Leslie and I saw Wall-E last night, Pixar’s latest movie. Definitely a thumbs up. It’s a very simple movie, and as with all of Pixar’s productions has a clear message of listening to your heart, not going along with the crowd, etc. And the story pivots around man-made environmental catastrophe and supplication to mega retail dominated suburbia (and mega cruises).

Visually it is spectacular - every frame of every scene is a feast for the eyes. In previous Pixar movies they stretched the limits of a certain aspect of 3D animation - Toy Story was about texturing, The Incredibles, Monsters Inc., and Ratatouille did cloth and hair/fur,  Finding Nemo was about water. What struck me about Wall-E was the animators’ use of foreground/background, and how they managed to render atmosphere and out-of-focus areas. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an animated movie where the point of focus moves back and forth so dramatically in the frame, and where such shallow depth of field is used to emphasize key elements. It lends an incredible amount of richness to each scene, and they have the used the flexibility of virtual lenses provided by the computer animation form to push this to an extreme. Check out this frame from the trailer of Wall-E’s hands, for example:

 

[I’m about to embark on some photography tech trivia, so if you’re not interested skip the rest of this post]

The subtleties don’t really come across in such a small image as above (they are much more apparent on the big screen), but how the areas in the back of the frame are rendered out of focus is just brilliantly done. What also can’t be communicated by a still image is when they pull the focus back and forth in the frame and seeing how different elements in the scene respond to the shifting focus - it’s completely realistic. You probably think I’m off my nut here, so let me explain a bit more. 

Other animated movies, including ones from Pixar, have of course blurred out the backgrounds, there’s nothing unusual there. What I saw for the first time in Wall-E was the artistic use of blurring, and an amazing attention to detail of how blur occurs with real lenses. In a lot of computer animation blurring will be achieved in the same way Photoshop does it - a uniform blurring of all objects based on distance from the virtual lens. But that’s not how physical lenses actually do things. For example specular highlights (small points of light) get de-focused very differently than flat areas of color.

This is a common trick in photography, and lenses which are effective at giving a nice smooth rendering of out of focus areas are highly prized by photographers and are termed as having “good bokeh”. The term was popularized by photographer and critic Mike Johnston, who has written articles about it, evaluated lenses on it, and even written a self-published book. Some lenses, mostly primes (non zooms) do a especially good job of bokeh thanks to a particular combination of lens elements shapes and arrangement, glass coatings, and shape and number of blades used to create the aperture iris.

For example, here is a detail of shot I took of some spools of tapestry thread. Look at how the bokeh is a bit busy, with some doubling of highlights. Not bad for a zoom lens, but not great.

Here’s a photo of one our dogs, Spencer. This has extremely shallow depth of field, less than an inch, which his eyes are within so they are sharp, but everything else is out of focus. This was taken with a Pentax 77mm Limited lens which I was trying out, considered by many one of the best lenses ever made and which produces spectacularly good bokeh, as you can see here. 

Seeing it at small size sharpens it up, so here’s a 100% size crop. Creamy!:

And here’s one more from a wedding we attended recently, this time taken with a Pentax 70mm Limited “pancake” lens, which is only about an inch thick and is just a beautiful little lens, though it’s bokeh is not quite as good as the 77.

A few post-scripts:

1. If you use a point-and-shoot (digital or film) chances are you won’t get much bokeh. Their sensors are so small that they have very large depth of field and so creating highly out-of-focus areas is almost impossible.
2. If you haven’t seen The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, it is an utterly touching movie, visually stunning, and likewise makes fantastic use of bokeh, but in a very different much more impressionistic way.  
3. If you haven’t seen Wanted, which we also saw this weekend, skip it. Horrible movie. Basically a 2 hour waste of time that makes the case for going postal being a socially acceptable way of dealing with the fact that your life is boring.

If you’re looking for a gift for someone who has everything, and who would be interested in giving something to someone who has almost nothing, then take a look at Kiva.org. It’s micro-lending for the rest of us.

Micro-lending, as you may be aware, is the concept of lending very small amounts of money to people who live in poverty so that they can entrepreneur their way out, or at least improve their standard of living significantly. Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus introduced the idea with Grameen Bank, and it has been growing steadily ever since in various forms. According to an article in the June 2008 Harvard Business Review some 140 million have taken advantage of micro-lending so far, but that pales in comparison to the 3 billion people who live on $2 a day or less.

Micro-lending largely has still been bank or non-profit based. What Kiva.org does is open it up for anyone to make the loans. A visit to their site allows you to read about the many people who are looking for loans, and it’s a simple process to sign up and lend them money.

As is the case with other micro-lending schemes the borrowers are almost entirely women because they are more entrepreneurial and have a much higher payback rate (come on gents, get with the program!). As your selected borrower receives more loans or makes progress on their goals, or pays you back, you get update emails.

Note that this is not a donation, it is a true loan. So you get paid back. And then you can loan the money to someone else. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

The ten-year old son of some good friends of ours recently had his birthday and my wife gave him a $25 certificate to Kiva.org. After looking at the site he wanted to loan money to everybody! He searched for someone who had so far not received any loans, and was delighted to see that after he got the ball rolling, other people started loaning to them as well! He was just ecstatic, and it’s a double gift: the borrower benefits, and this young person has a sense that he can make a difference in a very personal way on a global problem.

In this cynical age, that is a gift in itself.

Related posts: Co-Creation in Emerging Market

New Scientist magazine has a good interview with roving Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase. He travels around the world observing and photographing how people live their lives, and how mobile phones fit into that. It’s kind of amazing that Nokia allows him to blog about it as much as he does, normally a large corporation would keep a much tighter lid on this kind of research. But he’s a good ambassador for the brand, and I’m sure there’s plenty he doesn’t make public (including the all-important conclusions!).

I appreciate Chipchase’s modesty: he avoids the term anthropologist as he’s not trained as one (a refreshing change from some other people who have adopted that bandwagon label), and he also doesn’t get too caught up in only seeing the world from the point of view of a mobile phone. As he says on his blog “life is way more interesting than little lumps of plastic and metal”.

His blog is well worth checking out if you haven’t seen it already, with lots of fascinating photos of details of life from around the world. 

I recently purchased a universal remote control to replace the three other remotes that littered our living room. Both the remotes for the Comcast cable box and Marantz AV receiver were theoretically universal, but none really functioned as such as they were too hard to set up and too hard to use. So we did the familiar remote juggle.

Hoping to fix this I selected the Logitech Harmony One for various reasons which I’ll go into. (I should also note that Logitech is a client of frog design, where I work, but I’m writing this purely as a happy customer.)

I have long been skeptical of universal remotes as they never really seemed to be, well, universal. I’ve done a lot of research for projects over the years where I visit people in their homes to look at how they use technology and a typical scenario these days is that each TV set-up has three to five remotes layed out in front of the couch. On top of that, many houses have several TV’s, each with their own stack of cable/satellite box, DVD, and perhaps a receiver. So that can add up to a dozen or more remotes per household, all of which work differently. It’s a complete mess.

But every time I talked with someone who’d bought a universal remote, they still had the other remotes hanging around as there were one or two buttons on each they couldn’t get to work on the “universal.” I remember one gentleman who had an all-Sony set-up and his Sony universal remote couldn’t even control everything right.

But I can happily say that in the two months since we’ve had the Logitech that we have not touched our other remotes a single time. It mostly was a good experience to set up and is generally a delightful experience to use. Why?

Design

First from an aesthetic point of view it is quite elegant in a piano-black looking finish and a sleek shape that fits well in the hand (though it is so blobby that it sometimes is a bit slippery to orient quickly, despite being rubberized on the back surface). The buttons are mostly well positioned and fall readily to hand, though the remote is very long and I have to hike it forward in my hand to use the channel buttons, which makes it a bit unbalanced. My wife in particular likes the fact that it lights up when you pick it up or jostle it, which gives it an “alive” feel. Since both of us are designers, these things matter.

Interface

Speaking of which, all keys are lit, as of course is the nice color LCD display at the top. The UI is graphically rich, and the touchscreen makes navigation simpler than the older Logitech remotes that had buttons on the side. This is closer to an iPhone, whereas the older ones were like ATMs.

While the remote itself is very slick, the UI of the PC application used to configure it is aesthetically a 90’s throwback that looks like paintings of the set-up done by the brother of a start-up’s founder. It is probably legacy from when Logitech bought (start-up) Harmony to create its own remote control division, and they haven’t got around to updating the look to the Logitech corporate style. While friendly looking it is incongruous.

Ease of use

Logitech uses an activity-based approach for doing most things which works well. If you want to watch TV, you select the activity on the screen called “Watch TV”, and so on. This makes it easy to quickly get down to the business of couch potato-ing. The remote takes care of turning on all the components needed for that activity, in optimum order, and switching any inputs/outputs as necessary, and doing things like changing the surround sound setting. This takes a few seconds sometimes, during which you have to keep the remote pointed at the components or you risk the process not finishing and you having to do things manually (the horror!). The remote is charged with a cradle and so it needs to be put back in that every day or two, depending on how much you’ve been using it.

Universal

It truly does seem to be universal. Most of my AV components are new so those are expected. What wasn’t expected was that it had both by 1980’s vintage Harman Kardon Citation 23 tuner and Acoustic Research turntable in its database. The turntable is not remote-enabled of course, being a completely manual unit, but because of the activities-oriented approach in order for me to listen to it I needed to create an activity so that the Logitech can switch the receiver to the right input.

Set-up

To set up all the activities on the remote you connect it with a USB cable to a PC and then run an application (Mac or Windows) that asks you a series of questions to determine your system configuration. It’s sort of like TurboTax for your home theater. Logitech recommended setting aside about an hour for the set-up, and I think it took me a bit longer than that. Once you’ve got your initial set-up complete you try the remote out and see if everything works. If not then you go through a diagnostic to make modifications.

Most of the stuff was fairly straightforward, but two things took most of the time. The most infuriating one had nothing to do with the remote, and that was trying to figure out seemingly conflicting messages about which HDMI connector was being used by the TV (the receiver has 2 outputs). But the process was not helped by some diagnostic menus that were a bit confusing once I had to dig in and adjust some parameters. Once this was sorted the turntable presented the other challenge: the remote has no specific activity for listening to records. It turned out however, that my model of turntable was listed in the cassette deck activity! Weird.

How about downsides? It has a few

Device functions

While the activities are great for most things, sometimes you need to dive in and adjust a specific function on a single device. To do this you have to step through a series of screens of on-screen buttons, which can get to be numerous (8 in the case of my receiver). The buttons are labelled in alphabetical order, which means that power cycle (forcing a device on which didn’t come on) can be several screens deep. The names of the buttons don’t always map to what they are called on the device either. Better prioritization and clustering of these would be appreciated. Luckily you don’t have to do it very often.

Price

It is expensive at $250 list (though it can be had for much less). It’s not the spendiest remote Logitech makes, but it’s up there. It’s easily the best looking though (there’s that designer thing again), and the touch-screen makes it worth the premium. My wife had a bit of sticker shock (and I ordered with some hesitation, given my doubt about universal remotes), but now we are both completely sold on it.

By the way, an instrumental factor in me buying this remote was a user-submitted video on Amazon. It was very in-depth and really provided a good overview of how the remote would work. The reviewer Heath L. Buckmaster should get a commission from Logitech or Amazon.

Related Post: Competitor for the Worst User Experience

<grumpy>

I’m fed up with advertising in places where you are held captive, like movie theaters. I’m going to call it “indentured advertude” - advertising where you are held hostage to look at it and you know all it’s doing is paying for the crappy experience you’re having.

I’m fed up with advertising appearing on every conceivable flat surface that you might possibly look at, like grocery store floors.

It is oppressive, aggressive and reeks of desparation.

I found a new example this week that manages to combine all of these. With oil closing in on $150 a barrel and people not flying due to high ticket prices and the ever worsening experience of actually getting on a plane, US Airways is getting desparate. They have started selling advertising on their tray tables. One flight I took this week GM had ads all over the plane (pictured above), on the flight back it was Verizon. (This was on top of the several minutes of forced advertising they subjected us to with the drop-down TV monitors, with the sound and jingles blasted over the PA.)

Luckily I discovered that they are just vinyl labels that peel off easily. That’s me stickin’ it to the man.

Gee, US Airways, think if you improved the flying experience that might help retain customers, rather than pissing them off with indentured advertude?

</grumpy>