Report from NYU's ITP Winter Show

I paid a visit to NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program's Winter show last night, and as usual was blown away by the hard work and creativity of many of the projects. The level of sophistication seems to increase from show to show. The folks at ITP provided a handy map to the show that categorized the projects into 11 different general subject areas (sustainable, assistive technology, games, etc.). Very helpful. I took a few short videos of some of the projects. For more, go to the Make Blog's more comprehensive post.

This project is called "Magic Table," by Seung Jun Lee. The screen interacts visually and musically to objects that are passed or placed in front of a sensor. I think this would also make a great video wall installation in some public place.



TwiTerra, by Steven Lehrburger, tracks "re-tweets" -- re-transmissions of Twitter messages -- by projecting the approximate location of messages as they are forwarded from one person to another around the world.



Matt Parker's "Face of the Nation" did a nice job of morphing all of the US presidents and the current president-elect into a looped video that's fun to watch.



"Ballet Dancer," by Ramona Pringle and Xue Hou, projects moving images of a ballet dancer against floating layers of gauze and tulle. It reminded me a bit of something a Disney Imagineer would do.



There were two projects that were similar in that they used a library of captured images to create a moving image, kind of like what Chuck Close is known for doing in some of his portraits. One of these is called "membrain," by Yasser Ansari, Peter Horvath, and Bruno Kruse. A video of membrain appears below. The other is "Video Mosaic" by Meredith Hasson. Here is a short video of membrain:



The show runs again tonight, December 18, from 5 to 9 p.m. There will be another one in the spring.

NYU's ITP Winter Show Dec. 17-18

Put this in your calendar; the NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program Winter Show is scheduled for December 17 and 18, 5:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. at 721 Broadway, 4th Floor, South Elevators, here in NYC. I try to make ITP's winter and spring shows, and love seeing all the intelligent, creative projects brought to life. More info.

More Consideration of the Long Tail Theory

I had posted some days ago about a research study that questioned the Long Tail theory. Here is more thought on that from Chris Anderson in Wired, who concludes that "It's hard to make money in the Tail. . . . [I]t's also hard to make money if you don't have a Tail (to satisfy minority taste, which improves the consumer experience), but the revenues are disproportionately in the Head."

Thanks to Kevin O'Keefe for the heads up, via Twitter.

(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding?

The Charter for Compassion may seem a little off-topic for this blog, but we all could use a little bit of love these days. It's a project that is attempting to build bridges among religions and cultures based on a common foundation: the Golden Rule, variants of which exist in all religions as well as in almost every nook and cranny of human society.

Conceived by Karen Armstrong, an authority on comparative religions, the idea won the TEDPrize, awarded by TED Conferences. The TEDblog has several posts on the project, including one that embeds a video that is being translated and captioned by volunteers using the dotSUB platform.

TED is a wonderful source for short (generally under 20 minute) videos featuring interesting talks by fascinating speakers that I download to my Blackberry for train viewing. And I've done some work with the folks at dotSUB; they have developed a great tool for translating and captioning video content over the Internet.

"Long Tail" Debunked?

The Register today reports on a new analysis of the popular "Long Tail" theory ("The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream." See here also.) suggests that it may be a lot of, well, hooey.

The new study, conducted by Will Page of the MCPS-PRS Alliance and others, argues that "instead of following a Pareto or 'power law' curve," as the Long Tail theory would suggest, "digital song sales follow a classic Log Normal distribution. 80 per cent of the digital inventory sold no copies at all - and the 'head' was far more concentrated than the economists expected."

The analysis of tens of millions of on-line music transactions revealed that 80 percent of the revenues were generated by roughly 52,000 songs, which, as The Register points out, is about the number of songs included in the "typical inventory of a conventional high street record store."

Clients who are building businesses -- or investing in businesses -- that depend on Long Tail assumptions being correct would do well to consider this alternative view.

Open Source Those Inventions!

From Saturday's New York Times comes an interesting article about Johnny Chung Lee, a recent Ph.D. grad from Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. Dr. Lee became Internet-famous by posting videos on YouTube that describe in a wonderfully clear manner a number of his very clever and easy-to-build inventions.

One video, which describes how to use a Nintento Wii remote, some LEDs, and software to create a 3-D effect on a computer screen, has been viewed more than six million times. Another video explains how to build a general-purpose interactive whiteboard for about $60 in parts, some open-source software, and existing computer equipment (a fifth-grade robotics club built one in four hour-long after-school sessions). Dr. Lee's YouTube videos are available here.

Dr. Lee's videos were noticed. M.I.T.'s Technology Review magazine named him as a top innovater under 35, and according to the article he recently joined Microsoft.

The open source community may be of two minds about Dr. Lee -- while on the one hand, he makes his video ideas available for free (including the associated software, which he offers from his website), he does now work for Microsoft.

The article got me thinking about another avenue that creative individuals can use to promote their ideas and, perhaps more importantly, themselves. We all know that there are many good ideas that do not achieve market success. There is simply such a vast distance between "a good idea" and "a viable company" that, for many people, a better route to success may lie along the path taken by Dr. Lee: find the medium that will best publicize your idea, and give it away in a clear and concise manner. Let the world see not only how creative you are, but also how well you can explain your ideas.