Lately I’ve been working on a couple projects which use 3-D technology to arrange and display merchandise. One project is tied to a Joomla web store which will handle organising the 3-D models, saving scenes and selling of the real merchandise. The other is done using Haxe and Away3D, and would be compatible with mobile devices potentially.
Please if this interests you for your business. I will likely post more about this later!
Today I wrote the following letter to two members of Canadian Parliament:
Dear Ms Benson and Mr Bains,
I am a graphic designer and internet developer in the constituency of Ms Benson. As such, I tend to keep informed about technological advances. I am writing to you because I am becoming increasingly concerned that recent advances in virtual reality and artificial intelligence will soon become extremely invasive of our privacy unless we proactively create legislation to combat it.
Can you imagine if a company such as Facebook knew your every thought? This sounds alarmist, but hear me out. That company is already a heavy proponent of virtual reality:
https://venturebeat.com/2017/10/11/mark-zuckerberg-we-want-to-get-1-billion-people-in-virtual-reality/
What if they enhance their VR technology with eye tracking software, so that they can collect data on absolutely everything you look at with interest? When they find out that you like green socks better than blue ones, you can bet there will be custom advertising based on what caught your eye. People’s sexual preferences will certainly not be exempt from this data collection either.
https://venturebeat.com/2017/09/06/eye-tracking-is-virtual-realitys-next-frontier/
What if they began to analyze your body language to add to their data—tracking your every response as you watch a video? Facebook now owns a gesture-tracking technology, so they can do that too.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/oculus-facebook-virtual-reality-firm-buys-gesture-recognition-firm-pebbles-10394205.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4672508/New-AI-read-body-language-real-time.html
Last but not least, technology is now able to create virtual characters who look and sound like real people. Imagine how persuasive a real-time digital character could be if they knew all your interests, responded instantly to your body language, and even modified their own appearance to be more attractive to you?
https://twitter.com/verge/status/912403648356978688
Would not companies pay for such things in order that you would buy their products or submit to their agenda? Would not some politicians leverage such technology in order to sway your vote? These things are coming, and we need legislation to stop the abuse before it starts. Companies like Facebook already take heavy advantage of human psychology in crafting how their mobile applications work—using things such as eye tracking and body language will become just another tool in their toolbox.
I would recommend legislation against collection of eye tracking and body language data outright. This is something that people should not have to think about while using their computer. I would also recommend legislation disallowing advertising which is instantly customised in response to live user reaction. This would be especially inappropriate in politics. Savvy companies might allow virtual characters in games to be manipulated by digital advertisers—this also should be prevented.
Honourable Members, I know you keep busy with many things. I really hope you could also help out with this very important issue.
Thank you for your service to our country.
Sincerely,
Allan Dowdeswell
UPDATE:
I received a response from Ms. Benson; not sure yet whether my ideas will proceed further. I also recently found this video about research at Dolby, which validates my concerns:
I recently did a fun personal project illustrating and reciting nursery rhymes for my son with special needs, and other kids who need low-intensity entertainment.
At first glance there doesn’t seem to be much production effort involved – just a sketch book and a sharpie. Permit me to share a bit about the things unseen.
To the right of the filming area I kept the nursery rhyme book I was using. To the left was my laptop and microphone. I am sorry that I don’t have a picture at this time.
The video was filmed using a Nikon D90 digital SLR attached to a tripod, suspended over my work table. This worked nicely but was limited to filming 5 minutes at a time in the highest resolution. The other limitation was the camera’s microphone was neither high-quality nor positioned close enough to capture my voice very well.
For audio I used an AT2035 condenser microphone plugged into an M-Audio Fasttrack Pro sound capture board, which was in turn plugged into my Mac via USB. My recording software of choice was Audacity. After recording the high-quality audio, I used the Normalise and Noise Reduction filters (which were hardly needed) to make the quality top-notch.
Recording happened in a series of starts and stops. Sometimes I attempted a rhyme which did not lend itself well to drawing. Other times the camera would come to the end of its time limit and I would need to start over.
When finished recording I had a couple dozen video files from the camera, and I exported multiple MP3 files from Audacity. I imported the video and audio into iMovie and began to edit out the unwanted portions and add fade transitions between clips. I split the low-quality audio from the video track. This allowed me to see the waveform of the original audio and align them perfectly with the imported high-quality MP3 files beneath. Once that was done, I would put the audio level of the low-quality track above to zero.
I was not satisfied with the white balance of the video (it was too yellow) so I adjusted that easily using the iMovie controls.
I wanted a good quality title screen so I sped up the drawing portion of that, and spent a few minutes in GarageBand to record the jingle. After plugging into my electric piano via a USB MIDI convertor, I selected an appropriate keyboard voice from the many options. I had to start the recording in GarageBand, then switch to iMovie to start the video so I could play the jingle in time to the drawing. After doing that I exported an AIFF file and imported that into iMovie for the final cut.
iMovie has the wonderful option of publishing directly to YouTube, so I used that. It took quite a while to upload the 72-minute video but it went smoothly.
All told it was about a full day of work from start to completion. If you know of anybody who would enjoy the video, please share it with them!
