Michael Naimark - USC Interactive Media Professor Shooting to 'Flickerize' Google Earth

May 8, 2008

Michael Naimark is a longtime media artist and researcher. He is expertise in "place representation" and has made interactive "moviemaps" of Aspen from the street, Paris from the sidewalk, San Francisco from the air, Karlsruhe from the rail, Banff from hiking trails, and stereo-panoramic movies in Jerusalem, Dubrovnik, Angkor, and Timbuktu with the cooperation of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre. His work is an unusual combination of optimism and activism (for example, it currently ranks #1 on Google searches for both VR webcams and camera zapper).

Naimark was instrumental in the founding of several world-renown research labs and his art projects exhibit internationally. He received the World Technology Award for the Arts in 2002, was the subject of a 20-year retrospective at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 2005, and currently serves on the Visiting Committee for the MIT Media Laboratory.

More at http://www.naimark.net/

Professor Naimark took a few minutes to give us a insight into the success of Viewfinder and to discuss his other ideas: Movie Tagger, Propagation Engine, and True Tally.


Help us understand what you are up to:
The Viewfinder project began unofficially in March 2006 with a little manifesto I wrote for a "collective world wide movie map" and posted on my website. Paul Debevec at the Institute for Creative Technologies expressed interest, which led to some modest summer research support from ICT.

My conclusion early on was that any and all photographs could be integrated into 3D models as perfectly aligned overlays if one was willing to use a little bit of human help. This was an unconventional approach since most computer scientists want to automate such processes. The problem is that automation only works for certain photos, not all. So in a very real way, the technology is driving creativity. Enlisting a bit of human help inverts the paradigm.

The research led to a meeting with the head of Google Earth in August 2006. The funny part is that a week before our meeting, Microsoft announced "PhotoSynth," a similar project at least in spirit. Google asked for a proposal. A year passed. Then, in August 2007, seemingly out of nowhere, we were informed of a Google "Research Award" to continue this work in "collective photo mapping."
 

This is an image from the Viewfinder demonstration.

What drives you to continue pursuing this area of study?
I have two different answers. The first is entirely personal and to some extent mysterious, and I'm not sure how productive it is to analyze. The second answer is entirely secular and is driven by a conviction (rightly or wrongly) that if I don't push my ideas forward, some lame and mediocre alternative might get there first.

Describe how your work might impact people's lives, now and in the future:
By enabling new experiences. Oliver Wendell Holmes once said: "a mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions."

How did you come up with the idea?
The kernel was less of an "aha" as it was the incremental result of many years of experience, in my case exploring how new media may convey "sense of place". That was the kernel. But the bulk of the innovation came as a result of a very talented and open-minded team. It was both rewarding and challenging because the team members came from two different disciplines (computer science/vision/graphics and interactive media/design/art).

Has anyone ever doubted that your idea could work?
Yes: me. Though my tolerance for risk-taking is relatively high, I'm a big believer in "calculated risk," where thorough research and honest assessment are essential. Failure may be minimized but it's never eliminated.

What is the next step in the innovation process for you (and how might people help)?
We did something a little different: we ran hard and fast and lean with our funding, then immediately posted everything we learned with nothing held back on a public website, but right before posting we filed a Provisional Patent Application of the same material. In a very real way, we're using the patent process for which it was originally conceived: as a vehicle to quickly and openly disseminate invention with the security of knowing that we're protected. The visibility of the website has generated considerable interest and now we're considering next steps.

What mistake taught you the most?
Not jumping in at the right moment. Windows of opportunity are often extremely narrow, and the problem is that this is not obvious until it's too late. With Viewfinder, we may have gotten lucky.

What is the one innovation you can't live without?
The Undo command.

What would people be surprised to learn about you?
I've been a member of the American Anthropological Association's Society for Visual Anthropology for over 20 years. This has quietly been my "other" community and I've gained a great deal of insight from it. I always tell my students to "spread out" from their own little community and make the effort to mingle in others.

What do you wish you would have invented?
The staple remover.

Any tips for aspiring innovators?
The best art teacher I ever had once said that he was convinced that the creative process consisted of two parts. The first part was the actual coming up with creative ideas. He said that he had no idea where such things came from and didn't think that, as a teacher, he could offer any advice or help. The second part was the ability to step back from one's work and take a critical, detached look at it. This, he said, was something he thought he could instill in his students. My advice to aspiring innovators is to cultivate this second part of the creative process as much as the first.

Other Projects by Michel Naimark:

Movie Tagger is a method and system for parsing and richly tagging every movie ever made - scene by scene, shot by shot, and frame by frame - by employing a community of enthusiasts.

Propagation Engine is a system that allows streaming items of current interest to bubble up a ranking list, so that they can be found as they happen.

True Tally is an inexpensive next-generation smart camera feature in the spirit of what has recently become known as respectful cameras.