Tech Reading list. Week 2, September 2017
Audio is not going to kill the video star but their is lots of life in audio especially on Anchor. This post from Anchor ‘Introducing Anchor Videos: the best way to share audio on social media’ (08/08/17). The post looks at how you can create audio as a video replete with a transcript of what you are saying. Using audio in this way is niche, you could use it for powerful first person testimonies in support of a cause or a campaign. Myself I use Anchor audio videos for my film reviews. Anchor allows me to add background music to my voice. This messes with the transcription. So I simply strip the transcription down to the minimum. Then on YouTube add a strobe or bubbles effect to make the video a tad more interesting.
As a fan of Sutton United football team this story grabbed my attention ‘Augmented reality: Is Pokemon Go-style technology the future of football?’ (BBC, 05/09/17) The article shows how a lowly football team got creative with their match day programme. This is how it works
Using free web-based software, Medwell creates a ‘trigger image’ which is printed on to a page in the programme and recognised by a smartphone app to play the video — filmed by his SEN students — on screen
Augmented Reality (AR) has been around for years. The past few months plus this weeks Apple event will push AR out front. The phone is your AR intermediary, by holding it up in front of a newly developed town centre it can show you how it looked a hundred years ago. In my view for AR to succeed the phone has to go and replaced by AR glasses. This will be a more natural way to experience AR. Then in 25 years, Virtual reality headsets will have shrunk to the size of a pair of glasses. We mocked Google Glass and perhaps take pleasure in the slow sales of Snap Spectacles but glasses will be the hardware that we experience our AR in the near future and VR in the long run.
This week I left Los Angeles for Las Vegas so the moving image is even more on my mind. This from Wired argues ‘Phones are changing how people shoot and watch video’ (07/09/17). This is about the emerging use of vertical video popularised by Snapchat. Most of what we see is horizontal in particular on YouTube so let’s not get carried away. However a whole new cadre of video content producers will have been schooled by Snapchat will lead to a more vertical content. The advantage the article cites is we get the whole person in shot not just the face
Vertical, by contrast, captures body language too. “You can see not only their face but also how they move their hands,” says Kim Jansson, a Norwegian broadcast journalist
Live longer, defeat death and make disease a thing of the past are chants from the tech fringe. This from Wired about Matt Bencke ‘The day I found my life was hanging by a thread’ (24/08/17) is an essential read. One day Matt is heading up a thriving AI business the next he is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. What is harrowing is the journey from feeling ill to a full diagnoses. In between he gives up his role at the company, doctors scramble to find out what is going on then the realisation he has at best 5 years to live. The world of technology, social media and cinema is one that drives people to create, it can take over their lives but when life itself comes slowly to an end. What do you do? Reading what Matt did, is for me, less inspirational but instead more practical.
Have a great tech week, keep living and enjoy all the Apple announcements coming up.
