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Techbreak - August 2008

Image Metrics Emily O'Brian

I've got on ad nauseum about the Uncanny Valley and how we're stuck in the pit of it, unable to make CGI animations that look good without getting cartoony.


It kills me to think of all the work that goes into character modelling and facial animation, only to see how artificial it looks. Honestly, I preferred hand-drawn sprites from back in the day.

Researchers at Image Metrics, a California company, have tried to punch through the valley, and break on through to the other side. They've released this short clip of 'Emily', a CGI character that mimics real-life actress Emily O'Brian.

The results are pretty impressive:



From the Times Online article:

""The subtlety of the timing of eye movements is a big one. People also have a natural asymmetry - for instance, in the muscles in the side of their face. Those types of imperfections aren't that significant but they are what makes people look real.""


We're seeing how important imperfections are... often the most disturbing thing about a CGI face is how shiny the skin seems, and how symmetrical the features are. We need variation, dammit!

See the Emily Project on Image Metric's website.

An interesting article on the Uncanny Valley by Clive Thomson.


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Sonos ZP120
This photo is of a home media center, called the Sonos ZP120, which is used to play music in any room of your house without the need of cables - it uses wireless!

It's not cheap, either, aiming for upper-end consumers, the ones who have enough money to actually care about cables destroying the overall aesthetic of their home.

I wouldn't normally care about this (you can make your own version of this -sort of- by creating a MythBox), but Slate has an interesting article in Tech that uses the Sonos as an example.

That example is that, as time has crept up on the Sonos, it's just gotten better. By using the internet to deliver updates, the Sonos people have ensured that the 2005 version of the media player is as functional as the 2008 version.

Incredible, if you think about it. It's not too long ago that things were designed to become inferior, to coerce you into buying the latest model.

Forget about that - we've got a new design philosophy in town, which is, the longer you use something, the better it should be!

"What's remarkable, though, is that while its hardware has barely changed in three years, the Sonos system has improved tremendously since it went on sale. In 2006, the company issued a software update to every Sonos sold—suddenly, the system could play audiobooks. A few months after that, another update allowed Sonos players to hook into the Rhapsody online music service, which meant that for $13 a month, people could now listen to millions of tracks that they didn't own. Later, Sonos added Napster, Pandora, and Sirius, plus a slew of free Internet radio stations. Last year, the company improved its controller's user interface, adding a function that lets you search your tunes from the device—another feature that every Sonos owner got through a software update."

That's the way to do it, you play the gee-tar on the MTV.

I love this idea, and I'm willing to back it. I bought Galactic Civilizations II recently; I'd heard it was a good game, but the recent expansion pack blew me away. They managed to include an update that would make the game run faster on your computer! I heartily support developers that approach programming with the opposite mentality of Microsoft - make things smaller and faster.

The good thing about this shift in design is that it benefits everyone. You'll spend less money, hopefully, though companies like to include sneaky ways of making you subscribe to services. You'll throw away fewer devices, which is great for our environment. And, best of all, with this mentality, manufacturers can continue to improve things, not just release something half-done, then leap to the next platform.

This is good. Let's dig in.


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Windows dictionary update is ridiculous
ArsTechnica has an interesting rant about the poor design of Windows update... Emil Protalinski found that Windows wanted to install a 60 MB dictionary update, and he wondered why.

He looked it up and found that it was because of 5 words that weren't in the dictionary and were important enough to warrant an update:

"It appears that the English and German dictionaries in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 do not contain the following words: Friendster, Klum, Nazr, Obama, and Racicot. Applications that use the dictionary will flag these words as misspellings. Apparently this issue is important enough that it requires its own update, instead of say, being rolled in with the next service pack. "

Shall we assume it's the Obama that forced the Update team to hurriedly send out the new dictionary?

What we notice from this, of course, is that there's no way to simply add in new words to the dictionary? The entire database has to be replaced? That seems like rather poor design... I certainly don't want to sit around, waiting for a 60 MB update, just for five, rather useless words.

It's of particular importance in Australia, where many of us have rather slow broadband speeds, with download quotas. I'd rather use that 60 MB for something else, not to mention that it makes me question the use of the other updates.

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