Category Archives: Videos

Alright, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.

OpenCV is a wonderfully full-featured computer vision library. I’ve just written a very simple demo of the built-in face recogniser. It finds a face and scales it to a fixed size. If you watch my eyes in the viewfinder window, you’ll see they stay pretty much in the same place however I move around the room.

All sorts of things could be done to improve the frame-rate if needed, but this was just a quick test I put together over a couple of hours while learning about the library. Back in ancient history, when I did my PhD, this kind of thing would have taken weeks… The title of this post, if you’re not familiar with it, is from the famous closing scene of Sunset Boulevard, which you can see here. Of course, as soon as I thought of using this title, I realised that I could also grant Gloria Swanson’s greatest wish. So here’s my version…

It needs some smoothing, but still quite fun.

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The birth of a shed

In November 2009, we had a new studio built in our back garden. I had a webcam pointing at it.

Last Bank Holiday, I finally got around to doing something with the nearly two million images it had captured.

Except for those directly involved, I doubt many will want to spend 16 minutes watching this! But it might be fun to skim through!

Many thanks to the good folks at Croft Design and Build. We’re very pleased with the results.

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Bubble, bubble, toil and… jolly good fun!

As if it weren’t cold enough already at the moment, some friends and family gathered last week at my brother’s place to make ice cream. Not being advocates of the Slow Food movement, though, we did it with liquid nitrogen…

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I’m on a horse

The real interest of the Superbowl is not, for me, the sport, but the creativity that goes into the phenomenally expensive commercial breaks. The most famous example is Apple’s 1984 ad that introduced the Macintosh, but there have been many others.

This year’s most talked-about ad was from Old Spice, and I think it’s brilliant.

These days one immediately assumes that it’s all green-screen and CGI, but in fact there is almost no ‘trickery’. Isaiah Mustafa maintains this running commentary while bits of scenery move around him, and it’s a trolley, on which he sits part-way through, that transports him and deposits him on the horse. And he maintains this focus even though they eventually used something like the 57th take…

Leo Laporte interviewed the guys behind it, if you’d like to find out more….

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Up periscope

As a small puppy, our English Cocker Spaniel, Tilly, used to like running through long grass, and occasionally through crops.

But the grasses grew faster than she did, which left her with a navigation problem…

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Literal Videos

Many thanks to Andy Stanford-Clark for getting me searching YouTube for ‘literal music videos’. Some of them are brilliant, and your appreciation for each one probably depends on your generation… Here’s the best I’ve seen so far. Bonnie Tyler tells it like it is. Update 2012: you can now find it here . Here’s Penny Lane, for even older readers…

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Telling it like it is…

I loved the Homeopathic A&E sketch from Mitchell & Webb. Dara O’Briain makes some similar points rather nicely here:

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The joy of vortex

Know what a vortex cannon is? I didn’t, but it sounded interesting when my friend @Phil_Boswell mentioned it on Twitter.

So I did a search and found this on YouTube:

Fun, eh? But…call that a cannon? This is a cannon:

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Homeopathic A&E

Another lovely Mitchell & Webb skit.

Thanks to Ian Yorston for the link.

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Invisible drum kit

Hadn’t seen this one before. Rowan Atkinson is just superb.

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From Concepts to Companies

A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk entitled ‘From Concepts to Companies’ at a conference in Katowice, Poland, organised by the Polish Information Processing Society (PIPS) and sponsored by DisplayLink. The talks are now online here – mine is below, in case you’re interested.

You can right-click here to download a smallish MPEG4 (H.264) version.

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FPV

On the one occasion, many years ago, when I tried to fly a radio-controlled plane, I found it extremely difficult. It was OK when the plane was flying away from me, but when I wanted to bring it back towards me, the left/right controls were reversed. It was most counter-intuitive and the landing was far from elegant.

Recently, though, I’ve been thinking that it ought to be straightforward to mount a wireless camera on a small plane. A view of the transmitted video signal ought to let you fly the thing as if you were sitting in the cockpit of a real plane, something I know how to do.

I haven’t, alas, had a chance to try it, but it turns out that lots of other people have. It’s called FPV (for ‘First-Person View) and there’s lots more about it on this site. Here’s a nice example:

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