“I’ll have a ‘low importance’ seam please, Bob”
The algorithm chooses a path ‘of low importance’. In other words a path right across the image which you’d be unlikely to miss if it wasn’t there (in the case of reducing the scale), or unlikely to notice if it was duplicated and blended (in the case of increasing the scale).

Squash/stretch
Traditional image scaling uses a simple algorithm to uniformly remove or duplicate straight lines of pixels, vertically or horizontally, from an image resulting in squashing or stretching of the image which we’re all familiar with. Seam Carving handles the scaling in a totally different way.

Lose that sky
For example, if you look at this classic daytime shot of Hong Kong Island’s Central District taken from Kowloon (the night shot is more classic, I know), with its bar-graph of skyscrapers filling the harbour front and the blue sky above… well, if you were to scale that down vertically using CAS, the process would recognise (as would most humans) that the sky was pretty much all blue with low variation in detail, whereas the waterfront buildings and bay contains much more detail and variation, therefore the sky section of the image would be percieved as being of ‘low importance’ and scaling down would result in areas of the sky being dropped and the new seams subtly blended.

“Squeeze up, you on the edge..”
Whereas traditional scaling results in the old squash/stretch issue, which almost always looks wrong if not intentional, the application of this new process gives us a higher-brow issue: the adjustment of the composition of the image i.e. the distance between objects being varied. Imagine taking a considered photograph, with nicely balanced and well-thought content, only to find that someone had shuffled everything closer together like a junior school assembly photograph.
Considering that CAS is now shipping as a feature in Adobe Photoshop CS4, I’m sure we’ll see all sorts of results like this from daft to clever, and awful to entertaining. Either way, it’s a great tool, and a clever approach to a problem that was generally taken for granted.

Certain types of images aren’t really suitable for CAS, such as high-density-detail images (a satellite photograph of a city, or a crowd scene), some are ideal as you’ll see on this video (Flash 8 req)

Seam Carving was first presented at Siggraph 2007 by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir

We’ve been rather busy with some exciting projects for a while now (one of which is particularly cool - more on that soon) so you may have noticed that we’ve allowed some dust to settle on the site. Now we’ve got some time, we’ll be getting our digital dusters out and adding new artwork and articles over the next couple of weeks so look out.

We’ll be looking at the glossy, reflective world of Apple’s current graphic styling to see how it looks when 2.5D (pseudo-3D) meets its maker: 3D. We’ll also be looking at an eye-popping way to transform digital images which goes by the name of Content Aware Image Resizing (or Seam Carving as it’s known to its friends) and we’ll be adding a couple of walkthrough tutorials for beginners - probably a Maya NURBS basics to begin with, and a thorough start-to-finish project for newcomers to Adobe Photoshop Elements.

We’ll also be doing some general housework throughout the site, so if you hear any hammering or drilling sounds, you’ll know what it is…

There’s been a lot of talk about 3D virtual worlds being the future of the internet and I think there’s some truth in that although I’m not sure it’s quite that clear cut. Also, just because 3D virtual worlds are the future, I’m not convinced the virtual world in question is Second Life in its current state.

When I log in to Second Life I am always disappointed by the chunkiness of the experience, it’s frustrating at best and computer crashing at worst. I have been told I need a better computer to experience Second Life properly but my computer meets all the SL recommended system requirements and I have a healthy 8mb broadband connection so there must be plenty of people who have a similar experience to me.

I like the idea of Second Life and I’m looking forward to seeing how Linden Lab develops its virtual world in coming months. Last year they announced that they would be opening up the source code for Second Life’s servers, allowing anyone to run their own version of Second Life. This is in addition to the already open source Second Life Viewer which can be modified and redistributed under a Commercial or General Public License. Opening up the source code for both the server and the viewer will no doubt mean the technology develops and I’m sure we’ll start to see variations in the way it’s deployed.

So will Second Life be the virtual world we all inhabit in the future? What impact will individuals and organisations running their own Second Life servers have? Are we headed towards a 3D internet?

I’d like to hear your comments.

He wasn’t completely wrong though, there have been reductions in advertising budgets on the whole. But while traditional media advertising budgets are shrinking, digital and Internet advertising budgets have remained steady.

So the message seems to be that, in times of economic uncertainty, companies want to know exactly where their money is going and what a campaign is achieving for them. They want value for money and digital provides that.

As consumers, we’re finding it easier and easier to ignore brand messages and many people are cynical about the perceived interruptions advertising represents.

The most successful advertising happens when the line between entertainment and advertising is blurred. Engaging our audience and providing an entertaining experience means consumers will not only participate in the media but will involve other members of their social group in it.

The Adidas - Impossible Story viral campaign by Glue is an excellent example of an entertaining brand experience that communicates the brand message through participation with its audience. It combines quirky visuals with nifty technical execution and the results speak for themselves.

So, to answer the question about the future of advertising posed by our life coach friend, I think the old adage that half of all advertising is a waste of money but no one really knows which half, will continue to become more and more irrelevant and unacceptable. For this reason, we’ll continue to see a shift away from the more traditional forms of media and a move towards online, interactive media. Success will be measured in “interactivity levels” rather than click through rates and mobile will play a more important role than it currently does.

We’re a long way away from interactive media being the sole beneficiary of advertising budgets but it’s a growing sector and in my opinion, one of the most exciting.

We were also advised to try to work the word “solutions” into our company name. While this may be right for some businesses, we felt it was too generic. To me, “3D solutions” sounded a bit like an algebraic homework assignment.

We liked the word “mitooshi” and the meaning was a good representation of our service offering. “Mitooshi” is a Japanese Romaji word and it means perspective, unobstructed view, outlook and forecast. For a company which offers 3D visualisations, these words seemed like the right words to associate ourselves with.

It’s also fitting that we used a Japanese word to name our business because our technical director believes himself to be some kind of Ninja. What kind, we haven’t yet established.

Here are some interesting amateur Ninjas on YouTube – these guys never fail to make me laugh.

This quotation was identified by one of the presenters at HYPHEN on Wednesday evening. The event focussed on the opportunities new technologies bring with specific reference to Second Life and online gaming. There was quite a lot of discussion about the business opportunities these playful, often entertainment-focussed spaces deliver. Apparently BP identified virtual worlds as the “breakthrough technologies for 2008”.

I don’t think any of us need to be told about the serious business opportunity online gaming brings. The image to the left is Miniclip’s growth chart and although you might not be able to make out the text on the graph, all you really need to know is that the units on the horizontal axis are years and the units on the vertical axis are users (in increments of 5 million).

So what about Second Life’s business opportunities? A few years ago, any business which had a presence in Second Life was guaranteed some publicity out of it but these days that’s not the case. The last Second Life story I heard reported with any gusto was that of Ailin Graef, the Chinese businesswoman who built a business by buying and selling virtual land and made rather a lot of money in doing so. Perhaps that’s the business opportunity Second Life presents…but then, most of us don’t want to build a business in Second Life. We’re busy enough trying run the business we have created in our first lives.

Many companies use Second Life to advertise to its 1.1 million regular users. But only about 7% of the 1.1 million regular users are based in the UK, so if you want to communicate with a UK audience, it might not be the best platform.

IBM uses Second Life for internal communications and collaboration. It uses its own private islands to hold virtual meetings and deliver training so employees can meet regularly and access training without leaving a gigantic carbon footprint on the planet. I haven’t experienced a virtual meeting on IBM’s private island but I’m told that they are a richer, more engaging experience than a simple conference call or Skype interaction.

Using Second Life for private business interactions does bring its problems though, namely in the form of security. IBM’s Roo Reynolds says, “We’re never comfortable talking about things like patents because we recognize they’re on Linden’s servers…we can’t talk about anything confidential”.

News broke last year that IBM is launching a new mainframe platform specifically designed for next-generation virtual worlds and 3D virtual environments which will deliver added security, scalability and speed. The platform will provide a seamless development environment which will mean companies will be able to develop virtual world services. Over time this is likely to have a massive impact on the virtual worlds which exist and could easily pave the way to a 3D internet. Mark Wallace of 3pointD.com says “for some time now, execs have been comparing the advent of virtual worlds to the advent of the Web in terms of its impact on business and communications.”

David Gelardi, IBM’s vice president of industry solutions says, “I would argue that the world doesn’t yet understand the promise of [virtual world] technology.”

Hold on to your hats.

As you might imagine, I really liked the Citroen C4 Transformer advert which was on TV a few years ago. It was an excellent example of motion capture and 3D graphics put together seamlessly by Toronto Production Company, Spy Films and The Embassy VFX in Vancouver.

I also liked Chevrolet’s take on the Citroen transformer which featured the slogan, “get real”; a nice contrast to “alive with technology” favoured by Citroen. The X-BAM “zero technology” spoof is also well put together and I like both the difference in concept and visual approach. It’s worth noting that, unlike Citroen, Chevrolet and X-BAM don’t use motion capture to animate their robots. The Citroen robot has accurate weight and movement which is very hard to achieve through animation alone. Have a look at this interactive demonstration of biological motion patterns – it really helps convey the nuances of human movement.

Flash has been dividing opinion since I was learning about this new thing called Google back in ‘99. I once witnessed one of our Flash developers throwing a printer at a wall because of its so called “inconsistencies”.

That said, Flash has been providing web sites and 2D animation since 1996 and doesn’t show any signs of dissipating. Companies that consider themselves to be comprised of “creatives” often go wild with beautifully detailed animation and graphics and I have seen some truly remarkable work. So Flash has its place among the web design community, even if that’s not with my search marketing friend.

As you might imagine, something we’re particularly interested in is Flash for 3D. Until recently the only way to use Flash for 3D was to pre-render image sequences and use Flash to control them. This is often referred to as 2.5D because it looks like 3D but it’s actually 2D. Now that there are a few decent real-time 3D engines for Flash such as Papervision3d, FIVe3D, Away3D and Sandy, we can for the first time, create content in Flash that is truly 3D.

Of course there are many real-time 3D engines which have nothing to do with Flash, but the appeal with the 3D engines for Flash lies in the browser requirements and the file sizes. Real-time 3D engines for Flash provide content which can be viewed in browsers with Flash Player 8 or above installed and according to the Adobe Flash Player Version Penetration Statistics, in March 2008, 98% of users in the UK had at least Flash Player 8. The Flash based real-time 3D engines can also output relatively small files sizes considering the graphics-heavy nature of the content.

Currently, the main uses for the Flash based real-time 3D engines seem to be games and website navigation. The Neighbourhood’s website is a particularly good example of how Papervision3D can be used for site navigation and Carlos Ulloa (one of the Papervision3D development team) shows an application of the technology on his website in the form of a car which can travel into the distance as well as left and right. Another good example is the award winning LAB website which uses Mathieu Badimon’s FIVe3D. FIVe3D works slightly differently in that it’s entirely vector-based. Zeh Fernando explains more about the intricacies of FIVe3D compared to the other 3D engines on his blog.

In terms of commercial examples, I recently saw a banner ad which was almost identical to Ullosa’s car and I’m sure it won’t be long before advertisers come up with more snazzy ways to use the real-time 3D engines for Flash to attract and hold our attention.

One thing that’s certain is that the real-time 3D in Flash has a lot of potential and I’m really looking forward to seeing it develop in the coming years. All the Flash-based 3D engines I have come across so far are open source which will hopefully pave the way to experimentation and exploratory projects. I’ve encountered plenty of browser-crashing examples which seems to be a good indication we are right at the beginning of Flash 3D’s journey.

The other consideration is Flash Player which will have to develop considerably to meet the demands that 3D content brings. Adobe has outlined new features to be included in “Astro” (Flash Player 10) which will make the possibilities for delivering 3D content greater. Once there’s a Flash Player that can handle the complexities of 3D lighting and reflections, 3D Flash content could easily become as ubiquitous as Flash’s 2D content is currently.

Since I read that article, Google Adsense Video Units have been rolled out in the USA, the UK, France, Italy, Spain, Australia, Netherlands, Poland, New Zealand and Japan.

I haven’t actually come across one yet but as Adwords advertisers start to pick up on the opportunities video ads bring, I’ll be interested to see what impact this has on the way they communicate their message. Like Mr Sullivan rightly pointed out, “…AdWords advertisers have had to shoehorn their messages into a 70-character limit. Well, if a picture’s worth a 1,000 words, moving-picture ads will let advertisers blow through the haiku-like restriction.”

So perhaps, any day now, we’re going to be swamped by enquiries from companies who want their products brought to life with animation and swooshy graphics specifically for use in Google Adsense Video Units. Or perhaps there’ll be a surge in companies buying digital video cameras and cheap video editing software. One thing that’s certain is that some will be shockingly bad and some will be brilliantly slick, and we’ll enjoy them all.