Gaming Apps to Unlock Video Archive Footage

One of the leading digital media foundations in the San Francisco Bay Area, GAFFTA, the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, held a hackathon for film-makers and developers March 21-23, 2013. The challenge was to come up with new uses for open-source video archive footage (for example from the Internet Archive).

One idea would be to merge mobile gaming, crowdsourcing, and video archives to make the archives a fun and accessible tool for telling new stories. Here are some app ideas:

App: This is not my story!
In this gaming app, person 1 (whose image or profile photo is shown) selects a video micro-clip that he or she feels is ‘not my story.’ Then person 2, matched randomly from the crowd of the app’s community members, adds a short caption to the video as to why the video micro-clip is not that person’s story. Humor would be tantamount. Other community crowd members could validate the caption (e.g.; police spam), and vote on it with ‘likes’ to determine game winners.

App: PostSecret Video
This gaming app is the video version of the successful, strikingly poignant, and deeply human PostSecret project. PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard which are then posted on the web and compiled and published as books. Instead of sending anonymous postcards with ‘my secret,’ anonymous participants would find a video micro-clip that corresponds to their secret. Other community members would guess what the secret is from the video micro-clip.

App: Exquisite Video Corpse Again taking advantage of the community to create crowd art, this gaming app uses the exquisite corpse technique invented by the surrealists. In a group story telling exercise, the first person selects a video micro-clip. The second selects a second video micro-clip that is the next few frames of the story. The third selects the third, and so on. Each new person selecting can only see the story 1-2 nodes back. Again the crowd could vote on newly created video stories.

Top 10 Technology Tends for 2013

1. Big data ubiquity, along with machine learning algorithms, and information visualization
2. Video is the platform (example: individual YouTube channels with over 100,000 people making more than $10,000/year from ‘home video’ properties like My Drunk Kitchen, the ShayTards, and Right This Minute) 
3. Wearable computing and objective biometrics: Fitbit, myZeo, WiThings, smartwatch, smartring, wearable electronic patches and tattoos, Google’s Project Glass
4. Fracking
5. eHealth biohacking: Quantified Self-tracking, self-experimenting, group health collaboration, $99 personal genomics (23andMe), $99 personal microbiomics (American Gut Project), $5 home blood-test cards (Talking20) 
6. eLearning: Coursera, Udacity, edX, Class Central (MOOC aggregator)
7. Mobile is still the platform: worldwide smartphone adoption crosses 1 billion
8. Crowdsourced labor marketplaces: CrowdFlower, CrowdSource, oDesk, ClickWorker, Mechanical Turk, mobileworks, TopCoder, Elance, vWorker/Rent a Coder, Guru, 99designs, crowdSPRING, CloudCrowd, Soylent, microtask, LiveOps, Gigwalk
9. Computer security: increasing power of Internet-based activist hacking groups (e.g.; Anonymous)
10. New economic models (crowd-based): crowdfunding (Kickstarter, indiegogo, etc.), sustainable business, and crowdfunded debt forgiveness (from the Occupy movement’s financial arm: Rolling Jubilee)

Up and coming: Consumer EEG rigs wearable 24/7 (Axio, Interaxon) and attendant neural and biometric data privacy rights, ideally sans Faraday Cage 2.0

Still waiting for: nanotech, 3D printing, eHealth data commons with public longitudinal phenotypic data sets

Predictions for 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 

Open Global Courseware

The U.K., long an adopter of surveillance technology, announced recently that high-definition CCTV cameras from Classwatch have been installed in 94 schools. The result has been improved classroom management and there are plans to install hundreds more cameras nationwide in primary and secondary schools.

Free global education resource
With minimal effort, this internal surveillance initiative could be expanded into a worldwide sousveillance victory. A global education resource could be generated by broadcasting and archiving the live feeds to the web for access by teachers and students worldwide in their own classrooms and via cell phones. This is essentially an extension of MIT’s open courseware concept.

Language imperialism and the return of the British Empire?
The U.K. might briefly enjoy the notion of re-establishing the British Empire by exporting English-language education, but

language is becoming more fungible over time

The issue of language imperialism could be avoided with the use of audio translation tools (Google Translate – audio version?) and by opting in CCTV broadcasts from schools in other countries. The pilot project phases could be U.K. transmissions targeted at India and Beijing, etc. transmissions targets at rural Chinese schools.

PenPal 2.0 flattens the world
Classroom broadcasts could quickly become interactive with commenting and messaging on the streams. Students worldwide could get to know each other and work on team projects together in virtual world classrooms like Second Life’s Teen Grid; a multi-dimensional PenPal 2.0. Students in India could come up with ideas to work on problems in the U.K. by interviewing British students and vice versa. Teacher and student exchange programs could arise. Students could vote on the curriculum.

The real way to raise test scores would be to have live head-to-head competitions between different schools in a district, country or around the world (“The class in Chennai did 5% better….”).

Local community engagement tool
Internet broadcast could also enable the local community. Parents could tune in to their children’s classrooms (“Mom, did you see what I did around 10:30?”…”What happened at school today?” “Mom, just watch the feed archive…”). The social networking dimension could deepen student, teacher and parent interaction as many are already managing homework assignments colaboratively on the web.

American Idol Teacher: injecting abundance
Classroom broadcast could bring more abundance to teaching by providing acknowledgement (whuffie) for good teachers. Innovative and engaging teachers could reach a global audience and become YouTube celebrities. There could be competitions for the Best Teacher of the Pythagorean theorem, Best Teacher in Swindon, etc. as nominated through video clips. Videos could be linked to teacher ranking websites. From a policy perspective, education could become easier to evaluate and standardize. Countrywide best practices could be culled to train new teachers.

Conclusion: inevitablility of full-life recording

It seems inevitable that video surveillance/sousveillance will increasingly penetrate public and private areas for a variety of reasons ranging from safety and crime control to life-logging. One classic opposition argument is that recording inhibits ‘natural’ behavior, however most people quickly forget and adjust and it could be likely that the ongoing recording of society will advance without much opposition as long as there is a balance between surveillance and sousveillance (e.g.; there is popular access to the technologies and streams).

AGI, IPTV and Video Search

Video sites (no names please - YouTube!)and video search are early stage red hot. Video Search 1.0, the current available methodology for searching for video content includes meta data, tags, audio transcripts and image search but nothing to aid in identifying and categorizing the context and meaning of videos.

AGI viewing video UGC (user-generated content) would have the same problem humans do: there is no value without meaning and context. Two people playing basketball on a trampoline are ... two people playing basketball on a trampoline. Video search further highlights the challenges found in getting to the next levels in text search, and more broadly in AI, moving from explicit information representation to the abstraction, recognition and representation of concepts. The road forward is not clear.

Meanwhile, other early stage opportunities exist. For IP video to be a true TV replacement and fully arrive as an entertainment medium, rights issues must be resolved so that video playlists can be subscribed to, downloaded and stored automatically (anyone remember RSS?) for big screen viewing. Advertisers also need to shift to a content-providing mindset to extend and invite user experience. If IPTV cannot be TIVO'd, the advertising model better not be traditional or annoying.