Category Archives: Technology

Technical Recognition

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[A guest post by Hursley’s Ben Fletcher. This was originally written as an internal blog post – Ben recently received the award for External Honours at the IBM Corporate Technical Recognition Event. Here, he reflects on his experiences]

I believe it is important to leave it entirely up to the individual to recognise the positives of IBMers they work with, and go from there – you can’t do any better than this, but, there’s a bonus: sometimes IBM wants to recognise you too!  To make it all look good, to customers, or to make people happy, and to maintain the technical and innovative reputation or brand IBM has, they’ve built title names or award names as follows:

  • IBM Fellows
  • Corporate and Patent Portfolio Awards
  • Distinguished Engineers
  • Members of the IBM Academy of Technology
  • External Honours
  • Major Outstanding Innovation and Major Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards

Lots of different names, but of course IBM is so diverse that it’s difficult to recognise things in a systematic manner. Looking at the titles, I think the key points here are: if you love corporate technology and/or innovation, you can’t go any better!

I did.  As a result, I fell under the External Honours category, primarily for the RADAR Young Person of the Year award that I received last year.  Thereby I got into the book and, more excitedly, to meet other people and learn more about IBM.  What did I learn from the other IBM attendees?

I would firstly ask where do you work?  If it’s GBS [IBM Global Business Services], I would ask if they’ve heard of SWG [IBM Software Group]?  If yes, have they worked with SWG before?  With either answer, I would then ask if they’ve heard of Lab Services [which is where I work].  With these answers, I started coming up with questions I’d love answers to – for example:

  • how to improve the awareness of what Lab Services can do, across into GBS?
  • does the linkage between Lab Services and GBS have any room for improvement?
  • have people from Lab Services moved to GBS?
  • is Research well connected with UK?  With Research being in Switzerland?
  • is the market for deaf-related and/or blind-related technology too small to be of interest?

image

I also met with Brendon Riley [the IBM UK General Manager], who I was very keen to talk with, particularly as my wife is also Australian.  I was thrilled when he told me that he was from Perth – where my wife was from! Brendon very kindly took the opportunity to ask me to do something for him – clearly he was keen to demonstrate that the planet was flatter, as he could ask me directly like a colleague sitting at the next desk might, rather than passing the request down through a hierarchical organisation. The fact that he’s from Perth, my wife’s from Perth, the Country General Manager asking me directly to do something for him, as our CEO would say: the world is becoming smaller and flatter!

Ben

A different kind of TV remote control

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I’m very excited to be welcoming another Hursley innovator as a guest here on eightbar – Benjamin Hardill (you can find him on Twitter as @hardillb). Here’s some insight into what he’s been up to lately! More home automation, hardware hacking, and MQTT messaging adventures follow 🙂

I got a new TV around Christmas last year and while unpacking it I noticed along with the HDMI, SCART and other sockets on the back it had a 9-pin socket labelled "RS232C IN CONTROL&SERVICE". I didn’t think that much of it at the time, but I remembered it last week while thinking about a couple of problems that had come up.

Tidy TV setup The first of these was that I had got home twice recently to find I’d left the TV turned on while I was at work, this was mainly because I use MythTV and I’d left it at the menu screen rather than turning the screen off as well. This had left shadow on the menu on the screen for a day or so afterwards (luckily no permanent damage as would have happened with a plasma or CRT TV).

The other point was from when we all first got hold of our Current Cost meters, there had been a lot of thought about how to work out exactly what appliances were on at any given time. While spotting when things like an electric water heater turned on was relatively easy, it was proving difficult to spot some of the lower power devices.

A plan started to form and I ordered a null modem cable from Amazon (£2.18 with free shipping) and went looking for some documentation on the protocol. The manual that came with the TV while being nearly an inch thick just covers the basics of how to plug it in and turn it on, but there was a CD-ROM with a much more detailed PDF document. The version for my TV is here. While searching round I found manuals for several other LG LCD/plasma TVs and they all seem to use the same basic protocol.

The protocol is relatively simple

[cmd1][cmd2] [setid] [data]

Where the cmd1 & cmd2 are 1 letter code, setid is for if you have multiple TVs connected to the same cable, the default id is 01 but you can change if needed, using 00 will work for all connected TVs. And data is a hex value of the option to pass the command.

The response from the TV looks like this for a success

[cmd2] [setid] OK[data]x

and like this for a failure

[cmd2] [setid] NG[data]x

The command to turn the TV on and off is "ka" so sending

ka 00 1

turns the TV on and sending

ka 00 0

turns it off. Most of the commands will reply with the current status if they are passed ff as the data. So sending

ka 00 ff

gets the following when the TV is off

a 00 OK0x

So now I had a way to turn the TV on and off along with checking its current status. The next step was to surface this some way and given the fascination we all seem to have with messaging, MQTT seemed like a good idea. A little bit of Java and the Java COMM API later and I had 2 topics TV/Commands & TV/Status.

I already have a topic that publishes if my mobile phone is in the flat by pinging it with Bluetooth. Combining this with the two new topics I can ensure that the TV is turned off when I leave. I’m also wondering if I should start to log the amount of time the TV is on, but I think the results may scare me a little…

A new era begins

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Today is a day of mixed emotions. Today I resigned from IBM having been there for 18 years, 19 if you count my year out from university.
In all that time I have worked with some great people, and felt a tremendous sense of belonging.
Its been quite a journey, both in technical education and in personal growth. It is the extent of that growth and the speed that has not always been kept up to pace with by the system that I worked within.
I started back on green screens in 1990, very quickly moved to the PC’s and client server applications that followed shortly. Over the years the groups I worked with morphed from back office systems to customer facing ones, but in 1997 I made a break from what was traditional IT development. I threw myself into the web and the fantastic Interactive Media Centre. That itself morphed into the centre for e-business innovation but the group of people were known as Blueroom. An ecletic mix of can do people, graphic designers, producers and techies all bundled into one. That taught me that diversity of skills, coming up with ideas on the spot and good old fashioned teamwork for a common cause were what I thrived in.
For me that was the start of who I have become, the birth of epredator if you like.
When I decided that we should look in to the metaverse with Second Life back in 2006 I knew the industry was going to be big, but I was not expecting the evolutionary changes to happen to me. Getting this going turned me into a intrapreneur. The speed with which my fellow eightbars rallied and the spirit of innovation, just getting things done was simply amazing. It is something we should all be immensely proud of.
In leaving IBM I am not leaving eightbar, it is not something that can never really be left. The focus may change but I think we have made a decent enough mark in the history of virtual worlds.
Of course the question is what next? I left in order to be able to carry on and push this industry further. So in a few weeks you will see the birth of my own company, and I will seek to work and advise, speak and write just as I have done up to now. There are some significant projects that I already need to give some attention too.
There is, as I have told a few people, quite a story to tell on all this. The personal ups and and downs, the formation of our tribe and I suspect I will have to write that book after all. It will probably be called “Who says Elephants can’t Rez” or something similar.
So a huge thankyou and goodbye to all my friends, and thankyou for the support on twitter and see you all on Linkedin
I will also post this on http://www.epredator.com
See you all out there very soon.
***Update Feeding Edge is now live here, my new home

Augmented reality anywhere from MIT

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Thankyou to AnnieOk for pointing me towards the video and articles here on the MIT Fluid interfaces that got such a good reception at TED 2009. This is brilliant work. You have to see this and go to wired to read the rest of the article.

Projection, mixed with gesture and finger tracking, whilst looking a little cumbersome this is showing some very clever things actually working.
What I like about projection (though I do find the personal ways to get an AR experience relevant too) is the potential to share with others. Just as it has become common, as I have mentioned before, to see people gathered around and iphone on the table.
Its been quite a weeks for seeing things often talked about actually working.

Anarkik eightbar

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Ann Marie Shillito from Anarkik 3D visited the eightbar crowd in Hursley (thanks to epred for inviting a bunch of us hangers-on along!).

Anarkik are involved with haptic input devices and have developed some really nice software which enables users to interact with virtual worlds and 3D modelling tools using a consumer-priced haptic controller which can be connected to a PC via USB.

The demo blew us away. First we had a look at how the controller could be used to drive an avatar in a virtual world (in this case, OpenSim). It’s a considerably more natural way to navigate than the keyboard and mouse setup that is provided with most 3D worlds and should lead to a lot more accessibility into these environments. The part that really impressed us was the capability of driving a CAD-like tool called Cre8 – a free download from Anarkik, for people who have the controller – to easily create three-dimensional objects by physical manipulation… both inside and out. I remember hacking around with an old 3D package called Euclid on my RISC OS machine back in the early 90s and it was a nightmare – this was sheer joy. Watch the video to see various people playing around with the haptic controller 🙂

Just to explain what is going on in the video, as it may not be entirely clear! The demos use a Novint Falcon gaming controller. To quote Anarkik, it is “like a small grounded ‘robot’ and provides the ‘force feedback’ that gives the uncanny sense of touching a virtual object. This device replaces the mouse and also provides more natural and coherent movement in 3 dimensions.” At the start, several of us have a go with the controller to drive an avatar around an OpenSim island running on the local machine, using Anarkik’s software. Around the middle of the video, we switch to using the Cre8 tool to do some simple modelling. In particular, we change the surface hardness of a sphere (where it becomes more or less soft to the touch); and then go inside the sphere and extrude the shape by pulling the controller around. Finally, there’s a brief look at some fabricated items modelled using the same software.

Anarkik also have a community called Anarkik Angels where they are looking for supporters to help crowdsource and develop the project.

[the one minor disappointment for me personally was the current lack of Mac OS X support – Windows-only at the moment – and the websites aren’t terribly Mac-friendly either. Guess it’s time to buy a Windows box just for this stuff, it’s awesome!]

All of this haptic craziness hit a lot of our interest areas – 3d printing, new ways of interacting with technology, the application of these kinds of controls to education, manufacturing, science, craft, modelling… we had some very exciting and interesting discussions and I think several of us are looking forward to playing with this technology a lot more in the future. There are a bunch of additional videos on the Anarkik website.

Mirror Mirror on the wall

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Over at Redmonk, James Governor has written a very interesting piece on what has happened to the Microsoft ESP platform. Mirror worlds, accurate representations of real things, ideally instrumented by a raft of sensors from the real world are a very specific, and obvious, use of virtual worlds. After all pilots already spend a large amount of time training in such environments and we entrust out lives to them. (It would be interesting to know how much virtual training the Hero of the Hudson has had, re water landings).
James said of ESP “the single coolest initiative I have seen from Microsoft in the 13 years I have been watching the firm”, but now it appears there is a drop in focus on it.
There are of course lots of other mirror worlds and hybrid mirrors out there, but as yet there is not a good commercial high fidelity toolkit that can be used to build specific mirrors.
Google Earth is clearly the most rich in terms of global level instrumentation, but it is at a much more finite and realtime level that we will see the benefits.
I am not sure what we would do with a live as-is model of the world accurate and instrumented in every way possible, but as a concept and seeing the fascination people have for maps, photos, and satellite images of their part of the planet it seems a worthwhile goal to make a true mirror world.
Also an accurate model of an environment is a base requirement to help enhance the real world with augmented reality systems. i.e. like the ones we already have for our GPS tracking. Without the accurate map(digital model of the world), the GPS position is of less use to the average user.
As James also says though ,there is some speculation in the future of the ESP platform. So I guess we will have to wait and see.

Just thinking out loud – Metaverse snapshot

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I moved offices today and having a bright new whiteboard I could not leave it clean for long.
Its not really a mindmap, just some association of thoughts and bits of linkages. I am sure it will alter, but right now this is what was in my head in a mad flurry. The underlying red part is really the substrate of the whole thing. Just my personal thoughts linked to some of the things I have seen and been involved with one way and another.

Thoughts on the metaverse
Note: edited to show smaller version of the board as it was cropping the right hand important side for those that did not click through to flickr. 3d printing FTW and high value professional social networks one there too !

Socially Warcraft is the new golf, but golf is still coached professionally

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I mentioned in my 2009 predictions that there were some exciting things I had seen going on with both social media/web 2.0 and virtual worlds and specific applications to deal with something as a whole.
One such business currently in development, that got my interest, is around the sports coaching profession. Sports coaches all around the world in every sport from amateur to elite have mandated processes from their sport governing bodies and country governments to maintain their professional standards. Much of this can now benefit from the online tools and social interaction that we have seen grow the past few years.
Peter Meli is the man behind the formation of The Global Coaches Social Network, The Coaches Centre GCSN/TCC. A business currently building prototypes and expanding on extensive research into what coaches need, what their governing bodies require and how to improve and expand on the potential of a global approach to sports coaching.
Education, training and certification combined with professional directed social networks clearly make a great deal of sense. In addition the physical and spatial nature of sport is ideal to be represented with virtual world technology, as we have shown with our experiments with Wimbledon. That can range from the sort of simulations we see in todays high end games, to the more basic needs of a business meeting of a committee, to a convention for coaches, to a coaching masterclass from an elite coach.
The project itself is for the International Council for Coach Education(ICCE) and is in partnership with Pearson Learning and ECS.
coaches centre
Image from GCSN/TCC & ECS

This project is not about one technology, or one platform but about the set of people who can benefit from it. In this case the sports coaches and hence the athletes they motivate, train and grow. It is also about global partnerships, tailoring to local country needs and hence has some interesting challenges.
It is very ambitious, but the groundwork has been done over the past few years and its ready to take the next steps.
Peter told me “The objectives are straight forward: Build and organize an online community of coaches, transition offline transactions online, create new revenue streams to ICCE member organizations”
The last element is where I am sure many of you can see the potential here. The provision of services to a known community for sports coaches in a virtual world or social media platform has elements of both professional subscription, advertising, sponsorship, content distribution, physical and virtual product sales and also elements of entertainment (fantasy leagues, coaching games etc).
If you want to know more Peter is on Linkedin and keen to talk to prospective partners and share his very real passion for where his business is heading.
Given the online games and sports and the new golf what is World Of Warcraft whilst not yet having quite the same recognition professionally already by their very nature use all the online tools to both compete, train and communicate it makes sense that the old golf and all the other sports should get in on the act.

coaches centre
Image from GCSN/TCC & ECS

IBM’s “Sametime 3D” project – flowing workflow

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A new video recently arrived on youtube featuring the voices of many of the people who work in the Digital Convergence/3d internet emerging business unit. It shows real integration between various elements of a regular workflow, including the realtime data feeds into a representation of a data centre.

It also shows some of the work done on various thought gathering tools. Its well worth a look as this is the sort of integration that should start to make sense to more of the business community.
There is of course a lot of opensim in there as its very flexible for these sort of applications.
Well done to all the team doing this and showing it at Lotusphere