GSVideo is a brilliant library that you can use in processing to capture live video, on Windows, Linux and OSX, and it’s a huge improvement over the built-in capturing support. Unfortunately, a number of us (including some of the 123 students we got to build augmented reality music instruments this September) have been running into a problematic frame error crash that meant captures didn’t last for very long before unceremoniously crashing the application. Error info and stack trace look something like the following (edited for brevity):

# A fatal error has been detected by the Java Runtime Environment:
#
#  EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION (0xc0000005) at pc=0x7c342eee, pid=1564, tid=2052
#
# JRE version: 6.0_20-b02
# Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (16.3-b01 mixed mode windows-x86 )
# Problematic frame:
# C  [msvcr71.dll+0x2eee]
#
---------------  T H R E A D  ---------------

Current thread (0x18db7000):  JavaThread "Animation Thread" [_thread_in_native, id=2052, stack(0x1bfd0000,0x1c020000)]

Stack: [0x1bfd0000,0x1c020000],  sp=0x1c01f8a0,  free space=13e1c01f384k
Native frames: (J=compiled Java code, j=interpreted, Vv=VM code, C=native code)
C  [msvcr71.dll+0x2eee]
C  1
J  java.nio.Bits.copyToByteArray(JLjava/lang/Object;JJ)V
j  java.nio.DirectIntBufferU.get([III)Ljava/nio/IntBuffer;+126
j  java.nio.IntBuffer.get([I)Ljava/nio/IntBuffer;+5
j  codeanticode.gsvideo.GSCapture.read()V+24
j  CathetAR.draw()V+22

Read more about it on this forum thread.

In any case, today I spent some hours I don’t really have and finally managed to crush it. Turns out, and some of you will probably not be surprised, that it was a threading problem. The capture event handler invokeEvent() and the read() call were being interleaved, and the buffer they were using is also not thread-safe. Doh. Some synchronization here and there, and an extra capture buffer, now I can’t get it to crash anymore.

Get the patch here, and a patched GSVideo.jar here. Both of these are for the GSVideo 20110203 test version. If you can’t patch and build it yourself, just copy my GSVideo.jar over the GSVideo.jar in your unpacked GSVideo 20110203 plugin directory (sub-directory library). Update: See below, GSVideo 0.8 has been released and now contains my patch. Rather get the 0.8 download!

Leave me a comment if this helps!

Update on 2011-03-06

Andres Colubri, author of GSVideo, has refined and integrated my patch. The next GSVideo release (0.8 and newer) should have this fix.

Update on 2011-03-15

Andres has just released GSVideo 0.8, which integrates my fix and many other improvements. Go read his 0.8 release post!

Related posts:

1. Processing + GSVideo + NyARToolkit on Linux x86_64
2. Suspend-to-disc update
3. Processing + NyARToolkit + multiple marker tracking

Standard hiro and kanji markers tracked simultaneously with augmented reality sphere and cube. In the background some artwork by my daughter!

I’ve called it NyARMultiBoard, and you can use it instead of the default NyARBoard if you want to track multiple markers.

Download a ZIP file containing everything (source code, jar files) from this directory.  If you unpack this into your processing sketchbook/libraries directory, it should work out of the box.  It’s a drop-in replacement for NyAR4psg, so you don’t need to have that installed as well. There is an example to get you started in NyAR2/example/NyARMultiTest.  Note: This uses the GSVideo capturing stack as I explain here, you should easily be able to change it back to processing defaults (just change GSCapture to Capture).

Please let me know in the comments if this works (or doesn’t) for you!

I made this screencast to demonstrate the multiple marker tracking, assisted by TNR:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I also made this really bad screencast (old webcam + night time lighting + transcoding):

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you’re really into the details

I’ve just added two new classes NyARMultiBoard and NyARMultiBoardMarker to the default NyAR4psg distribution. Very importantly, NyARToolkit itself needs to be patched with one extra method in NyARDetectMarker, see the NyARMultiBoard comments.

Update on 20110304

I’ve fixed the problematic frame bug in gsvideo that many of you have been running into. See this post.

Update on 20110305

I’ve updated NyAR2 so it works with the P3D renderer as well, which is often faster for blitting the webcam image onto the display. The updated zip file is named NyAR2-20110305.zip, and it can be downloaded from the usual directory. My changes are based on NyAR4psg 0.3.0 and NyARToolkit 2.5.2.

Related posts:

1. Processing + GSVideo + NyARToolkit on Linux x86_64
2. Spring has arrived in suburbia! [Weekly Head Voices #40]
3. Where should that dang button go?

Adding the Facebook Like button functionality wasted the most time, because there are far too many plugins and howtos that claim to work and don’t quite. I ended up using the Like plugin (official wordpress page and plugin website), because it has the best documentation that includes details on all the ways in which things can go wrong, and there are many.  I’m using the IFRAME option, also because that seems to work most of the time.  I had a hard time finding this plugin in the built-in directory, so I downloaded and installed it manually.

For the facebook share button, I use the Facebook Share (New) Button plugin, and for the retweet button, I’m using the Topsy Retweet Button plugin.  I installed both of them from the built-in “Plugins | Add New” directory.

In all three cases, I made use of the plugin options to have the buttons placed all over my blog, instead of manually editing the theme.

I hope that you enjoy your shiny buttons, and I look forward to seeing you for the next Weekly Head Voices!

P.S. feel free to click on my buttons, right below this post.

Related posts:

1. Bad, interface, bad!
2. Where should that dang button go?

UBCD is a bootable CD image that’s fantastic if you’re trying to save grandma’s PC from a certain death, as it contains a number of different bootable utilities for testing memory, testing and low-level repair of hard drives, partition repair, antivirus and so forth. It even contains Parted Magic, a compact linux distribution for fixing partitions, amongst others.

Knoppix is the swiss knife of live linux distributions, and Ubuntu 10.04 is probably the slickest distribution out there at the moment. Both of these can be ran live from your USB disc, so they don’t have to touch your hard drive.  However, both of them are also able to install to your hard disc if you so choose.

To me it seemed logical to combine all three of these elements onto the single USB flash drive that I carry on my keychain, as I know of many grandmas with broken PCs…

Let’s go!

1. make sure the single FAT32 partition on your USB stick is bootable (use command ‘a’ in linux fdisk) and large enough (you’ll need just a bit less than 2G).
2. mount your flash drive on a directory, henceforth referred to as FLASH_MNT.
3. copy all files from the ubcd5 iso into a directory, henceforth referred to as CUSTOM_UBCD5.
4. mount the ubuntu 10.04 i386 iso on a directory, henceforth referred to as LUCID_MNT
5. mount the knoppix iso on a directory, henceforth referred to as KNOPPIX_MNT.
6. copy necessary boot files from the ubuntu ISO to UBCD:

   mkdir CUSTOM_UBCD5/ubcd/custom/lucid
   cp LUCID_MNT/casper/vmlinuz LUCID_MNT/casper/initrd.lz CUSTOM_UBCD5/ubcd/custom/lucid
   

7. copy ubuntu-10.04-desktop-i386.iso to your flash disk:

   mkdir /FLASH_MNT/isos
   cp ubuntu-10.04-desktop-386.iso /FLASH_MNT/isos/
   

8. Knoppix can’t be booted directly from its iso like Ubuntu, so we have to copy the actual contents of the ISO to your flash:

   cp -r KNOPPIX_MNT/KNOPPIX to FLASH_MNT/
   cp -r KNOPPIX_MNT/boot/isolinux to FLASH_MNT/KNOPPIX/isolinux
   

9. replace FLASH_MNT/KNOPPIX/isolinux/isolinux.cfg with the isolinux.cfg at the bottom of this post. (It’s the same file, except that “KERNEL linux” is replaced with “KERNEL /KNOPPIX/isolinux/linux”, “initrd=minirt.gz” with “initrd=/KNOPPIX/isolinux/minirt.gz”, F1, F2, F3 and DISPLAY paths all fixed, e.g. “F2 f2″ becomes “F2 /KNOPPIX/f2″ and finally all instances of “quiet” removed)
10. Now replace CUSTOM_UBCD5/ubcd/custom/custom.cfg with the custom.cfg at the bottom of this post.
11. copy all files from CUSTOM_UBCD5 to your usb flash disk:

    cp -r CUSTOM_UBCD5/* FLASH_MNT/
    

12. Finally, make the whole thing bootable with the following invocation. It’s really important that you replace /dev/sdX1 with the correct device for your flash disk. To see what this is, type “mount” and see the device associated with your FLASH_MNT.

    cd FLASH_MNT
    sudo ./ubcd/tools/linux/ubcd2usb/syslinux -s -d /boot/syslinux /dev/sdX1
    

You’re done. You should now be able to boot with your EMUBD! Knoppix and Ubuntu can be found under “User defined”.

Here are those files that you’ll need. First FLASH_MNT/KNOPPIX/isolinux/isolinux.cfg:

DEFAULT knoppix
APPEND ramdisk_size=100000 lang=en vt.default_utf8=0 apm=power-off vga=0x311 initrd=/KNOPPIX/isolinux/minirt.gz nomce loglevel=0 tz=localtime
TIMEOUT 50
# TOTALTIMEOUT 20
# KBDMAP german.kbd
PROMPT 1
F1 /KNOPPIX/isolinux/boot.msg
F2 /KNOPPIX/isolinux/f2
F3 /KNOPPIX/isolinux/f3
DISPLAY /KNOPPIX/isolinux/boot.msg
LABEL adriane
KERNEL /KNOPPIX/isolinux/linux
APPEND ramdisk_size=100000 lang=en vt.default_utf8=0 apm=power-off vga=0x311 initrd=/KNOPPIX/isolinux/minirt.gz nomce loglevel=0 tz=localtime adriane
LABEL knoppix
KERNEL /KNOPPIX/isolinux/linux
APPEND ramdisk_size=100000 lang=en vt.default_utf8=0 apm=power-off vga=791 initrd=/KNOPPIX/isolinux/minirt.gz nomce loglevel=0 tz=localtime
LABEL fb1024x768
KERNEL /KNOPPIX/isolinux/linux
APPEND ramdisk_size=100000 lang=en vt.default_utf8=0 apm=power-off vga=791 xmodule=fbdev initrd=/KNOPPIX/isolinux/minirt.gz nomce loglevel=0 tz=localtime
LABEL fb1280x1024
KERNEL /KNOPPIX/isolinux/linux
APPEND ramdisk_size=100000 lang=en vt.default_utf8=0 apm=power-off vga=794 xmodule=fbdev initrd=/KNOPPIX/isolinux/minirt.gz nomce loglevel=0 tz=localtime
LABEL fb800x600
KERNEL /KNOPPIX/isolinux/linux
APPEND ramdisk_size=100000 lang=en vt.default_utf8=0 apm=power-off vga=788 xmodule=fbdev initrd=/KNOPPIX/isolinux/minirt.gz nomce loglevel=0 tz=localtime
LABEL memtest
KERNEL memtest
APPEND foo
LABEL dos
KERNEL memdisk
APPEND initrd=balder.img
LABEL failsafe
KERNEL /KNOPPIX/isolinux/linux
APPEND ramdisk_size=100000 lang=en vt.default_utf8=0 vga=normal atapicd nosound noapic nolapic noacpi pnpbios=off acpi=off nofstab noscsi nodma noapm nousb nopcmcia nofirewire noagp nomce nonetwork nodhcp xmodule=vesa initrd=/KNOPPIX/isolinux/minirt.gz

… and then CUSTOM_UBCD5/ubcd/custom/custom.cfg:

MENU INCLUDE /ubcd/menus/syslinux/defaults.cfg
UI /boot/syslinux/menu.c32

# option to be able to go back to the main menu
LABEL -
MENU LABEL ..
COM32 /boot/syslinux/menu.c32
APPEND /ubcd/menus/syslinux/main.cfg

# this clause will boot directly from the ubuntu iso
LABEL ubuntulive
MENU LABEL Ubuntu 10.04 i386 Desktop LIVE
LINUX /ubcd/custom/lucid/vmlinuz
INITRD /ubcd/custom/lucid/initrd.lz
APPEND boot=casper iso-scan/filename=/isos/ubuntu-10.04-desktop-i386.iso --

# and this one will chain into the knoppix boot setup
LABEL knoppix
MENU LABEL Knoppix 6.2.1 LIVE
CONFIG /KNOPPIX/isolinux/isolinux.cfg

Post scriptum

• The instructions in this post are derived from the UBCD linux documentation and various forum posts.  Credits to their authors!
• If you don’t want Knoppix on your bootable USB and you have a Windows computer, you could also use MultiBootISOS to add multiple ISOs to a USB boot disk.

Related posts:

1. Knoppix
2. A first whiff of Gutsy Gibbon power-management
3. Another small step on the way to S3 STR

Before continuing, you might like to watch this clip explaining why you shall build a turtle fence (I’ll get back to the clip after my dropbox story):

Click here to view the embedded video.

Last week I completed, you guessed it, 21 GTD tasks spread over 10 projects. Once again, one more task than last week. The question is thus not if, but when I’m going to have to disappoint you. :)  Worth mentioning on the miscellany front is that I’ve started playing around with processing, a fantastic little system for programming visual effects and interaction, in preparation for a new first year course. My goal is to get the students irrevocably addicted to the coolness that is media processing! I’ll keep you up to date…

In a previous post, I was quite enthusiastic about Dropbox and its possibilities for collaboration. As some of you might now, I really like this whole living-in-the-cloud idea: I use GMail, Google Calendar and Google Documents quite extensively and I’m even paying for extra storage with the big G.  So, during the past week, I decided to bite the bullet some more and to move 12G more of my data right into the cloud, courtesy of a 50G Dropbox Pro account.  Up to now, I had a ridiculously complex synchronisation system keeping various subsets of my data up to date between a netbook, a laptop and three different servers. At the core of this system was unison, a brilliant multi-way open source synchronisation tool. In spite of this system mostly working, its complexity and the starkly contrasting It-Just-Works nature of Dropbox convinced me to give the simple solution a shot.

So far I can only report that I remain impressed: At one stage I manually copied a complete dropbox (12Gigs) from one already synced machine to a fresh target machine and started the Dropbox software on the target. It politely asked:

There is already a folder in your home folder called Dropbox. Do you want to merge all the existing files in that folder into your dropbox?

After clicking on the “HELL YEAH!” button (that’s how it felt, ok), the software went on indexing for a minute or two and then correctly claimed that everything was nicely synced up. Very much understated robustness, kudos to the developers. I’m going to test-drive this whole business for one month, and then let you know whether it’s going to be  a permanent fixture in my cloud-home.

Still wondering why you should build a turtle fence? Well, you can blame the Auto-Tune internet meme. Very shortly, auto-tune is an audio effect that corrects one voice to be perfectly in tune with backing music. In other words, a vocalist who can’t sing is in fact no problem at all, computer will fix! Initially it was used quite sparingly and its application was even sometimes kept a secret, until artists such as Cher and especially T-Pain turned it into an art form, in fact exaggerating the effect until it gave a decidedly unsubtle robotic voice effect. The effect has become so famous that it now gets to call itself an internet meme and is often parodied.  The turtle clip above is just one of a whole series (auto-tune the news, see them all!). In the clip below, internet scientists *ahem*, including the well-known Professor Weird Al Yankovic, take an in-depth look at this phenomenon:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Finally, back to the purpose of this weblog… Good blogs all seem to have some central theme, such as photography, environmental issues, science or pokemon. I seem to recall that I’d also seen this in more than one “how to become an A-list blogger” guides.  I don’t find it hard to believe that this is very important.  However, this blog has never had a central theme, it’s always been me blabbing about the various things that I find blab-worthy.  I’ve never been able to come up with something better, and it was definitely not for lack of trying.  The Weekly Head Voices, by focusing my blabbing into slightly more coherent episodes, have finally helped me to come to a conclusion.  Besides acting as a creative outlet, sitting down every week and carefully externalising a specific subset of my experiences with the express purpose of having it read by a small number of people, is an important ritual during which I am forced to distance myself from the events of the week, and to self-reflect.  By formally concluding the previous period in this way, one has the mental room to manoeuvre in preparation for the next. If you by any chance find any of it entertaining, or at least you just can’t look away, it’s a win-win situation!

In other words: Theme-schmeme! The voices in my head will continue to be the many and various topics of this weblog, thank you very much. :)

Have a great week kids!

Related posts:

1. Weekly Head Voices #13: So you want to sue me?!
2. Weekly Head Voices #8: Uninterruptible Fun Supply
3. Weekly Head Voices #14: My Week Was A Wormhole.

In any case.

On the geek front, I have to say that I’m really liking Windows 7.  Partly eye-candy, partly the SuperBar, partly the revamped file manager: I’m a happy camper both on the NetBook (just installed 4GB of SDHC especially for ReadyBoost) and on the quad core workstation.  Feel free to discuss this in the comments, even, or especially, my black turtleneck-wearing friends! :)  Unrelated to the big 7, it turns out that if you use large removable (USB) drives between computers with different operating systems, NTFS is your best bet.  Even more unrelated, I’ve also discovered that one can implement complete independent Windows applications using AutoHotkey.  Before I knew what I was doing, I had re-implemented most of my envedit application in AutoHotKey, with GUI and all (you can find my efforts in SVN, AHK’s a strange little language).  The resultant stand-alone app is 400k, which compares favourably to the 4MB envedit installation.  To conclude this week’s edition of I Really Like Geeking Out, I broke down and bought 20G of extra Google storage for slightly less than EUR 5 per year.  I’m not using it (yet), but I somehow get a kick from seeing this at the bottom of my GMail interface (click the image for a slightly larger version):

With regard to research, things have been going just swimmingly.  There are a number of really cool articles being lovingly incubated as we speak.  Some mathematical visualization and some time-varying VDA will go to Eurovis, whilst one other submission is already being carefully groomed for the Vis deadline in March next year.

In other news that absolutely made my day on Monday, November 9, 2009: After being in the oven for almost two years, our pathological shoulder segmentation article should soon appear at a news-stand near you:

Related posts:

1. Weekly Head Voices #8: Uninterruptible Fun Supply
2. Weekly Head Voices #14: My Week Was A Wormhole.
3. Weekly Head Voices #15: Auto-tune my cloud.

Due to a small accident with a friend’s quantum entanglement device, I briefly got stuck in a high pressure reality vortex. The headaches have subsided, but I do still seem to be suffering from slight time compression artifacts. In any case, that’s why there’s only this one edition of the Weekly Head Voices to cover weeks 43 to 45. As is always the case, please make use of the bolded phrases to guide you through this post. In other words, the fat words tell you what you you might find interesting so that you can skip the rest.

Week 43 was for a large part about re-learning a lesson that I’ve learned and forgotten more times than I care to count, but it was mostly about joining Superbly Cool Extraordinarily Lovely People (hi there y’all!) and going here:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now how about that lesson? Let’s go:

On the Importance of Not Getting Interrupted.

During these past weeks I’ve been hard at work completing a mini-thesis (some call it a teaching portfolio) documenting my teaching activities, meaning that I had to spend a significant amount of Contiguous Time(tm) producing a significant body of text. In order to supplement the scarce supply of said Contiguous Time, I spent two mornings working at home. Furthermore, I for some or other vague reason decided not to check email before I started early in the morning and of course also not to keep my e-mail client running whilst working.

My word, what a difference!

Who woulda thunk it, it turns out that that habitual and reflexive email checking really breaks one’s speed and, in my case, causes unnecessary stress as each time the inbox piles up with even more remotely injected work. Bottom line: I’m going back (for the umpteenth time) to 3 fixed email checks and inbox emptying sessions per day: one before the early morning daily review, one just after lunch when my brain is too busy coping with digestion anyway and one in the late afternoon.

Operating Systems all-you-can-eat Buffet

During wind-down time in these past three weeks, I installed and tried out the following operating systems:

• Moblin 2.1 preview on my netbook: Oh my it boots really fast and is very pretty. It would take some getting used to, my experience was too much mobile internet device and too little computer.
• OSX 10.5.7 on my Q9450 quad-core: First: No, I have no idea how that got there! Second: Meh. Looks nice, not my thing though. Third: Eventually I’m going to port DeVIDE to OSX, when either wxCocoa or pySide is ready. I’m only doing this for my goateed, turtle-necked and beret-wearing apologist friends and definitely not for the OS or the company behind it.
• Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix on my, err, netbook: My jotted down thoughts at the time: Very slick, clutter interface (including maximus) is great for netbooks. It seems the ath9k wlan adapter still has minor problems connecting / staying connected at full speed.
• Windows 7 on my netbook: Yes, the TU does in fact give us all licenses for this type of stuff, it’s a cool perk. Wow, it went on there quite easily, I simply ran “setup.exe” from the unpacked ISO and installed it to an extra 70G partition. After installing the usual suspects (truecrypt, 7zip, avira, vim, asus stuff [Super Hybrid Engine, Hotkey, Asus Update, Touchpad driver], fastcopy, chrome), I was up and running. Looooong battery life seems to be intact.

The End, My Friend

In week 44 a number of us went to defend the whole TU Delft Computer Science research programme at an international research evaluation. Besides leading to my recent PowerPoint post, this occasion surprisingly turned out to be great fun (probably thanks to the 5-star evaluation committee and their interviewing style) and we seem to have done quite well in the evaluation.

Preparing for the evaluation and finishing my teaching portfolio took up much of my time, so much so that I have not been giving the people around me all the time and attention that they deserve. People around me, I am acutely aware of this and I will make it up to you!

Related posts:

1. emusic – legal mp3s
2. Weekly Head Voices #9: Windows 7 Geek-o-Rama.
3. Taxing but fun. [Weekly Head Voices #43]

For those of you still wondering, I’d like to confirm that it is indeed possible to hack a GMail account over insecure WiFi: GMail does indeed always send your password through secure HTTP (SSL) so that this can’t be directly hacked, BUT, by default, the rest of your session happens through normal clear-text HTTP.  The Watchdog episode of course gives absolutely no technical details, but it’s most probably the “sidejacking” attack first published by Robert Graham, where the attacker reads the cookies of the post-authentication HTTP traffic and uses them to fool GMail into thinking that they are in fact the legitimate owners attacked GMail account.  This attack works on other webmail and -service providers too.

In short, if you EVER use a network connection that you don’t trust, simply change the “http:” in your URL bar to “https:”, or, even better, change your browser connection to “Always use https” on the GMail Settings – General page.   With both of these solutions, the whole connection will use secure HTTPS (SSL), and cookies can’t be sidejacked.

The drawback of the secure setting is that your GMail access will be slightly slower than usual:  The encryption costs more compute time at both ends, and the transmission of data is slightly less efficient.

Related posts:

1. GMail Favour
2. Even more GMail (also for domains) storage for free!
3. GMail I love you dearly

The people that brought you PowerPoint.

Some of you might remember that I posted about a strange PowerPoint 2003 bug and its work-around back in 2005.  In short, hyperlinking to an MS-MPEG4 encoded AVI would result in a completely unnecessary warning dialogue.  Renaming the AVI to MPG made this problem go away.

Guess how I worked around the movie clip black box problem in PowerPoint 2007?  Yes, children, changing the file extension from AVI to MPG and re-embedding the movie-clip resulted in a perfectly-playing embedded AVI.  You can thank the clever guys and girls at Microsoft for keeping life interesting with these pleasant little surprises.

Problem #2 took slightly longer to solve, but Uncle Google soon had me on the right track.  The last slide in my presentation, the one that took 4 to 6 seconds to appear, was quite image-heavy.  It turns out that PowerPoint saves embedded images in a relatively inefficient non-compressed form.  This does, contrary to what we expect from MS, make sense, as one would like to retain all image information.  However, when one is doing a slide-show, the processing that has to take place scaling and displaying all images takes an inordinate amount of time.  Having an upwards of 4 second delay before the next slide appears is simply not acceptable.

The solution is saving a copy of your presentation, but with image compression activated.  Do “Save As” and on the bottom-left of the dialogue that appears, select the “Tools” menu button, then “Compress Pictures”, then “Options” and finally “Screen (150ppi)”.  Now “Ok” twice, then finally select a new filename and click on “Save”.  In my case, the presentation file was reduced from 10MB to 2MB, and the load time for that crucial last slide from 4 seconds (minimum) to slightly less than 1.

That concludes the second installment in my exciting life as a PowerPoint flunky!

Related posts:

1. Hyperlinked AVIs and PowerPoint 2003
2. Second day of IEEE Visualization 2007
3. Final day of IEEE Visualization 2007

Because these bets only realise in 10 or 20 years, I’ve told my betting partners that I would write it up on my blog so that we could check in that much time, and that they would then owe me copious amounts of beer. This also gives them the opportunity to check my wording for suitability, as we might have to cleave hairs when the time comes.

Bet #1: At VisWeek 2019, I and at least one other person will be wearing a HUD pretty much all the time, OR I will have at least one bionic eye.

Courtesy of Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft.

I made this bet with the infamous Dr. Bob Laramee, proprietor of the 5-star webpage.  This came up in a conversation about having some form of non-intrusive display device always available with which things could be looked up, relatively unobtrusively, during for example a conversation.

I do expect that sometime within the next 10 years, HUDs (heads-up display) will be offered as an option with every new set of spectacles.  This is definitely not a push-over bet, but that makes it all the more exciting.

I’m not sure how the bionic eye clause slipped in there, honestly!

Bet #2: 19.5 years from now, there will be more cars with alternative propulsion systems than there are cars with fossil-fuel based internal combustion engines.

This one was made with Dr Helmut Doleisch, linked view data analysis guru and now CEO of SimVis (hey man, BUY THEIR SOFTWARE!).  He is concerned with all the vested interests in fossil-fuel combustion, whereas I think that 19.5 years is more than enough time to introduce non-fossil fuel based propulsion systems on the road, so much so that less than 50% of cars on the road will have need of fossil fuel.

Brazil with its 190 million inhabitants is an interesting example in this regard: A large number of their cars already run on either gasoline or sugarcane ethanol – clearly a great step in the direction of non-fossil fuel options.

Bet #3: In 2029, distributed conferences with tele-presence will be common.

In this case, the beer-donor is Dr Stefan Bruckner, master of all things volume visualisation and father of the VolumeShop software system.  My contention is that in 20 years, conferences where attendees take part via tele-presence systems, whatever they may be, will be common-place.

I’ve called one of the models I envision of this “clustered telepresence”, which would entail that groups of attendees would indeed gather physically, but that these remote clusters would be connected by advanced tele-presence systems, involving advanced displays (think very large, or perhaps even some form of mobile volumetric displays) and distributed and mobile sound.

During the discussion preceding the making of this bet, valid concerns were raised with regard to the efficacy of remote socialising, especially beer-drinking.  I agree that this is an issue of utmost importance, but still contend that technology and efficiency concerns will conspire to address this problem in a way that is at least good enough to fool, to a sufficient extent, all parties involved.

Related posts:

1. Setup CVS Read-Only Access
2. Bill Buxton at CARS 2009
3. Care and feeding of your Lithium-Ion batteries