I hate the Harvard system!
Archive for the ‘Dissertation’ Category
Dissertation
Monday, April 26th, 2010Beaten To It…My 3DTV Experience
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010Well well well, I appear to have been beaten to it! I always said that 3DTV will never catch on because of:
- The stupid glasses that you have to wear whether you want to watch sport, films or even the adverts
- The lack of parallax in current systems for more than one viewer at a time
- The fact that the edge of the screen is still the edge
I recently visited the NEC in Birmingham for ‘Focus On Imaging’, an annual photographic showcase of the latest innovations in photography and digital imaging. As I walked past the Panasonic stand, I was offered to view their newest 3DTV, the appropriately-named TC-P50VT20.
I had to wear these stupid glasses that were both heavy and uncomfortable (and battery-powered!) to watch two 3-minute 3D films.
The image that the system gave was quite impressive, but if I moved ever so slightly to try and trigger parallax, the effect was ruined. After the films had shown and everyone had left, I took my chance to talk to the girl from Panasonic about the system. The method used was quite crude and I don’t think it will catch on. The screen would show alternating images for the right and then the left eye at 120Hz and each time, send out an infrared signal to the glasses, which would use LCD technology to cover the appropriate eye. This is just a LED/LCD version of one of the oldest 3D techniques.
I quizzed the girl on the lack of 3DTV standards and the response I got was: “We’re hoping to set the standard…” – WRONG! That’s not how standards are set! Go back 2 years and we can see 2 companies trying to ‘set the standard’ in the form of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. Roll back 30 years and we see a similar story with Betamax and VHS. Now imagine the same scenario with more than 5 or 6 media giants trying to set the standard. Nothing good will happen and it will inevitably be the system with the most money to back it up winning, rather than the best or the most efficient.
One company that has solved 2 out of my 3 gripes (which is twice as much as any other company!) is Holografika, who have created a 3DTV that features parallax AND you don’t have to wear a pair of glasses to watch it. The price for this privilege? £26,265! The other downside? you have to have 4 video sources, typically 4x DVI-I or DVI-D signals.
The hardest problem to solve is the border problem. It really annoys me when 3DTVs are shown with things ‘coming out’ of them:
Until someone solves all 3 of these things, the 3DTV will never reach its full potential. We will all end up looking like complete idiots, sitting in our under-furnished white-walled homes wearing heavy, bulky glasses that cause headaches watching giraffes on a TV that ISN’T 3D…
I close my case…
My New Idea – 3DTV Sucks
Monday, December 7th, 2009Well, well, well. HDTV was a bit of a failure, wasn’t it? It has turned out to be too expensive, too unsupported and too variable in quality.
If you want to receive HDTV, you have to shell out a couple of hundred for a HD television and then another hundred bob for a HD receiver (FreeSat HD, Sky HD or soon Freeview HD) which is ridiculous! If you were to have all the equipment, there then becomes the problem that there are only a handful of channels that broadcast in HD, and those are the boring ones like BBC One and Sky Sports. Also, for reasons I don’t completely understand, there are 2 different standards and 4 different screen resolutions with an additional 2 interlacing options:
- 720p (1024 x 768)
- 720p (1280 x 720)
- 720p (1366 x 768)
- 1080i (1920 x 1080)
- 1080p (1920 x 1080)
WTF!? 3DTV is rumoured to be the next big thing, but I’m just wondering how successful it can be.
In November 2009, Channel 4 had a week-long broadcasting session in which they showed a number of 3-dimensional programmes for which you needed a pair of less-than-fasionable 3D glasses. I found the glasses annoying as they distorted the colour and made my eyes sore after extended use.
Shown during the Channel 4 3D week was some recently-uncovered and never-before-seen footage of the Queens corination, which was filmed in colour 3D because at the time, it was believed that 3DTV was the next big thing, but here we are, 56 years later and no such thing as yet. It still annoyingly required the viewer to use some form of stupid glasses.
I think that 3DTV will not catch on unless there is a way that we don’t have to wear some stupid bloody glasses to watch and there becomes a way in which the screen doesn’t end at its edges. As far as I can see, there are 3 ways to make 3D or immersive TV successful:
- Film the scene with a 360° panoramic camera (as used by Google and view the resulting footage through goggles which can use digital compasses and accelerometers to detect the direction of view and display the correctly-orientated footage. Unfortunately, this has already been done, as I found here.
- Project a fish-eye image around the television to create content (albeit less important and not as defined) outside of the screen to ‘extend’ the screen area to the entire room. This method requires not only a TV, but a projector that has to be calibrated for each room. It also needs either multiple videos or an ultra-high definition video to get the quality on the screen up to an acceptable standard.
- Create a TV system that responds to the position of the viewer, in which moving around the TV allows you to view areas ‘behind and beyond’ the confinements of the screen. Moving closer to the screen allows you to see more of the image, as if the screen was a window to the screen outside.
Above: Idea 2, showing the projected images around and outside the TV area.
Below: Idea 3 – The position of the viewer (A, B and C) provides different extremities of the image.
I prefer the third option because it also has potential for gaming applications, where ducking and diving your head will result in dodging around objects in the level. It would be nice if I could do this with a live stream of the view from a window as it would give a feel of realism.
As th effect only works for a single person at a time, I plan to use the webcam on my laptop for motion tracking the position of my own face, but because there is a lot of noise and acurate motion tracking becomes difficult. I shall use an IR (infrared) filter over my webcam and 2 IR LEDs attached to my face so that all my webcam sees is 2 white points of light, making the tracking process easier and more acurate.
Updated Dissertation Structure
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
The title is still “Language, Code and Communication – What Does It Take To Make Artificial Intelligence?”, but I have now re-drafted my dissertation structure as follows:
- Introduction
- 1.1 – What I plan to discuss
- 1.2 – A brief history of AI
- Intelligence
- 2.1 – What is intelligence?
- 2.2 – How do we solve problems?
- 2.2a – Intrinsic and extrinsic knowledge
- 2.2b – Learning by trial and error
- Communication and Language
- 3.1 – Why the need to communicate?
- 3.1a – Humans
- 3.1b – Machines
- 3.1c – The Internet
- 3.2 – Why and how did language evolve?
- 3.2a – Spoken word
- 3.2b – Written
- 3.2c – Print
- 3.2d – Digital
- 3.1 – Why the need to communicate?
- Code
- 4.1 – Why do we need code?
- 4.1a – Communication
- 4.1b – Increasing productivity
- 4.1c – Problem solving
- 4.2 – How has code evolved to better handle complex tasks?
- 4.3 – Why do different codes exist?
- 4.1 – Why do we need code?
- Artificial Intelligence
- 5.1 – How does AI work and how has it evolved?
- 5.1a – Set-response AI
- 5.1a.1 – Point and click games
- 5.1a.2 – Command-line games
- 5.1b – Linear reactive AI
- 5.1b.1 – Pong
- 5.1b.2 – PacMan
- 5.1c – Strategic learning-based AI
- 5.1c.1 – Chess machines
- 5.1c.2 – Social networking sites
- 5.1d – Problem-solving and self-autonomous AI
- 5.1d.1 – ASIMO
- 5.1d.2 – Mars Explorer
- 5.1a – Set-response AI
- 5.2 – Faking intelligence
- 5.3 – The worry of self-awareness
- 5.3a – The Terminator franchise
- 5.3b – I, Robot
- 5.3c – Issac Asimovs “Three Laws of Robotics”
- 5.3c.1 – The possible 4th and 5th laws
- 5.1 – How does AI work and how has it evolved?
- How hard is it to make AI?
- 6.1 – Have we actually created intelligence? (as defined in 2.1)
- 6.2 – How can AI be made better?
- 6.3 – What is holding us back?
- 6.3a – Technical limitations
- 6.3b – Social restrictions
As for references, I only have:
- Prolog – Programming for Artificial Intelligence, Second Edition by Ivan Bratko [0-201-41606-9]
- AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence by Daniel Crevier [0-465-02997-3]
Dissertation Proposal
Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
Possible title: Language, Code and Communication – What Does It Take To Make Artificial Intelligence?
Communication has always existed in some form. Whether it is spoken language, smell, sound or gesture-based, if a life form exists, it needs to be able to communicate with its neighbors and possibly even its surroundings. As time went by, language evolved into a spoken form that became almost universal amongst nearly all homo sapiens. At some point in history, man created computers to perform mind-numbingly boring and tedious calculations and operations. There became a point where the operations were so complex, it would be easier to create a system whereby the machine could give itself instructions.
John McCarthy was the first to coin the phrase ‘Artificial Intelligence’ in 1956, describing it as “The science and engineering of making intelligent machines” [What is Artificial Intelligence?, John McCarthy - Revised November 12, 2007]. There have been various forms of AI throughout the years, from simple trigger-based responses to robot that can perform complex problem-solving operations in unfamiliar situations, gaining knowledge that can be applied for future similar circumstances. Due to the rapid expansion of web-based technology in the past few years with tags, suggestions, sharing and a vast collection of ‘Web 2.0’ social networking sites, the information that everyone sees on the Internet is becoming very unique to the individual. The next step in searches and social sharing is artificially-intelligently suggested information.
As it stands, AI already exists in simple forms on the Internet, with some websites suggesting links to websites, news items or current trends that are similar to previously visited sites. However, current online AI technology is based on hard-coded information and commands and can only expand their knowledge by additional hard-coding or guess-work. A large percentage of Internet users are unable to code intelligence, due to a lack of coding knowledge, but what if I could create an intelligent entity that understood and responded to human-based commands?
Possible resources and critical context:
- AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence [ISBN-10: 0465029973]
Sounds complicated, but interesting – no?