Recently in Technology Category

Scott Guthrie is a modest man in a high position in the biggie Microsoft, pulling all strings together and delivering technologies that keep Microsoft still still a better technology product maker or technology designer with the kind of loads of competition, stress and economy eating up many commercial products while giving open source a more bigger headway in technology.

Starting with being the manager for the team that designs .Net, and its related technologies, to also listening up or helping users of the technologies directly through blogs or communities, and as if that wasn't enough work, Scott goes the last step in wrapping up his team's work by doing the marketing and sales kind of speeches for the technologies too.

While being inspired by Scott Guthrie, I also notice that coincidentally or not many top guys in Microsoft are Scotts.. or their first names are Scott as well.. You can also put it differently.. that many people with firstname Scott in microsoft seem to be making interesting technology breakthroughs or represent something nice about the company Microsoft.

Though that last one of finding a coincidence of the name Scott with Microsoft is only a fancy observation of mine, I am really inspired by seeing more of people like scott guthrie on the web, to keep that geeky thing motivated in me... that someday I too might try hard and do/become what scott is today.

My recent view of scott guthrie was from here where he talks about release of Silverlight 3, an Uer-Interface technology of Microsoft.

I was on code.google.com, and was surprised to see an image in the usually text-based search website. In what looked like an ADvert for RadioHead's "House of Cards", there was this interesting line.

In Radiohead's new video for "House of Cards" from the album "In Rainbows", no cameras or lights were used. Just data.

Images were all formed by some dots or english characters all through the video.. and it looked quite interesting to see something like this for the first time. Something like effects we have seen in the film series 'Mummy'. The extra effect on the RadioHead video seems like, they have allowed some part of the image formed by the data to pulsate or move high/low based on the music.

The technology uses a mix of contouring techniques + lasers + geographical information scanners.. to deliver the goods.

Interesting!! presentation.. Out of Box stuff. Shows why google was so excited about the idea that they put this on their website(they have a policy not to put images or adverts on their sites other than their logo).

You will find the video and more information on how it was created at:
http://code.google.com/creative/radiohead/

Animating 2D or 3D characters is a painful process.. very much so that Sir Walt Disney is said to have taken many years to create the Mickey Mouse films, and also those were the days of traditional animation, where every frame of a scene is painted or drawn on paper.

If you even have worked on softwares like photoshop or corel draw like a hobby to drawing or designing something, you know how much time and pain it is to even design a proper webpage.

So, after all that when you go and see a movie like "Finding Nemo", "Monsters Inc", or "Cars", you open your mouth and gape.

Because every single frame of the movie which plays only for 1/24th of a second (in digital filming there are 24 frames per second) , has the characters, the environment or background graphics, with color, texture.. and to add to the complexity, they have lighting and related object surface color and shadow variations.

To put it lighter, one frame of a scene in animation movies is equivalent to drawing what you see below on a computer or a sheet of paper with whatever tools you want on earth (except a copier and printer).

So, that explains how much work should be done to make a movie like what Pixar does .. and how much effort to be Pixar, because they are the best today.

Obviously for any animator their work is inspirations, and people look forward to learn from their experience. Knowing this Pixar has interestingly put-up a brief of their process of making animation films on their website. The page mentions only the core steps or milestones of the animation film making process, but that itself would overwhelm you.

Pixar - How We Do It

What I learnt New from their processes..
> The animators make the frames of a scene and have the animation as digitized sequences, but this is not the movie that gets released... what we see as a film is a video recording of the sequences played up on their computers.

> If in a scene, a character raises its hand, the animators probably create one or two steps of the action or only one or two frames of the scene and the computer generates the in-between frames that show the motion of the hand as a smooth one.. the animators of course fine tune these in-between frames manually as necessary.

This is one other major advantage digital animations have over traditional animations. The first advantage obviously being able to correct or modify the art work easily, instead of redrawing the whole thing on another paper again.

> They use server farms just like all big software enterprises do.. they use a bulk of machines (farms) to render each frame. Probably this means redrawing the background, the characters, the lighting, etc., all into a frame, or integrating every other teams work into the final output.

Pixar says, on an average each frame with such bulk of servers, takes about 6 hours to render, and some complex frames take up to 90 hours too.

Interesting bit of information they had on their website.

Related link:
Blend it... its easy to make 3D graphics yourself

You don't have to be a programmer / techy person to watch this.. but only understand that with a few thousand rupees spent on some hardware, and with installing a software demo available, you could easily test 3D on your TV display which shows stuff streamed from a computer. Just like this guy shows here.

I have not tried, or neither am I conversant with the technology that this guy Johnny shows in the video. But this guy seems to have successfully made 3D TV look possible even with cheap home-made technology.. while many big corporations out there are still experimenting with different technologies to make the next big thing in TV viewing.

If you have a nintendo hardware packed system with wii remote (wireless interface remote) and also probably related stuff to play computer images/video on TV, then, probably you can try his programs and experiments that are listed here.

What happens when you decide to meetup with fellow web identities, so far total strangers, for an informal technical seminar.. so aptly called a camp. That's what I think I gave myself time to findout today at the pipescamp.

I got interested after reading an invite email from GaneshAPP for the camp. While I don't understand why even when the sender himself said too many times in the email message that it is 'SPAM', Thunderbird or gmail didn't think it was spam...sometimes these google guys don't believe users ..at all. ha ha.

pipesCamp was about Yahoo Pipes! There was both formal and informal discussions on the Yahoo Pipes' technology, the features, what is possible, what is not, why it is not great business sense to do mash-ups like yahoo pipes, and, some more brainstorming like that.

The camp was well organized and attended at Hotel Shaan Royal near koyambedu, chennai.. and it was all planned and pulled off with blogger support with just 3 days notice.

The take-homes from the camp were:
1. All it takes to make a camp and have people brainstorm around is.. just a few humble modest friends who have the contacts, and one guy atleast with the money to sponsor it, and regular blog post readers.

2. 'Geeks' is an utterly butterly over-used, abused, word. Everybody is not a geek in my opinion.. and not definitely just because we attend such camps. Don't brand us geeks please.

3. Remember to have MONEY as an output when you do something.

4. I didn't get convinced that Yahoo Pipes is great, neither got bored that it was just about feed processing... but one thing that was obvious is.. Yahoo Pipes is giving people new ideas to use and present content differently... even on their blogs...so imagine what they will think of doing for their commercial web projects.