Welcome to Slide Studios

This is a very cool working demo of how human-computer interaction might look moving forward using “gesturally driven displays”. This one actualizes some of what was envisioned in the movie Minority Report. More info can be found at Oblong Industries Web site. I love the plain-English overview explanation found in the first couple of paragraphs on the Web site:

Oblong Industries is the developer of the g-speak spatial operating environment. The SOE’s combination of gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels brings the first major step in computer interface since 1984; starting today, g-speak will fundamentally change the way people use machines at work, in the living room, in conference rooms, in vehicles. The g-speak platform is a complete application development and execution environment that redresses the dire constriction of human intent imposed by traditional GUIs. Its idiom of spatial immediacy and information responsive to real-world geometry enables a necessary new kind of work: data-intensive, embodied, real-time, predicated on universal human expertise.

“…dire constriction of human intent imposed by traditional GUIs.”

Priceless. Here is a look at it:


g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

At the 2008 CES in January of this year, Blu-ray celebrated its “win” over HD-DVD in the so-called High Definition DVD format war. You could argue that it was good for the consumer that we now have a single high definition format, and I would argue (personally) that the best format won. So why haven’t I purchased a player yet? Why am I not buying new Titles in this format? Probably for the same reasons you aren’t:

1. Sure the quality is much better than standard DVD, but for the average consumer, standard DVD is plenty good. The newer DVD players do a great job up converting the display to HD sets and many consumers are hard pressed to tell the difference.
2. The equipment and discs are expensive. Players are, for the most part, north of $200 dollars. Discs are costly as well. Even at Amazon.com prices you’re shelling out $26 bucks for Iron Man (with a retail cost of almost $40).
3. Interactive features and new menuing schemes aren’t enough of a differentiator. No doubt about it - if you have played with the Blu-ray menuing system or seen a disc that is BD-Live enabled - you know how much better the user experience is from standard DVD, however, these enhancements don’t yet appeal to the mass market.
4. Why buy physical media when it is getting easier and easier to get HD movies from online services?

It is number 4 that I want to delve into a bit more deeply. While I’m not a huge fan of standalone VOD appliances like Roku or Vudu, some recent announcements from Netflix have turned my head. Engaget broke the news a few days ago that Netflix would begin providing movies in High Definition streamed to the Xbox 360. We’ve seen several announcements from Netflix over the past year as they have begun integration with consumer devices including Blu-ray players, TVs and a recent announcement of support on Tivo Series 3. Now we’re talking. If I’ve already invested in a high end gaming platform and have broadband to my house, there is no reason anymore for me to own a player for movie rental.

But what about owning an HD movie? With the Vudu service, you can purchase HD movies today, but they only “live” on your Vudu box. iTunes sells SD movies today (HD is only available for rental), but I predict it won’t be long before you can purchase the HD version of a movie to add to your iTunes library. Point is, there are “for sale” services emerging now, which will let you purchase the high definition version of a film, without requiring you to purchase the physical media (the disc).

Now, I don’t want to get in to a debate about what “HD” means when it’s delivered online vs. on a Blu-ray disc. I concede that “Internet HD” isn’t at the same quality level as Blu-ray HD, but I refer you to point 1 above. If it’s good enough . . .

So, here is what I expect this holiday season. Blu-ray players will see a cost reduction just in time for the Thanksgiving weekend along with select Titles. The industry needs to see a huge boost in sales, otherwise there is a real risk that Blu-ray acceptance may just limp along a la Laserdisc in the 80s (remember those things?).

My advice is wait. Wait to see how things pan out over the Holiday season. Save your money. There would be nothing worse than sinking cash into a new player and Titles only to have the industry stop producing them for lack of consumer acceptance, and go exclusively to a download/streaming model over the next year. If you do want to buy a Blu-ray player, consider the Sony PS3. While it is more expensive, you can obviously do a lot more with it than just watch Blu-ray movies.

I believe that physical media will eventually go away - maybe not next year, but certainly within the next few years as broadband penetration and entertainment devices find their way into everyone’s homes. Now, if we just had a slick way to manage all of that downloaded content to all of those devices . . .

I just turned up AT&T DSL service to our home. I wanted to get Verizon Fios or AT&T Uverse which are both offered “near” where I live, but I can’t get either yet - hopefully the trucks with the bright orange cable will arrive soon. So I went with AT&T for a bundled package over Time Warner. It includes 6Mbps DSL, Dish Network programming and phone service. I hope to uprade to Uverse IPTV at some point. The Dish programming and voice service is fine - but setting up the DSL service was an experience.

I opted out of the $200 fee to have a tech come to the house to setup the DSL service. I also opted out of their built in WiFi modem, for which I was lectured extensively by the rep that they wouldn’t guarantee Internet access to anything but the modem. Thanks for that.

Two days later a box arrived with my modem and filters for all of the phones in the house. You have to install a filter wherever a device uses a standard phone line since the DSL data portion of the signal is present on every phone jack. I plugged the modem in and it trained up indicating that it had a good DSL signal. I plugged my Mac laptop in and . . . nothing.

You see, I’m not big on instructions, and I had missed the part where I needed to run an installer on my Mac to start my service. AT&T provides a “wizard” of sorts that gets you setup before you can actulaly use the Internet service. Unlike Cable, AT&T uses an additional layer of authentication called PPP which allows AT&T to control access to service through the use of a username and password. Once I had run the setup, my Mac connected just fine, although I’m sure I’ve now collected a raft of adware. I also have an att.net throwaway email address in case I ever want to have yet another mailbox full of spam.

So at that point, I switched the connection from my Mac to my Linksys Wireless router and . . . nothing. Switching back to the Mac everything worked fine. In combing through the Linksys settings I realized that the Linksys was receiving a private IP address from the DSL modem. With a cable modem, the IP address is a public IP and it is bridged straight through to the home router - very simply to setup; you plugin and go. Not the case with the DSL modem. In fact, the IP address that the Linksys received was in the same IP address range as the IP addresses that the Linksys was giving to my Mac (and other devices) over WiFi. This is a “no no” in routing. To fix it, I changed the IP assignment range on the Linksys to be in a different range from the address the modem was handing out, and . . . it worked.

Now, I know that last paragraph will make some eyes glaze over. Suffice to say, most consumers, who opt for the “self install” package and wish to connect a Wifi router downstream of the modem are going to have issues. The linksys brand Wifi routers all come with 192.168.1.1 address by default and assign IP addresses somewhere in that address space. I suspect other brands do as well. The Motorola DSL modem also shipps with these same settings. Short of understanding some basic routing principles, it won’t be obvious to most consumers what the problem is when their PCs can’t find Google. Why Motorola didn’t pick a 10.0.0.0 range, or at least do some testing with popular Wifi routers to find non conflicting settings, I have no idea. Oh wait, maybe AT&T cuts them in on the follow up service call fees . . .

In any case, I got it all working and went straight to the Speakeasy bandwidth speed test program. If you want to get a good view on your actual throughput, both up and downstream, I highly recommend this little application. Point your browser to: http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/ and select the city nearest to you. I was a little dissapointed when the needle barely registered above 5 Megabits per second on my 6 Megabit per second service, but I knew why. The reason is all of the overhead in moving data across the DSL line. It is acronym alphabet soup in terms of the network stack: IP over TCP over PPP over Ethernet over AAL5 over ATM over ADSL. Holy . . .

What this translates into is a 16-20% loss of throughput for all of that overhead depending on how they package the TCP/IP portion. So, on the brightside, I’m getting a full 6 Megabit per second service, I’m just losing about 1 of those megabits on the downstream and about 200K or so on the upstream. Maybe they should just call it a 5 Megabit per second service . . . or do they just love the phone calls?

Not cool:

Dear Comcast High-Speed Internet Customer,

We appreciate your business and strive to provide you with the best online experience possible. One of the ways we do this is through our Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). The AUP outlines acceptable use of our service as well as steps we take to protect our customers from things that can negatively impact their experience online. This policy has been in place for many years and we update it periodically to keep it current with our customers’ use of our service.

On October 1, 2008, we will post an updated AUP that will go into effect at that time.

In the updated AUP, we clarify that monthly data (or bandwidth) usage of more than 250 Gigabytes (GB) is the specific threshold that defines excessive use of our service. We have an excessive use policy because a fraction of one percent of our customers use such a disproportionate amount of bandwidth every month that they may degrade the online experience of other customers.

250 GB/month is an extremely large amount of bandwidth and it’s very likely that your monthly data usage doesn’t even come close to that amount. In fact, the threshold is approximately 100 times greater than the typical or median residential customer usage, which is 2 to 3 GB/month. To put it in perspective, to reach 250 GB of data usage in one month a customer would have to do any one of the following:

* Send more than 50 million plain text emails (at 5 KB/email);
* Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song); or
* Download 125 standard definition movies (at 2 GB/movie).

And online gamers should know that even the heaviest multi- or single-player gaming activity would not typically come close to this threshold over the course of a month.“

Love the fact that Comcast uses number of emails as a measure of how much you can do with 250GB of download capacity. While this may seem like a lot - it isn’t. Besides the ever-expanding consumption of high quality video from online streaming and download services to your PC, there are many more non-PC devices that are making their way into consumers home that utilize your broadband connection. NewTeeVee has a good article here.

Metering sux.

-E

Interesting article from NewTeeVee today on what is effectively amounting to the death of the Korean DVD market. Sales are at a third this year of what they were in 2002. With broadband penetration at 90% and roughly 50% of the households admitting to downloading movies, it isn’t surprising that sales of DVDs are in a free fall.

Interestingly enough, P2P networks aren’t at the center of the Korean downloading craze. Users are flocking to web-based storage solutions instead. The market for these so-called “webhard” services was originally popularized by LG, but now there are dozens of vendors, with some offering up to 1 Terabyte of storage space for free. The services are monetized through priority access points that guarantee higher speeds. There are supposed to be filters in place, but it’s obvious they don’t work.

I have no doubt that physical media will disappear in the US as well over time. Initial feedback from friends who use the Netflix Roku or the Vudu box is positive - other than needing to attach another box to the TV set. I’ve also been impressed with the Sony Playstation online service which, in my opinion, continues to put the game console in a great position in the home for combined services.

-E