I came back from a visit to FXPAL lab on invitation by some friends, including their President Larry Rowe — or Prof. Larry Rowe.
This trip gave me a chance to share m,y views, but in my selfish interest, more usueful was to see many of their current projects. Of course being a company, they can only so a subset of interesting things, but what I saw was very intereting.
Some important projects and observations are briefly listed here.
1. They have multiple projects on using photos and presentation and interaction of those. A cute project is to present multiple photos as stain glass arrangement — that is becoming commercial all over the coutry. Another really interesting was to allow interactive clustering (grouping) based on different factors and present those. That reminded me of visualization approaches that are really becoming very interesting and useful for different applicvations and it is clear that these could be very useful in photo presentation. In fact, these could be combined with emergent semantics approaches that at one time Simone Santini was developing. These kind of approaches will also be very useful with event visualization.
2. Multi camera systems for surveillance and other applications. Many people have been looking at these and are talking about making these useful. Interesting that our group at UCSD was doing these things in mid 90s and things have not progressed much in technology. However availability of computing and need of the time — focus on surveillance and other similar apps — makes them very interesting and useful now.
3. Combining cyber world with physical world was also an important these there. This is another rapidly developing area. Some people are trying to bting real world in the context of cirtual space while some are thrying to augment real world with some cyber or similar information. It is clear that depending on different apps, different combinations will berequired. Will be interesting to see how this progresses.
Overall it was a very enjoyable day.
I am loving your comments 2 & 3 here – this fits very well with my own areas of research. I hope we can chat later this week – that would be great. As you point out, the work you did in the 90’s – with the multiple camera placements/interactions – was the best example I could find of a phenomenon I am sure will be proliferating rapidly these days. We have a heightened “3D consciousness” coming upon us – also reflected in the wave of 3D product and films about to be launched in the consumer sphere of the next couple of years too. I am not sure they’ve gotten it right, but nonetheless – 3D/distributed viewing is totally happening – IMHO! LOL.