The Times Online Tech & Web blog reports on Image Metric's latest attempt to create lifelike human CGI. Recreating humans through animation has long been a Holy Grail for filmmakers, with some outstanding early efforts by pioneer animators such as Bob Clampett, Max Fleischer, and Walt Disney's team for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Whilst these films highlighted some brilliant realisation of human and animal movement, less effort was put into facial characteristics: partly because close-ups were not as widespread as they are today, and partly because live action monochrome film had got along quite nicely without showing great detail. In recent times Pixar, Dreamworks and others have produced magnificent CGI, but it's noticeable how the human faces are far less convincing than the living landscapes and animals; probably the most convincing film attempt so far being The Polar Express.

The Image Metrics demo is certainly shows significant progress, and as expected a key application is to make more lifelike games. There is plenty of potential across social networks as well (more convincing avatars), but what about mobile? As processors become more powerful, then the next decade could see handsets with enough power, memory and connection speed to receive live streams of these avatars. This could overcome some of the limitations of e.g. video calling, where the typical source of light is behind the callers, and hence results in poor quality. Video conferences with the mobile as input/output source could become more consistent as a result. And how about avatar-read voicemail, where either your contact's face appears to read the message, changing expression according to perceived mood and vocabulary of the call? Or a push message from a customer service department of one of your utility providerrs, where the message metadata describes an avatar to appear on your screen...?

Of course, there is a philosphical argument about avatars replacing human contact: 'eyes are the window to the soul', and body language can tell us as much as spoken words. There is even potential for a new kind of fraud as a previously trusted avatar becomes compromised. So as the technology improves, we need to make sure it is used wisely.

Just before our family holiday I managed to get tickets to an early showing of The Dark Knight at the BFI IMAX. I highly recommend the IMAX version as certain scenes are filmed in the format; so rather than get blown-up close ups with 6ft nostrils, you get panoramic cityscapes in gorgeous detail. Superb film, but that's not the reason for this blog; rather this is my two cents on the ongoing debate regarding the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) rating of '12A' for the movie. The BBFC's vision statement includes the following goal:

we give the public information that empowers them to make appropriate viewing decisions for themselves and those in their care. We help to protect vulnerable viewers and society from the effects of viewing potentially harmful or unsuitable content while respecting adult freedom of choice.

The key part for me, as a father of three, being ...and those in their care. Now, this is important because clearly I want to be able to ascertain in advance whether to take my 8-year old son to see the superhero he loves from the animated series. My personal view is that I'm glad I didn't take him, mainly due to the power of Heath Ledger's brilliant, nihilistic portrayal of The Joker, but specifically due to the two scenes where The Joker holds a knife inside a person's mouth, threatening to slice their lips open (not to mention the creative, but undeniably unorthodox, use of a pencil eariler in the film).

The 12A criterion for violence states


Violence

Violence must not dwell on detail. There should be no emphasis on injuries or blood. Sexual violence may only be implied or briefly and discreetly indicated.
Imitable techniques

Dangerous techniques (eg combat, hanging, suicide and self-harming) should not dwell on imitable detail or appear pain or harm free. Easily accessible weapons should not be glamorised.

...whereas the BBFC's (somewhat rushed) analysis of the Dark Knight is:


There are also scenes in which the Joker threatens first a man and then a woman with a knife and whilst these do have a significant degree of menace, without any actual violence shown they were also acceptably placed at ‘12A’. In the final analysis, THE DARK KNIGHT is a superhero movie and the violence it contains exists within that context, with both Batman and the Joker apparently indestructible no matter what is thrown at them.

Not sure how holding a knife in someone's mouth is either 'not actual violence' or 'superhero violence', or how it is inimatable, but there you go. Compare with the violence rating for the new extended cut of The The Good, The Bad and The Ugly:

As for Imitable techniques, the film features some hanging scenes that often involve a man being saved from death by his colleague shooting the rope that hangs around his neck. These scenes appear to be harm free and are not allowable at '12A', although they do no dwell on imitable detail so they are permissible at '15'.

Notice that hanging is explicitly mentioned here (rightly so), but the knife threat, which is a huge concern for parents at the moment, has been omitted from the Dark Knight rating. The BBFC have made an attempt to help parents determine film suitability for their children with http://www.parentsbbfc.co.uk, which is a good idea since only the child's parent can really know what is suitable for their child. However this simply leads back to the same Dark Knight review with litte detail.

Many of the online debates about the rating have included comments along the lines of: 'Blame the parents - if they can't be bothered seeing what is suitable for their kids, then it's all their fault'. An argument which spectacularly fails to spot the obvious: a parent probably doesn't have the time, and very likely not the money, to watch the film on their own before deciding whether it is suitable. Hence we rely on NGO's such as the BBFC for this advice.

Now, this blog is not supposed to be an attack on the BBFC; rather a suggestion that by declaring in more detail the specific content of a film, it will save parents time/money/worry in knowing whether to take their kids. Technical solutions exist, for example, by making use of the ICRA tagset, you can describe accurately the nature of a web resource (such as a movie homepage). The ICRA vocabulary is XML so can be extended with namespace-bound extensions; but most importantly it allows a machine to process a film's description and hence either output that description to another website, or perform a calculation based on a parent's preferences, and hence highlight movies which may not be suitable for that parent's children. The upcoming POWDER (Protocol for Web Description Resources) standard will allow such descriptions to be easily bundled and published for discovery, and hence facilitate such services - as soon as it is stable I will produce a version for Betavine so that applications for particular devices and platforms can be discovered more easily via remote search applications.

Such an application can alleviate concern for parents as more movies are watched in children's bedrooms, on mobile phones and PCs. Note that some movies, such as say 'Aliens', would significantly lose horror impact on a tiny mobile screen, whereas those with opressive dialogue and theme (Dark Knight) rely less on the screen size and more on acting to convey a threat.

Now, if only ICRA tagging could go back in time and make more explicit the 'A' rating for Jaws, which I watched on home video when I was 6, then I might still be able to swim in the sea for more than 30 seconds at a time....

I’m very excited to announce that on September 7th I will be co-presenting, with my friend and fellow Mobile Monday organizer C. Enrique Ortiz, a Barcamp event in Austin, Texas! The event will focus on mobile widgets and we are looking to bring in presenters and participants from all across the spectrum of companies and industry efforts involved in this burgeoning space. The event will feature a mix of structured and unstructured time, with both a program of speakers (to be announced but including speakers from OMTP and W3C) and an open schedule on which participants can write in their own sessions. If you’d like to attend, just put your name on the wiki (see link above). If you’d like to present in one of the pre-programmed slots, please get in touch with myself of Enrique.

Cuil (pronounced 'Cool') is a very promising new search engine, built by a former IBM and Google architects and with a purported larger view of the Web (120bn pages) than the incumbent. I've tried it and am pretty impressed: there is an intuitive autocomplete, the ability to view the search results in a category view, but most importantly, a basic implementation of semantic search.

The Cuil team explain:

...establishing relevancy is more than a numbers game. Cuil prefers to find all the pages with your keyword or phrase and then analyze the rest of the content on those pages. During this analysis we discover that your keywords have different meanings in different contexts. Once we’ve established the context of the pages, we’re in a much better position to help you in your search.

Now this is a promising step in the right direction. 'Full' semantic Web involves providing context and definition to URLs, and has the potential to better determine correct search results, and create a web of meaning between various URLs. The hurdles to adoption have been that to make your web page semantic, you need to add markup inline that can be processed and recognised by machines; unfortunately there is no standard vocabulary for describing web content beyond publication metadata (RDF is a framework for vocabularies, not a vocabulary itself). So for example, a movie such as Heat may be tagged as a 'thriller' by you but a 'crime drama' by me; so a search crawler has little chance of matching the two descriptions in a search for 'best police movies'.

So whilst initiatives such as POWDER will make describing content easier, for now Cuil does a good job of working with free text in the page to provide contextual relevance. My favourite test search is 'Ant movies' to see whether I will get a list of tests for Java Ant, or those great insect disaster movies (Naked Jungle, Them!, Phase IV, etc.) A Cuil search first prompts whether I am looking for the Ant Movie Catalog, and then provides a neat AJAX categorisation box and tabs where you can drill down to find the topic you are looking for. So it's an 'assisted filter' process where the search alogorithms make a best guess and then bundle the results for you to complete the context. See the features list for full details.

A few tests revealed less results returned than Google, however the results were more meaningful.

No mobile specific search as of yet, but then Cuil has only just launched.

--Kevin

PS Read about the origin of the name Cuil here.

C. Enrique Ortiz reports on a Patent Law blog which may have major ramifications for the ability of software to be patented (in the US; as far as I know you cannot patent software in the EU). The basic thrust of the argument is that programs run on 'general purpose' computers; i.e. they are not specific, 'particular' machines that have been created solely to run the software in question. It then follows that software is unpatentable if they can be run on any general machine. Of course, for any such change to patent law to be made, there will be counter-arguments from the huge patent players (Microsoft, Qualcomm, etc) that (for example) cars are general purpose machines but it is still possible to patent features for them....an interesting topic, and worth keeping an eye on.