and Twittering classes really ready to become representative of the happiness of our world? How do you 'feel' about that? Please let us know. Also, please tell us what you think of Bhuvan. We'll literally be watching this space...

Labels: 3D, Bhuvan, Emotionr, Google Earth, India, ISRO, mapping, NASA, San Francisco Chronicle, The Times of India, TweetFeel, Wikimapia