Viewfinders16

An eclectic pinboard of my digital findings.

[viewfinders16-blog]

I’ve just found this amateur travel film which is almost a cliché for the number of contemporary ATF conventions it shows.

As covered in my exegesis:

Portraiture (a lot of it! Is this a travel film or a model shoot?)

Non-diegetic music

Shooting from moving vehicle

Hand-held camera

Distributed via social networks

Illustrates Cammaer’s point: From ‘I was there’ to ‘I was there.’

[viewfinders16-blog]

I’ve just produced a basic web app page to test out the Google Cloud Vision API. It turns out that images processed through this API must be supplied in base64 code format, rather than an image file as was the case for Microsoft Cognitive Services and Clarifai. The upshot is, due to problems with Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS), any image to be converted to base64 must come from the same domain as the page sending the API request.

Running the code locally did not work. Running it from a local test server (Xampp) didn’t work. Creating a web app through Google Apps Script didn’t work (scripts being served from a different domain to where images can be hosted in Google Drive). I finally cracked it by hosting everything on the viewfinders.gallery server. This way, the video, any resulting canvas ‘image’ (frame taken from the video), and the request to the API, are all coming from the same domain.

Whew. The test UI is here https://viewfinders.gallery/cloud_vision/index.html

[viewfinders16-blog]

Amy Liu from Clarifai explains the Clarifai approach to image recognition and the three models of image recognition: General, domain, and custom.

[viewfinders16-blog]

This is fantastic. Minh Tran posted a playful article on Clarifai’s public blog detailing a pet project where he trained an algorithm to search for Wally AKA ‘Waldo’.

“At Clarifai, we have an internal Hack Day every month where everyone works on a pet project they don't normally have time for... My Hack Day project this month was to []find Waldo]. With scenes filled with animals, aliens, mermaids, and people of all sorts (including several Waldo imposters or "friends" as they call them), I wanted to see just how well our Custom Training model could perform on such a challenging and popular data set.”

Tran explains the entire process on his post.

[viewfinders16-blog]

A slightly younger Nisselson foretells the impact of newfangled cellphone cameras in 2003.

Article on The Digital Journalist

[viewfinders16-blog]

Evan Nisselson is a man with a knack for predicting new trends in technology. His talk on the emergence of mainstream computer vision applications, and their implications for industries from advertising to health, holds many insights.

This talk is hosted by Nordic Next and is available on Vimeo.

[viewfinders16-blog]

Ken Weiner’s article on computer vision is well worth a read.

Why image recognition is about to transform business

[viewfinders16-blog]

This is a short summary of the Google Lens announcement at the Google I/O event on May 19. This is where smartphones are headed; intelligent environmental interfacing. Combining features detected visually with the data already tied to the location’s geocoordinates allows the service to offer content “in a meaningful way” (Sundar Pichai, Google CEO).

I won’t go so far as to say Viewfinders anticipated this announcement, but the writing was on the wall, and these kinds of releases (Google Lens is still officially ‘coming soon’) are going to have enormous impact on the ways that we use mobile media. Viewfinders acknowledges this coming shift, and is looking at what implications it has for experiential viewing.

[viewfinders16-blog]

I’ve been looking into what other Google APIs are available to indie developers in the wake of Google’s announcement of Google Lens at Google I/O 2017 on May 19. I figured this new service (officially ‘arriving soon’) must be based on existing prototypes, and sure enough Google have an under-promoted API hiding in their library called the Cloud Vision API.

The public beta was only launched in February last year, so the tech is pretty new, and more than likely will be swallowed up by a more fully featured Google Lens API in the coming months.

[viewfinders16-blog]

Eric Bidelman’s article here on the relatively recent advent of html5 device hardware access is a great read. It give a nice summary of recent developments in the field of web development that are “ridiculously powerful, exposing high level Javascript APIs that sit on top of the system’s underlying hardware capabilities”.

[viewfinders16-blog]

I first heard of Nyarri’s story four years ago on a hunting trip with the Martu women painters in the Western Desert. Hearing that I had been to Maralinga, where Britain tested atomic bombs in the 1950s, Nyarri’s wife Nola turned to me at the campfire with what felt like an instruction…"You have to talk to Nyarri." A year later I did just that and I heard a short powerful parable that Nyarri had waited almost his entire life to share. So this work was born, as a thought or an imagining. I hadn’t yet experienced Virtual Reality and I was waiting to decide the form that would best suit this work. When I experienced my first VR film I knew how to make Nyarri’s story exist again. I love new technology. I love the moment when the viewer experiences a new sensation for the first time. I know that moment gets seared into memory. I also believe in the power of story to reshape us collectively. I think the two belong together. Nyarri’s world is only available to me through being invited, through this work that invitation is extended to you. The powerful sense of presence of VR makes everything personal. Nyarri knows who it is he is speaking to. He is speaking to you. So this work is something of a gift sent from a private world. It contains an old story, held close till now. It is a technological message in a bottle sent out to a world that could enact a different future. It's a work that tries to do the hardest of things- to create a bridge for two cultures in our shared homeland acknowledging our onward stewardship of this wonderful, wounded, resilient country.

Lynette Wallworth

[viewfinders16-blog]

When it comes time to exhibit this work it would be great to use the approach found on the 500px terms page. There’s a basic overview for those not looking to invest a lot of time into seeing what the initiative is about, and then a more lengthy explanation for those prepared to spend a bit of time reading to find out more.

[viewfinders16-blog]

This site has helpful pointers on things like making web apps full screen, accessing device location and making use of hover states as touch input feedback.

[viewfinders16-blog]

Animations and performance - I need to consider the performance of a web app carefully, since unlike a native app it relies on hardware-accelerated css animations. The lesson it: use animations sparingly, and carefully so as not to overwhelm the web browser.

Animate with CSS - not javascript.

[viewfinders16-blog]

Matt West has created this handy guide for using the device camera with HTML5 served over HTTPS. Of course my restriction is currently that the viewfinders.gallery domain doesn’t have an SSL Certificate (ie is served over http) and so anything I’m building I am testing on Google Apps Script. This is a free way to test as I go, however when it comes time to publish I’ll need to have HTTPS set up on the viewfinders site.

[viewfinders16-blog]

Andrew Trice lends his insights on PhoneGap’s performance shortfalls.

[viewfinders16-blog]

What an absolute whirlwind. I’ve just spent the morning looking at options for how I can sidestep PhoneGap’s animation limitations, and reckon I may be onto something. I originally chose PhoneGap because it allowed me to use web dev skills and translate them into app dev skills. As it turns out, although an early innovator in the field, PhoneGap are far from alone in this approach. Enter Progressive Web Apps.

PWApps are:

Progressive - Works for every user, regardless of browser choice because it's built with progressive enhancement as a core tenet.

Responsive - Fits any form factor: desktop, mobile, tablet, or whatever is next.

Connectivity independent - Enhanced with service workers to work offline or on low-quality networks.

App-like - Feels like an app, because the app shell model separates the application functionality from application content.

Fresh - Always up-to-date thanks to the service worker update process.

Safe - Served via HTTPS to prevent snooping and to ensure content hasn't been tampered with.

Discoverable - Is identifiable as an "application" thanks to W3C manifest and service worker registration scope, allowing search engines to find it.

Re-engageable - Makes re-engagement easy through features like push notifications.

Installable - Allows users to add apps they find most useful to their home screen without the hassle of an app store.

Linkable - Easily share the application via URL, does not require complex installation.

Essentially, they are a way to cut out the middle man and create a web app without PhoneGap. The whole things still sounds a little intimidating to a beginner like me, but having now familiarised myself with PhoneGap’s setup I at least have an understanding of what a web app expects - like a config.xml file, npm plugins, and <meta> tags to specify platform-specific content.

Tristan helpfully suggested I should try running the raw web code in my mobile browser without first putting it through PhoneGap. I did so and tested its animation, and sure enough it was much smoother than when installed as a ‘native app’ through PhoneGap. It wasn’t perfect, but there’s probably more I can do to optimise the interface for the mobile environment, such as being more frugal with the overall number of elements that receive animations, prioritising transitions foremost, and selectively forcing GPU rendering (a concept I didn’t know existed two weeks ago). Having run the web app locally without PhoneGap I now have some confidence that a PWApp should do the trick.

The only drawback is that a web app must be served via HTTPS in order to access core functions like the camera. Obviously this is something I’ll need, and this restriction actually is one of the key factors that led to me using PhoneGap in the first place (converting it to a ‘native’ app sidestepped this web requirement). However I’ve since remembered that although the viewfinders.gallery host is not HTTPS certified, the current web app prototype is, due to being built and run through google scripts.

There’s a faint light at the end of this tunnel.