I just returned from Bangalore, India as part of the WikiWars Conference (see previous post). Organized by Nishant Shah and Geert Lovnik as part 1 of CPOV: Critical Point of View (as opposed to Wikipedia’s NPOV), the conference featured speakers from 27 different countries.
Nathaniel Stern and I presented Wikipedia Art: Citation as Performative Act in the final session of the 2-day conference, where we performed the presentation, based on the impetus behind the Wikipedia Art project, performative citations and used examples from The Miracle on 34th Street and The Digital Dark Age.
Part 2 will be in Amsterdam in March and the result will be a free book featuring a compendium of writings from the two events, which will be distributed to universities and libraries worldwide — a unification of academia and open culture philosophy.
This was one of the best conferences I’ve been to: well-organized with thoughtful presentations, plenty of time for in-depth discussions and a warm group of people, which resulted in some new friendships.
I was particularly impressed with Stuart Gieger’s discussion of bots in Wikipedia culture as well as Mark Graham’s analysis of uneven geographies in Wikipedia.
Stay tuned for the Amsterdam session and you can follow the CPOV blog here.
I have many more photos from the India trip on my Facebook page.
We are making good progress on the Open Video Sync project. It’s buggy but the syncing code works!
After some thought about how to best make this available to a wide set of users and support some of Apple’s undocumented APIs — ones that are basic like pausing a movie or playing it back on an external device, (see this thread for the geeks out there) we have decided to release two versions of Open Video Sync, one for App Store which will be a slimmed-down version and one for the Cydia Store — for jailbroken phones, which will be a full-featured version.
I’m still disappointed with Apple and their closing down of the iPhone. But apparently I am just one of many.
Open Video Sync is one of my Eyebeam projects and will be a way to turn your iPhone or iPod touch into a cheap and wireless video synchronization tool.
We have unfortunately come to the conclusion that we will have to release this as a jailbroken application which means it will be released on the Cydia Store rather than the Apple Store (here is a glossary of what these terms mean) which means restricting the audience to a more tech-savvy group, but there is no other way.
The bone of contention is the use of undocumented interfaces and there is specifically one called the MPTVOutInterface which lets you playback video onto an external device. Apple doesn’t support this for the development community which is a foot-shooting maneuver.
First of all: any video player should have a direct-to-device output. In fact, here is a great iPhone hardware hack that will let you do just that.
Second: this is already something that works for Apple’s own iPod video player. It is well-tested and should be folded into the general API.
The shoot-in-foot problem is this: it is only a matter of time before the open source Google Android phone catches up. Right now, it still lacks the necessary inter-phone communication via Bluetooth/wireless API. And also the phone is too expensive, requiring a service plan. The iPod touch is an excellent model: cheap, great UI and a lot of application support. Hopefully the Android will come up with a similar model sooner than later.
Apple could profit from iPhone-as-gaming device such as this example.
In the meantime, my co-developer, Eric Brelsford and I have decided to jailbreak and go Cydia on this one. Stay tuned.
This week I’ve been researching what type of open source license to use with the Open Video Sync (OVS) project — one of the many things I’ve got going on at Eyebeam.
Open Video Sync will do amazing things for video artists (and others), namely the ability to synchronize video playback across multiple cheap video players, such as the iPod touch.
The legal issue is that OVS is an iPhone application and is therefore running on an essentially developer-unfriendly and closed environment. In addition to the numerous restrictions that Apple imposes upon developers, including esoteric developer’s certificates and provisioning profiles, programmers have to pay $99 fee to download their custom programs onto their mobile devices.
After meeting with Fred Benenson today, it became clear to me that iPhone development presents problems with the GPL namely that it is not free software. This means that I will end up deploying the software with a more liberal, BSD-style license.
Why not Google Android — a device that is open? Simply: iPod Touches are cheap, require no service plan and the iPhone SDK supports inter-phone communication. Some day, I’d like to port Open Video Sync to a more open platform, but not until it is cost-effective for users.
