In Michael Jackson's 50 years on the planet, he reinvented dance, song, and the art of collecting arcade games, but even now, after his death, he's still reinventing. Kraken Opus publishers have recently revealed a new book, coming out December 7th, that Michael was working on before his death. The huge coffee table photo book will include new technology the publishers were working on with Jacko that may be able to bring the book publishing world to the 21st century, and change how we normal peeps exchange photos and videos with friends and family...
Michael Jackson's Technological Feat from the Grave
Try it at Home!
The 400-page bible of all things Michael will include hundreds of photos, but will also have essays, illustrations and poetry, handbound in leather and enclosed in a silk clamshell case. The tech comes in with the membership card included with the book.
The card looks like a standard 5-by-6 inch print of a photograph of Michael, but when you hold it in front of your computer's webcam, instead of seeing the image on your computer screen, the 5-by-6 inch card becomes a video screen, showing video clips of Jackson concert footage, complete with audio.
The only way to truly understand this is to watch Kraken Opus CEO Karl Fowler demo the tech with Al Roker on the Today Show.
You can also get a taste of the technology by downloading a sample image from the Kraken Opus site and either printing it out or uploading it to your iPhone and then placing the image in front of your webcam to see the video first hand!
This could be the beginning of some super cool innovations in both the book publishing world -- imagine buying the next Apartment Therapy book and being able to access video interviews of our apartment dwellers via images in the book -- and even the consumer photo world. One day soon it could be possible to send home printed postcards of photos you've taken to friends that then access video greetings when held in front of a webcam! The possibilities are super exciting.
(Image: Kraken Opus)
Comments (3)
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Augmented reality is cool but often applied as a huge gimmick. Wouldn't it be better to simply have access to the videos to play in full screen from a site or web application, without having to use a webcam and computer vision and hold a key image in front of the screen to awkwardly watch?
view alinear's profile
I'm not sure I understand. The picture is turned away from you, so you can't see the video? And how does the webcam make it work?
view MKQ's profile
MKQ, think of the image as just a catalog reference. When you hold it up to the webcam and are running their software (it requires a special application to process the video etc) it, based on the image give, can then track and overlay live video back to you.
I guess the best example might be imagine you have a Lab book for a Language course. Right now if it had video demos it would, in the text, tell you to put the DVD in the drive and load chapter 9 or whatever. With this you would just open the software package, point the book at the webcam and it could detect and load the videos for you as an overlay, even appearing to animate the pages. It is a merging of tactile physical objects with digital interactions.
It is basically like a really elaborate barcode scanner that can also track the barcode and modify how it looks with an overlay on the video feed. One of the oldest mainstream examples are some of the games Sony put out with the Eyetoy. Eye of judgment uses playing cards with symbols that, when read by the camera, have a 3d avatar of the card appear overlaid on them.
view kamikazetedibear's profile