Representing Earth

Jail visits via Webcams and a slew of other neat webcams

November 19th, 2009 by mr1994

“The visitors, inmates and jail officials alike say the video visits are a much friendlier alternative to the lines, metal detectors and space limitations visitors at the jail face. Unlike at the jail, whole families are able to visit with an inmate at one time during the video visits.”
Families in Camden County now have a new option for visiting their incarcerated loved ones. Week nights in a few churches through out the county, families can now see and talk to inmates in the county jail via webcam. The environment is much more comfortable for the family members and so provides a much nicer experience for everyone, making them more likely to see family often. The video visits run Tuesday and Thursday from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. and on Friday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Visitors must sign up in advance by calling Officer Rachel Hairston at (609) 413-4078.
webcam jail visit

webcam jail

Link to the full article.

Another revolution in visitation is the creation of a webcam visiting room. This method has the family come all the way to the prison but the inmate stays in their cell. Here is an account from the Montgomery County Jail building a new video visitation area. “The administrative offices on the first floor of the current facility will be remodeled to house the video visitation area. When the expansion is completed, visitors will enter the current Detention Facility and talk with detainees via computer webcams. This new feature brings an added bonus because inmates will no longer need to be escorted to a visitation area but will be able to participate in visitation from their cells.”
Here is a link to people discussing there opinion about video visitation. Many people feel it lacks the feeling of connection of being in the same space as the inmate.

NPR clip about the use of webcams in actual prison facilities.” It was a hit when a jail in Tennessee decided to put in a webcam several years ago. The live, 24-hour video feed logged millions of viewers. Now the show may be over. Some jailcam viewers phoned up female guards and harassed them. Others tracked inmate movements to deliver contraband. A jail in Arizona has already shut down its webcam, after inmates sued. The judge ruled the webcam was humiliating.”

Other places through out the country, jails and prisons are using webcams as a way to speed up the hearing process. “Local governments can save big bucks and save inmates months of needless incarceration by using videoconferencing for bond hearings. Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County Common Pleas Court implemented such a system and has saved about $80,000.” View full story here.
Control a camera that sees Alcatraz.

The top 25 webcams award.

Posted in About the class | No Comments »

Liveness: Practical Matters

November 19th, 2009 by Liangjie Xia

Liveness: Practical Matters

Liveness before internet

Before internet, liveness is already widely practiced in radio and television broadcasting. Due to the nature of radio transmission, from the early days of television until about 1958, live broadcasting was used heavily before technologies such as videotape recording appeared. Videotape did not exist until 1957.

Live television (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_television) is today most common in television news, where news programs are generally broadcast live, presenting recorded and edited news stories. Events that networks and stations decide most viewers will want to or should know about as soon as possible are broadcast live, often interrupting regularly scheduled programming, as news bulletins, and if they are quickly changing and developing, with coverage as they unfold as “breaking news” stories. There is usually a 75-90 second delay between what is actually being filmed and what is being broadcast; this is to allow time for editing and censoring. However, some events can be delayed by up to 20 minutes such as Barack Obama’s inauguration speech, and live coverage from the Big Brother house (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Brother_(UK)) in the UK.

September 21, 2005 – JetBlue Airways Flight 292 made an emergency landing in Los Angeles. The passengers were able to watch the incident unfold on live television.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JetBlue_Airways_Flight_292#September_21.2C_2005_flight

The unedited nature of live television can pose problems for networks because of the potential for mishaps. To enforce the Federal Communications Commission regulations, networks often broadcast live programs on a slight delay to give them the ability to censor words and images while keeping the broadcast as “live” as possible.

Broadcast delay

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_delay

In radio and television, broadcast delay refers to the practice of intentionally delaying broadcast of live material. A short delay is often used to prevent profanity, bloopers, or other undesirable material from making it to air, including more mundane problems such as technical malfunctions or coughing. In this instance, it is often referred to as aseven-second delay or profanity delay.

Longer delays can also be introduced, often to allow a show to air at the same time for the local market as is sometimes done with nationally-broadcast programs in countries with multiple time zones. That can sometimes be simply achieved with a video tape recorder or similar technology, it is often called a tape delay or west-coast delay in the United States

Paper on delay in video communication

http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/0/1/4/7/9/p14795_index.html

Gigs for building a time shift for Quartz Composer

http://quartzcompositions.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=311

Who needs streaming videos?

http://blog.tomevslin.com/2007/02/who_needs_strea.html

Liveness before internet

Live television is today most common in television news, where news programs are generally broadcast live, presenting recorded and edited news stories. Events that networks and stations decide most viewers will want to or should know about as soon as possible are broadcast live, often interrupting regularly scheduled programming, as news bulletins, and if they are quickly changing and developing, with coverage as they unfold as “breaking news” stories. There is usually a 75-90 second delay between what is actually being filmed and what is being broadcast; this is to allow time for editing and censoring. However, some events can be delayed by up to 20 minutes such as Barack Obama’s inauguration speech, and live coverage from the Big Brother house in the UK.

Memorable events:

September 21, 2005 – JetBlue Airways Flight 292 made an emergency landing in Los Angeles. The passengers were able to watch the incident unfold on live television.

Broadcast delay

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_delay

Paper on delay in video communication

http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/0/1/4/7/9/p14795_index.html

Gigs for building a time shift for Quartz Composer

http://quartzcompositions.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=311

Who needs streaming videos?

http://blog.tomevslin.com/2007/02/who_needs_strea.html

Tags: broadcast, delay
Posted in V. Liveness 1 (video) | No Comments »

Real-time Omniscience

November 19th, 2009 by Eric Mika

Our survey of live video services last week proved that there’s plenty of content out there, but the bottleneck seemed to be a lack of discoverability in the interface. None of the sites we looked at really gave the sense of how much was happening at one, or provided a way to sift through the piles of live video to find something of relevance or interest. The major live webcam sites seem stuck in the YouTube / catalog approach. Luckily for us, JustinTV hosts an API that makes building experimental interfaces relatively painless. (Ustream offers a similar but slightly less robust API.)

I wanted to see whether bandwidth / API terms-of-service / human perception would allow for a massive grid of live feeds. The answer turns out to be “sort of.” I wrote some code to take the most active JustinTV channels in the “lifecasting” category, and dump them into a grid.

The results are available here.

In case the system breaks, or I run through my API allocation, a video of the system in action is available below:

A few other re-workings of the catalog approach are of interest.

5000 Webcams places live feeds in geographical context on a google map. (Also available as a grid view.)

Posted in V. Liveness 1 (video) | No Comments »

What else can we use live cameras for?

November 19th, 2009 by Jeff

The thought of being able to use our cell phones to stream live video opens up all kinds of possibilities. Many of those possibilities are yet to be seen. I like Clay Shirkey’s thought of “technology becomes interesting once people start taking it for granted”. Seeing as mobile streaming video has not reached that point yet, there are bound to be all sorts of emergent behaviours that will be seen in the future. Until then there is a lot of speculation going on. Here are a few speculations from Qik as to how they think their own technology may be adapted:

Using live video in general is much more common however. Given that’s the case, there have been many interesting uses of the technology. One & Other is an interesting performance art project that was streamed live online during it’s entirety (over 100 days during the summer of 2009). Anyone was able to reserve a time slot of an hour during the performance and take their place on top of the plinth to do whatever they wanted. Here is a video of some of the highlights.

Another art project used live cameras monitoring progress on the Hoover Dam Bypass and created composite webcam panoramas over time as the cameras moved and construction progressed.

Lastly, is an example of giving the users control over something else than just the camera. The project Solar Collector uses solar panels to power the lights in the structure and once night falls, users are able to submit lighting designs that they can then watch in person or via the live webcam.

Related
- Voz Alta by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
- Tiny Eyebeam

Tags: live video, mobile, panorama, solar, webcam
Posted in V. Liveness 1 (video) | No Comments »

CCTV

November 19th, 2009 by nh724

Closed Circuit Television system (CCTV) is not necessarily a new invention but it is still of importance in the context of live video. In general, CCTV is understood to be a set up of (networked) cameras that broadcast from different spaces at the same (live) time index. Today, it is mainly used to monitor public or private spaces, which have a high rate of criminal activity. Moreover, CCTV may also be used in sociological studies that deal with mobility, on highways to control traffic flow, etc.
The first CCTV system was introduced in Pennemünde (Germany), in 1942, to document the first test of the V2 rocket. Then, in 1968, CCTV was introduced in Olean, NY, as a mean to fight criminal activity. Ever since then it has gained more and more popularity, especially in the UK in the context of crime.
However, these systems are not as closed as one may assume. There one dozen videos on youtube, which show how these systems may be hacked:check here.

Posted in V. Liveness 1 (video) | No Comments »

Live Data @ pachube

November 19th, 2009 by mdc368

Pachube is an attempt at creating an open network of data, a live data aggregator of sorts. Through openly-formatted RSS feeds, you and your application can access automated sensor feeds ranging from weather to someone’s electric usage, to a feed which tells us whether someone’s cat is sitting in their cat-bed. In realistic internet fahion, though, with some inspection you will notice that most of the feeds are inactive, with the live feeds being the minority. It is not that hard to put together a network enabled data logger with an arduino or other device, but often with maintenance, upkeep people simply stop collecting data.

If a network like this of live, open, data gained traction with government and companies, it could provide new kinds of ‘live’ perception of environments and events that we have never seen before.

Sample data feeds:

State of the Tower Bridge in London – Open/Closed
Cat Presence – On/off the mat
Harbour Weather – Several environmental data feeds
Current cost – Home energy sensing

Posted in About the class, VI. Liveness 2 (other data) | No Comments »

More of Live Streaming

November 19th, 2009 by Tianwei Liu

Live Streaming of The Universe

Live From Space: Streaming Webcam Now Available

Written by Nancy Atkinson ShareThis

It’s not exactly what Al Gore had in mind, but its close. Live streaming video is now available every day of the week from the International Space Station. The video will show views of Earth and the exterior structure of the station, as seen from cameras mounted outside the ISS, and other times, activities going on inside the station. If you regularly watch NASA TV online, just go to the same website, and now there’s another choice of channels. Just click on the “Live Space Station Video” tab to enjoy. The Earth views will usually be seen during what is the crew off-duty or sleep periods, usually from about 6 pm to 6 am GMT (1 p.m. to 1 a.m. CST.) During times when the crew is awake and working, selected video will be available, accompanied by audio of communications between Mission Control and the astronauts. Be advised that during working hours when there are special events going on — for example, today as I’m writing this there is a spacewalk taking place — the public channel offers better views and commentary.

..……………….

NASA TV

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

NASA LCROSS Streaming Video

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LCROSS/lunarswingby/index.html

Live Streaming with control

Webcam of SWITCH in Zurich

http://cam-i.switch.ch/login.cgi?b=p&ch=2&l=1&i=1258584389

Real World Interventions via Live Video

November 19th, 2009 by Sebastian

There’s a passivity to a lot of live webcams/lifecasts that makes them pretty boring. Last week in class, we tuned in to this live video:

ZZZZZZZZZZ.

While most personal web cams that I’ve watched are about as boring as the one we watched in class, it’s certainly possible to find more entertaining and interactive ones. While browsing Stickam, I randomly clicked my way into a stream hosted by Jake Fogelnest. I didn’t know who he was initially, but found out after a couple of minutes that he started the cable access television show SQUiRT TV from his New York City bedroom in 1994. He was fourteen years old, and the show, which featured his opinions on music, film and television, quickly found its way to MTV after gaining popularity (Wiki). Since then, he’s done all kinds of work in TV, writes comedy, and hosts a show on Sirius radio.

During his live stream, Fogelnest provided a comedic response to almost every message in the chat box. He also provided a call-in number and picked up every phone call. This was his response when I said that I’d bring up his web cam in class:

Video of Fogelnest talking to a prank caller

As a kind of interactive performance, Jake Fogelnest’s live stream is pretty entertaining, but the call and response way that he interacts with his audience is pretty common on the internet and something radio talk show hosts have been doing for decades.

What happens when we give viewers the power to directly intervene in what they’re watching – to effect change on the other side of the screen, without a human intermediary?

At the beginning of class last week, we looked at Marie Sester’s Access Project, which “lets you track anonymous individuals in public places, by pursuing them with a robotic spotlight and acoustic beam system.”

Elim Cheng’s Break the Wall at the ITP Winter Show 2008
Click your mouse to swing a wrecking ball at a brick wall

Online hunting
Mouse Click Brings Home Thrill of the Hunt
“The idea came from another website that has viewing of animals, and a co-worker had asked me, ‘boy wouldn’t it be great if you could put a gun to that?”
Live-paintball spin-off

Wafaa Bilal’s “Domestic Tension” (Shoot an Iraqi) project
Domestic Tension YouTube channel
“80 million hits, 60,000 shots from 128 countries over 30 days”

Shoot The Banker

Live “Virtual Stakeouts” – border patrol
This site only allows you to search and report, but what if users could activate a search light? Cast a net? Shoot a paintball gun?

What are the implications of moving toward earth models in which every pixel is “live” and people are able to directly manipulate events in the real space represented on their screens?

Posted in V. Liveness 1 (video) | No Comments »

The Tele-Healing Touch

November 13th, 2009 by jel402

Advances in telecommunications, particularly in the “liveness” now possibly with faster data connections and high-definition display, have laid newly possible, simultaneous relationships between people separated by place. Applications based on this new dynamic vary widely, from business meetings to bedroom liveblogging, all involving face-to-face communication. Telepresence, the liveness now afforded by this technology, has also paved the way to a different kind of interaction, one based in action rather than expression, where movements made in one place are replicated in another – perhaps most visibly in the field of telesurgery.

On September 7, 2001, an American specialty surgeon based in New York removed the gallbladder of a patient in France and conducted the first tele-mediated surgery, known as the Lindbergh Operation (named after the first aviator to fly across the Atlantic). Video of the operation can be found here. Movements made in the surgeon’s New York office occurred in the operating room with little delay (150 milliseconds, to be exact); a camera inside the patient’s body transmitted similarly rapid display to the surgeon to show the actions of the robotic arms at the other end. To ensure that there were no interruptions during the surgery due to technical reasons, the operation was conducted over a dedicated fiberoptic link provided by France Telecom for this specific reason. Later operations, like those done by another specialty surgeon in Canada, were performed “over a non-dedicated fiberoptic connection that shares bandwidth with regular telecommunications data” (from Wikipedia: robotic surgery), pointing to the fact that telesurgery may become a very common phenomenon.

The Lindbergh Operation and others like it constitute a form of interaction that involves action taking place in two physically separated spaces, and liveness being not just screen-based but also three-dimensional. Liveblogging and conferencing are considered simultaneous exchanges because conversations occur as fluidly as they would between two people only feet away from each other. This live exchange relies on a minimal amount of time passing between hearing, processing and responding to what is being; as a class, we decided that this pause, or lag, should not exceed sixty seconds. Telesurgery similarly spans two separate places, yet it requires a human-to-mechanism relationship in which robotics faithfully reproduce the movements conducted by the operator. This form of telepresence also demands more instantaneous interaction, a surgeon’s delicate movement necessarily replicated within milliseconds and across millimeters. In exchanges through teleconferencing or webcasting, lag is annoying but can be tolerated, while in telesurgery, pauses may result in life or death.

Central to telesurgery and other forms of movement-based telepresence, currently, is the notion that our operation of machinery in one place will control a robotic limb to do the same. The surgeon conducting the Lindbergh Operation had to relearn surgical procedures in a way that the Zeus robot in his New York office could understand and replicate; unlike traditional hand-based motions many surgeons are accustomed to, surgery involved rotating a small joystick-like knob that performed movement in the robotic arms. Future devices based on physical telepresence, however, could understand and reproduce analogous hand, arm or bodily movements familiar to humans, such that a surgeon’s, artist’s or engineer’s hand replaces the joystick as the means to move a robotic arm. As greater data exchange becomes possible, sensing all kinds of minute , quick or complex movements and passing that data to the other end will result in more fidelity and responsiveness, thereby most faithfully transferring physical, three-dimensional “presence” into other, far-removed places.

Tags: liveness, robotics, telepresence, telesurgery
Posted in V. Liveness 1 (video) | No Comments »

Open 3D data with OpenStreetMap 3D

November 12th, 2009 by mdc368

The true power of free and open-source GIS software tools is linked tightly with the availability and quality of free and open-source GIS data. While we may enjoy relying on generous companies for such as Google or Yahoo for this type of data, there is no ultimate right to it, and the users and developers are powerless at the whims of these large companies. As the collection of this kind of quality data on a worldwide scale is such a daunting challenge, crowd sourcing the data collection is the only solution, so that developers large and small can easily provide applications that deliver useful and high-quality data. As our society continually moves forwards as an ‘information society’, data is one of the prime currencies, and to safeguard data as a inherent public right will quickly move from a hobby to a necessity.

The Open Street Map project is the prime example of this, as the community has grown so has the quality of the data. Mapping parties and events occur all over the world, where participants attack city streets with data-loggers and notepads, making the boring act of data collection into a social activity of the 21st century. The data combined with open source GIS server software such as GeoServer allows for small developers around the globe to produce powerful software that uses the wealth of open data to its full potential.

It is from here that I began exploring what I envision to be the next logical step of this equation, bring free software and data into the 3-dimensional world. Eventually, after many iterations, this 3-d world grid could become much more than a ‘map’. It could become really the meta-web, where any sort of contextual layers of data could live on top of this world grid, while the grid could be accessed, viewed, explored in multitudes of ways.

Much GIS data does already have altitude and elevation data, which is conceptually & technically a far different scope than having actual 3D data of structures and objects. The problem is, there is no easy way for a person to gather 3 dimensional data, as there is in a 2D world with a GPS logger. There is no so-called ‘depth camera’; using current methods it may not be that easy but I would imagine many minds are working on an inventing a way to do this easily and cheaply so anyone can author 3-d media as easily as taking a picture.

In my opinion the most promising development in terms of accessing 3-dimensional data is the current development of a 3D Javascript API’s; O3D from Google giving javascript access to the computer’s OpenGL chip, and a collaboration between Mozilla and Khronos to make an open standard for 3-d on the web. These are promising as now 3-D content can grow into being a 1st class citizens on the web, not 2nd rate flash apps or tied to using proprietary Google rendering engines through Google Earth.

[OpenStreetMap 3D Homepage] http://www.geographie.uni-bonn.de/karto/osm-3d/index.en.html

[Wiki] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM-3D

[Open-3D Geoserver PDF article] http://www.opengeo.com.br/download/Open_3D_GIS.pdf

There has been an attempt at a 3D OpenStreetMap in Germany, with successful results shown in the link above. It looks like they are making some progress into developing an open protocol and implementation to deal with the can of worms inherent in 3D data. It will be really exciting to see the project progress.

The true power of free and open-source GIS software tools is linked tightly with the availability and quality of free and open-source GIS data. While we may enjoy relying on generous companies for such as Google or Yahoo for this type of data, there is no ultimate right to it, and the users and developers are powerless at the whims of these large companies. As the collection of this kind of quality data on a worldwide scale is such a daunting challenge, crowd sourcing the data collection is the only solution, so that developers large and small can easily provide applications that deliver useful and high-quality data. As our society continually moves forwards as an ‘information society’, data is one of the prime currencies, and to safeguard data as an inherent public right will quickly move from a hobby to a necessity.

The Open Street Map project is the prime example of this, as the community has grown and prospered so has the quality of the data. Mapping parties and events occur all over the world, where participants attack city streets with data-loggers and notepads, making the boring act of data collection into a social activity of the 21st century. The data combined with open source GIS server software such as GeoServer allows for small developers around the globe to produce powerful software that uses the wealth of open data to its full potential.

There has been an attempt at a 3D OpenStreetMap in Germany, with successful results shown in the links below. It looks like they are making some progress into developing an open protocol and implementation to deal with the can of worms inherent in 3D data. It will be really exciting to see the project progress, and hopefully turn into a reality as the client and server infrastructures are developed further.

[OpenStreetMap 3D Homepage]

[OpenStreetMap 3D Wiki]

[Open-3D Geoserver PDF article]

Posted in IV. Rich 3D Modeling | No Comments »

Representing Earth

Jail visits via Webcams and a slew of other neat webcams

Liveness: Practical Matters

Real-time Omniscience

What else can we use live cameras for?

CCTV

Live Data @ pachube

More of Live Streaming

Real World Interventions via Live Video

The Tele-Healing Touch

Open 3D data with OpenStreetMap 3D

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