blacklog

Max and I recently finished this video for the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. The video illustrates Chris Caplice’s talk on Scenario Planning, a brainstorming technique that helps prepare for abrupt changes in the future.

We use Boxing and Judo to compare between different planning techniques. Boxing represents the traditional approach, based on precise predictions of specific events, and Judo represents Scenario Planning, where it is more important to outline a number of potential futures and prepare for them. This way, specific events become less relevant as the effects they might produce. It makes sense, because lots of different events may cause the same effect over a given system. Preparing for this effect is a lot better strategy than the nearly impossible task of trying to predict each one of these events.

This is an update to a previous note on some video work I recently finished for the Center for Transportation and Logistics at MIT. The videos are now available in the FutureFreightFlows YouTube channel. I chose Millions of Markets to be featured in this post because it offers an interesting vision at the gateway of the Technological Singularity. Regardless of the questionable veracity of its claims, the so called Technological Singularity is a fun thing to fantasize about. I really can’t wait to be synthesized, augmented, cloned, and uploaded.

Here is the official explanation of the project, as found in the FutureFreightFlows YouTube channel:

This video is one of four fictional newscasts to be aired on 2 November 2037. They are all part of the Future Freight Flows project run at MIT’s Center for Transportation and Logistics (CTL) for the National Academies. Four separate future scenarios were developed over the course of a year through a series of focused expert panel sessions, practitioner acid testing, and industry wide surveys. The key driving forces and critical uncertainties were identified and formed the basis of the underlying scenarios. While originally designed to be used for freight transportation planning, they can be employed for a wide variety of different planning purposes. To find out more, visit FutureFreightFlows at MITCTL or send email to future[at]mit[dot]edu.

Finally, here is a flickr group with photos from the shoot.

Honey I shrunk the Red Hook on Radar

In a recent note about the Video2Web Cocoa exercise I made, I mentioned that there was no real need for for the application to be document based, but when I tried to manage input from several camera devices at the same time, it suddenly made sense to have the option of having the input from each camera managed by a different document. The version of Video2Web that is available for download still doesn’t have this features, because I am still figuring out the better way to manage the different cameras, but I’ll have it ready soon.

Last week I made a miniCocoa application that captures frames from a live video stream and posts them to the web as a practice exercise for my thesis project, because I need to deal with ways of capturing pixels from OpenGLViews and other kinds of NSViews, and figure out how to broadcast or publish them to the network.

Video2Web is a good and very simple example that deals with the NSDocument, QTCaptureView and NSURLConnection Cocoa classes. The StillMotion example from Apple’s confusing QTKit Capture Programming Guide was very useful to deal with the capture of images from the video stream, although I haven’t found a way to integrate the code I needed into a Cocoa app that was not document based. Hence Video2Web is document based, even though there is no real need for it to be, other than I couldn’t make it work otherwise.

You can download Video2Web here and play with it if you want (no warrantee). Video2Web will post screenshots from your video to PictureXS every time you press the p key, tagging them with the date and time zone data from your computer, and it will save them to your desktop every time you press the s key. It is buggy and unstable, obviously because there is a difference between making things work and making them work right, but it makes me happy that it works, and it doesn’t hurt anybody that it crashes all the time =). I might make the source code available once I figure out how to write it better.

This are some captures from the first sessions when Video2Web still tagged every capture with live-video. I later decided to add some DateTime information to separate the captures by time and time zone.