R Sloan Design Experiences » current

Banking Youth: Otoy’s Technology Allows Actors To Stop Time

R Sloan Design — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 04:14:00 +0000

L.A.’s Otoy promises a processing and image capture breakthrough that will allow actors to play their current age indefinitely. But the tech also opens up a range of possibilities for other image-intensive applications. If Otoy’s founders are right, Star Trek’s holodeck isn’t far behind.

“They never get old,” says legendary talent agent Ari Emanuel, who is encouraging his WME clients to digitally scan their faces with a technology that allows them to act in roles at their current age for the rest of their life.

While the technology to digitally archive a celebrity’s face and overlay it on a younger actor has been around for years, the expensive storage and computing power necessary to render the mammoth data files limited the technology to the fleeting needs of big-budget blockbusters. Now, Otoy, a hidden gem of a startup tucked away in Los Angeles, has solved the processing and storage problem with a breakthrough in processing power, making it economically viable to archive the appearances of actors en masse in their own private bank of youth.

How it Works

Capturing a realistic representation of a face isn’t as simple as snapping a picture in good light. “Skin is a unique material,” says Otoy’s Academy Award-winning technologist, Tim Hawkins. “It’s a little bit like a cloud,”–a mesh of tissue and blood vessels reflecting light in a way that gives facial complexion a textured luminosity, over patches of bumpy skin and subtle shadows. Indeed, it’s the lack of detail that gives CGI-created faces a suspicious sense of unrealistic perfection, tipping them into the dreaded “uncanny valley.”

Otoy’s solution is to bask a human face in 360 degrees of bright light, which allows a computer to recreate the effects of light at any angle and any intensity of luminosity, from an early-morning sunrise to a full moon. Actors step into large hollow sphere, surrounded by dozens of high-wattage bulbs. Six high-resolution professional cameras stationed in four corners at eye-level snap photos, as a series of light patterns is projected onto the actor’s face. The surreal, eye-tearing experience only takes about five minutes to capture a blank stare expression (see a video of me unsuccessfully trying to keep my eyes still during the process below).

The magic of that capture technology, LightStage, is how a single actor, Armie Hammer, played both Winklevoss twins simultaneously in the Facebook biography, The Social Network (see before and after photos of Hammer’s LightStage-captured face overlayed on his body-double below).

Click to zoom.

Should an actor want to express more than just a blank stare, the LightStage can capture facial expressions of all contortions. Running through the full catalog of human expressions, the Facial Action Coding System, users act out every possible dramatic and silly expression, as LightStage captures facial muscles stretched in enough ways that a computer can “puppeteer” any emotion in the future.

A Brilliant New Technology

The prodigy behind the technology is Otoy CEO, Jules Urbach, a self-taught computer programmer who designed the software that super-charges a cheap graphics card with the rendering power of a supercomputer. Instead of processing tasks one a time, Otoy’s software opens up the computing pipeline like a multi-lane highway, permitting multiple tasks simultaneously (what programmers refer to as “parallel processing”). Without Otoy’s tech, a supercomputer “typically spends dozens of hours per machine to render just a single [frame] on films like Transformers,” explains Otoy President, Alissa Grainger, who first caught up with Fast Company at Singularity University’s executive training conference in Los Angeles. At Otoy’s ever-expanding headquarters in downtown L.A., I witnessed Transformers-quality rendering in
real time on a iPad, streaming from their cloud servers over a Wi-Fi connection.

Even with this impressive improvement in processing power, tech-savvy readers will rightly call out that even a blazing fast Internet connection couldn’t possibly download the huge data file of a cinema-quality image in real time. True. So, Urbach also designed a new data compression algorithm that scrunches the data “several hundreds” times smaller than, for instance, what Sony Image Works used to store CGI from the Spider-Man movies, according to Grainger.

Otoy previously made headlines when it proved what was thought to be impossible, streaming an Xbox game seamlessly between different types of devices.

The implications of this technology are far-reaching. For instance, Urbach estimates that his compressed streaming algorithm could cut Netflix bandwidth needs by roughly half. Given that Netflix hogs up to 32% all all U.S. bandwidth, Otoy could potentially free up a sizable chunk of Internet, if it were to partner with the biggest names in video streaming.

A Business of Possibilities

With the processing and storage problem solved, Otoy’s hole-in-the-wall LightStage studio in Burbank has already become a conveyor belt of A-list celebrities and athletes seeking its digital fountain of youth. Though Urbach is insistent that facial scans be the intellectual property of each individual person, clients still need Otoy’s patented technology to store and stream their digital doubles in manageable chunks. As a result, Otoy has, overnight, become the only business in town for this kind of service, and has attracted some of Silicon Valley’s top investors for a trip down South.

But, for the Otoy team, the real magic of digital doubles is yet to be realized. Legendary actors such as Tom Hanks would be able to play younger parts years after receiving their Medicare cards. Young actors could licenses out their likeness to magazines, rather than have to churn out photo shoots and profiles during the grueling promotion of an
upcoming film. Even deceased actors could be digitally resurrected.

Otoy’s biggest business potential may not be in serving the Hollywood elite, but in democratizing access to supercomputing power for the growing industry of web, low-budget, and amateur filmmaking. The company recently acquired a popular rendering software, Octane, and revealed to Fast Company that it is offering up its LightStage
data and real-time rendering power as a cloud service, complete with plug-ins for the widely used production software of Autodesk, including Autodesk Maya.

Ultimately, the dream for Otoy’s founder is a Star Trek-like holodeck, where a 3-D virtual environment looks as realistic as the analog world. Such a breakthrough would require more than just LightStage. Otoy is tackling this dream one chunk at a time, and we’ll have more details soon as it releases technology that could disrupt the entertainment, app, PC, and video game industries. Stay tuned.

PEEP Storage Units by Note Design Studio

R Sloan Design — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 06:57:03 +0000

THOUGHT: ‘…relax with pep.’peep.

Stockholm-based Note Design Studio have created the PEEP storage units..

When working with offices and workplace environments the light from the windows are seldom sufficient and furnishings including desks and acoustic screens are effective barriers of light traveling through the room. We have sought to remedy this by looking for products that allow light to pass through. There were none. During our annual experimenting within the Marginal Notes concept, we picked up the light issue again and found some early rough sketches of ideas regarding the matter.

Marginal Notes is a forum we have created for ourselves where we have the space and opportunity to realize ideas that might not work or do not necessarily comply with industry production requirements.

PEEP was such an idea.

We had an idea for a transparent “collar” in mesh or perforated metal. The collar would then be fixated with some kind of boxes or shelves at any height, like a Tetris game within the collar. The product would also be a spacious and visually exciting furniture that was not specifically linked to the office environment.

We had earlier discussed an idea about how to create a product like that, but in live projects there is little room for failures. In this case we doubted whether it would be stable enough or whether the weight would be a factor. Now that we together with Lerch Träinredningar had a possibility within the Marginal Notes concept to test the idea, we went as far as we could experimenting with different sizes of collars, different perforation density of the metal and different materials. We developed the perforated collars with RMIG. When the collars arrived it was far from obvious that the project would succeed. The aluminium collars were very light but also very wobbly. Until the boxes were fixed the project was very uncertain. However, when assembled the cabinets were stable way beyond our expectation and stood firmly without swaying.

Another idea that we wanted to try out was a series of legs whose design would fixate the material that it was intended to support. We tried several different leg positions in the PEEP series that were all customized to the respective PEEP cabinet that they would support. All the legs are (mounted?) flush into the drawers side piece and can be dismounted. In addition to PEEP we designed KEEP. As little as possible we wanted to work with fixed shelving’s and came up with the idea to work with loose boxes that can be pushed around, piled up and spun around inside the PEEP cabinets. In the KEEP series some boxes have an open front and back cover with perforated metal. Forward facing, these boxes can be a display area for things you want to expose, while rear facing, they could be hiding your mobile charger or cords. There is also a series of boxes with sliding perforated shutters.

.
Visit the Note Design Studio website – here.

Photography by Mattias Nero

Silicon Valley’s New Secret Weapon: Designers Who Found Startups

R Sloan Design — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 05:47:00 +0000

COMMENT: …go figure, someone else figured it out.

by Enrique Allen

If you want to ship great products, writes the Designer Fund’s Enrique Allen, consider having a designer in your founding group.

For the last few years, I was teaching startups to think like designers. But I eventually realized that you need someone to model and inspire design thinking within the company. If you don’t have a designer in your founding group, it’s harder to have a culture of design. You see the reasons why all the time: A consultant comes in to improve a design and when they leave, the transformation eventually dies.

This was my aha moment; it challenged whether I was making an impact. My solution? Do the opposite of what I’ve been doing. Rather than spending as much energy training nondesigners, I figured I’d help designers succeed as part of the founding DNA of startups, thus making great design a natural expression of their operations.

Although designer-founder genes are rare, more designers have the capacity to step up to the challenge. Inspired by the mathematician Richard Hamming, I believe that being a designer founder of a tech startup is one of the biggest opportunities in the design field today. So I laid out some assertions to begin experimenting, started aligning resources and kickstarted research about designer founders.

What’s Driving the Movement

Here’s why design is important to the tech world today:

1. As the consumer tech market becomes more crowded, brands and experience design–not just technical capabilities–are becoming critical to success.

2. Innovation is about radical collaboration. The critical mass of combined design, technical, and business skills enables product iteration to happen faster and at a higher resolution.

3. Designer founders have unique skills (not just visual) to understand human needs and discover unarticulated opportunities.

With these points in hand, I presented them to as many designers and investors as I could find. Turns out, more than 50 of them believed these assertions, too. So we came together as a community to create the Designer Fund and invest in the next generation of designer founders.

[Image: Seregam/Shutterstock]

The Skills to Ship

Clearly, every designer isn’t meant to be a founder and probably shouldn’t be. To be clear, we don’t mean designer as the prima donna pixel-pusher that you might be picturing. We also don’t mean designer as the “I took one class called UX Fundamentals in business school.” We mean an honest-to-goodness, experienced practitioner who has learned to design by designing. And most importantly, they’re able to ship usable products.

Above all, designer founders should be experts at finding the right problems to solve. That means sometimes building usable products that are ugly, or prototyping with a spreadsheet, and not getting trapped into making something beautifully useless that will not scale. Designer founders need to be able to do a lot, and it’s not easy.

This Is About Impact, Not Hype

The point is not to get caught up in buzzword titles, or challenge the role of design consultants or founders with engineering backgrounds, but to highlight the emerging opportunity for founders with design expertise from trained to self-taught backgrounds. It makes sense that a prerequisite for a tech company is to have a founder with technical skills. The same heuristic should hold true if you want to ship consistently well-designed products like Pinterest, AirBnB, and Path. Why not have a cofounder with design skills who champions the user experience?

Now, more than ever, we face complex problems that designer founders are well-equipped to solve. Everyone in a company should have empathy and practice design regardless of their title. Design can no longer be just be an outsourced add-on, limited to putting “lipstick on a pig.” Tech moves too fast for such short-sighted design thinking; it won’t be a lasting advantage.

Of course, designer founders aren’t some magical unicorn or silver bullet that’s going to solve everything. They’re but one potential key ingredient to teams of innovators, not a guarantee. Many companies will succeed without designer founders and many will fail with them. But I believe they improve the odds of survival.

Studying the Paths of Designer Founders

Designer founders we’ve observed are consistently multidisciplinary and have cross-functional skills necessary to make decisions about products. They are fluent in the full design stack, ranging from user research and interaction design to information architecture and communication design. They may not be experts in all sub-disciplines of design but can get by on their own in the early days of their startup and attract specialists when needed. In addition, they have a thorough enough working understanding of technology and business stacks, including agile programming and data-based marketing methods. Designer founders can move up and down the design stack and across the technology and business stacks to do what it takes to ship and use data to justify their decisions when needed. Thus, they are capable of leading both their product and organization through the design cycles needed to innovate. There’s a difference between a designer who can design a car dashboard and a designer who can design an entire car and how to drive it. Designer founders need to be able to do both.

[A portrait of the ideal designer founder. Image: Nanostock/Shutterstock]

To support these claims, we’re practicing what we preach and interviewing every designer founder we can find who’s created a venture-backed tech startup. The collection of interviews will be published as a nonprofit book that will be free for students, with the goal of synthesizing patterns and lessons to inspire entrepreneurial designers. The first by-product of this research, our Designer Founders info cards, represent a snapshot of data we’ve collected and some patterns we’re starting to explore. What you find is that designers live behind some of the web’s best startups, including Vimeo, YouTube, Hunch, Path, Etsy, and Instagram. That’s no coincidence.

The Future of Designer Founders

More designer founders than previous decades are daring to walk the unbeaten path and sacrifice the security of a paycheck to pursue the freedom of creating meaningful impact through tech startups. Whether they succeed or not, these designers represent a new breed of entrepreneur that will hopefully inspire the next generation of designers to be even better at making positive social change. There are also schools who are responding to the call to train entrepreneurial designers, such as the Stanford d.school, School of Visual Arts, among others. As we enter a user-interface revolution, there are even more possibilities for designers to create experiences with touch, sound, and movement interaction.

In the wake of Steve Jobs’s example, it’s obvious that designer founders should be champions of the user experience. They’re the ones who stand with one foot in the world of technology and the other in the world of people, bringing the two together.