Hi guys,

Below the second discussion topic for the co-creation project "Creativity on the Move". Again you are free to let all your thoughts, ideas & (for some of us) poetic talents flow when answering the following question:


What will be the next best thing in Creative Media Editing & Sharing?

So what are your expectations, wishes, thoughts, ideas when it comes to the future of editing, remixing, combining and sharing pictures, music and video on your device?



Everything that is said during these dialogues will be used as input for the expert co-creation session before the Summit. Feel free to come up with anything that you find applicable!


cheers,

Marieke

Well... just a few quick ideas about what could be done with group of friends who are right there with you.

First of all it would be cool to be able to easily send music to friends that are nearby. It probably isn't hard even now using bluetooth, but if it were integrated into media player then it might make it even easier.

Another idea is networking nearby devices for your choice of media editing & sharing. For example stream the music you're listening to your friends' devices or share a desktop to show your images so that everyone sees the same image on their own device. There might be some nice applications also if you could simultaneously snap a picture with all the cameras on your nearby friends devices and then get the images easily to your device... It would allow you to get several pictures from the same object at the same time - or see what's happening at different places at exactly the same time.

One problem with remixing/editing and sharing is legality and liability. Since Facebook, Myspace and most of those social platforms are owned by big media corporations I think they'll heavily fight that. Instead, I envision F2F (friend2friend); P2P over IM (Jabber preferably). Yet if the platform used is centralized data can be easily censored or filtered. So to protect our privacy and work for net neutrality I think we'll see increased usage of decentralized platforms, and cryptography including over 3G. Its not just that. If I make a picture of myself on a train station and someone else is on the picture they legally need to give consent. But in a blink of an eye the photo is uploaded on Facebook. Is the world adolescent enough to handle this responsibility? I think not, I think we're gonna see more and more (self) moderation on the Internet.

One thing we'll see a lot innovation with is augmented reality. I think Google Streetview will raise in popularity as well. I envision all kind of user scenarios there which are useful to life. Maybe the person on photograph is recognized by Google and has a privacy policy. I've posted elsewhere examples of grocery shopping using a mobile device for 0) scanning in the products 1) getting cuts & deals 2) calculator of price (from total of groceries to even fuel used by car) 3) logistics (amount of food, perishing, active/passive reminders) 4) recipes (say what is missing, suggestions, reminders, etc). Heck, you could even link your inventory with your neighbors if you're on good terms with them, and help each other out for a change (or if you live with students). My question is not if this kind of application will see light. I'm convinced it will. My question is when.

Mix OCR/TTS/voice recognition with augmented reality and you get all kind of crazy things. Get the point? Its about I/O. You have input in one way and want output in another way. Then you can process further. Very important and difficult. But once its there. Wow. Examples. You tagged your data accordingly and are able to use voice commands to 'embed' them. For example you tell your mobile device to e-mail a certain picture to a certain person. Or to get that picure of your 2nd car and apply photo manipulation on it to see how it would look in different colours. Or you could browse Wikipedia this way. If there is an object you don't recognize you make a picture of it and augmented reality with search engine does the rest. IOW, besides personal data I imagine a whole library, an encyclopedia, of data available on the mobile device. I also imagine automated translation services eventually being applied on phones.

Now, I've seen application for photo manipulation, soft synths, and much more creative applications on iPod touch. Yes, its nice and fun, but its toys. Its nothing like a real VST, never mind a real hardware synthesizer. The quality is bad, the UI is bad (could be worse but the hardware synth is mimicked, knobs are difficult to control), you can't export it over MIDI or anything. Maybe a touchscreen can be used for this but then the touchscreen has to be bigger. Otherwise I don't see laptops being replaced in the music scene any time soon.

A normal screen can be used as output (maybe even foldable LCD?) with the mobile device being a remote. Yes, that makes some sense IMO, if the remote control UI application is optimized for running on the specific hardware. IOW, one has to think out of the box of the existent UI and think of the limitations and potential of the device.

Speaking of remotes, I guess my mobile device would be like a remote control for all kind of objects which currently have their own buttons. Instead, those devices only have a WiFi connection to AP. You could also see statistics of these devices on your mobile device. So if your fridge dies you receive a SMS about that. If your espresso machine needs maintenance this is added to your todo list. We want integration between devices. RFIDGuardian (Nokia Cellphone User Interface, API), Blinkenlights (tradtionally controlled by SMS IIRC), any many more examples.

Eventually we will see commercial photo manipulation software on (small) touchscreen devices but their UI will be very much optimized, and they will have their limits. The result is not the final work, or its purely hobby wise.

For video editing I can imagine something similar. Effects like Cheese does. Or mixing yourself in a Google Streetview picture because you've been at that place. But serious video editing requires a lot of raw power, and a good UI and application. Even if there are tools like this for Linux, they're for the Linux desktop.

For UI we'll see gestures to move to different parts of the UI. These have to work well and make sense. Carman, for example, is an example I like.

For gaming I think of RTS, even in collaboration, using touchscreen. Racing as well using accelerometer. And the device being used as remote for gaming consoles. But eventually the fun wears off, and the hardware is as-is. There is only so little you can modify on it. For example, I don't see a N900 easily replacing a Korg's KAOSSILATOR Portable Touch-Screen Synth.

Eh, I think the porn industry will also eventually catch up with augmented reality and mobile devices...

Hmm, its also important to use automation such as Electric Sheep and Debris. Would be nice to make your own Nokia background with some kind of application like that (although I love the default; maybe it could resemble the cellphone wave used when called lol). Something like fractal art, which is not that heavy on GPU/CPU and is also a matter of formulaes I can see applied on a mobile device. This can also be used just to make proof of concepts, and later exported for fine graining. I think that is some kind of key here: that the task performed on the mobile device is not the final end result, that it almost always needs final pinches of salt and pepper to get an acceptable end result. For example, I've used software synths to get some basic idea and quickly play around on laptop because my hardware synths are too heavy and can't have them all with me. That is the advantage of a computer: it can mimic instruments without the required space, weight, and price. But it cannot fully replace them. You're still bound to MIDI (or Melodyne Direct Node Access?).

In an ideal world collaboration all happens over IPv4/IPv6 and WWAN and hopefully those protocols and formats are open standards. Could be real-time, but I think is better to upload your 'audio diffs' of source of music to collaboration platform and allow your (specific) friends or the whole world to hack further on it like version control system or wiki. Same for photos and video. But with Apple strong foot in multimedia and artistic industries maybe they'll get the more serious stuff only ported to their platform, being incompatible with anything else.

PS: No, I'm not on psychedelics... merely pain relievers because of recent operation...

PPS: Oh, and Twister (tm)

Here 2 videos of touch screen MIDI controllers 1, 2

A table touchscreen where one or multiple musicians can compose using objects as instruments. The objects, in various forms and symbols, will be controllable by the way they are pointed towards the screen, connected towards each other, and in each other's influence field. The touchscreen provides additional control. ReacTable is the most astonishing multi touch audio application I've ever seen (ReacTable on Youtube, Official homepage), I'd love to try it out, have to see it in action some day... also impressive is AudioTouch and something like VJing.

In the end, size matters, and it should be clear for what 'size' this discussion is aimed at. Bigger touchscreens easily open up a can of worms like above whereas smartphone/internet_tablet size is more limited. Both will have their market, eventually.

Maybe ShareFlow?

http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterpri...ilable-now.php

I want the experience to be organic. I want to be able to use my device's "senses" to capture what's interesting and important around me to be stored, processed and shared. I want it to act as my second brain, easily storing and (cross categorizing) the new memories and experiences for quick and easy retrieval.

I think abstraction layer\crutches like "applications" or "file systems" are hinderances that break the way of working organically\naturally the way the brain works.

Building on Naranek's ideas:

Using mobile devices for creative purposes should be a lot like the low-tech group creativity method that we're all familiar with: "jamming". It should be possible to improvise and build on each other's "riffs" and ideas, and it should be possible to "get into a groove" where everyone is paying attention to everyone else and making all the parts come together in real time to make a harmonious whole.

I actually think that has a lot to do with the app or fs. Some apps feel so natural to me that using them is more play than work-- Visio is a great example. And as for file systems, WinFS was *supposed* to be a step forward to object-oriented information management. Too bad it's in limbo.

@texrat: Hmmm yeah, I didn't mean to do away with 'apps' and 'filesystems', at least not immediately..

...and I think this has more to do when you're interoperating multiple tasks from different apps and making use of objects from different media types. That's when the 'apps' and 'fs' boundaries show up and you'll have to change your thinking mode to 'cope' with this layer.

Working inside Visio is quite effortless as you don't need to deal with separate app or files (in general, unless you're importing medias or combinging multiple diagrams, i guess).

I recently blogged (http://tabulacrypticum.wordpress.com...at-does-it-do/) how the out-of-box experience makes or breaks a product like this. To that extent, one simple, readily-available app that makes sense is a photo/image slideshow (electronic picture frame). Let's take that a step further. Not only do I want to share raw media with people, I want to be able to share it in specific contexts as well. So why not entire slideshows?

Of course file size and transfer rates would keep this from being a fleeting encounter sort of thing, but if I visit family it would be a nice feature to have. And even better: make it cross-platform. Shooting slideshows from a tablet to a PC or Mac... ooo...

Texrat: I've often wondered about that, too. Why isn't there any standardised slideshow "playlist" format? You would want a list of photos, length of time to show each photo, and optionally, the transition to use between photos. Never seen anything like that.

EDIT: I don't mean software that makes a slideshow into a video or something. I mean a meta-file that doesn't contain the actual media, just information about how to present it in a standardised format that any slideshow app can read.