Festival of the Arts at the Narrows

We're still throwing things at the wall here at Aerial Vr, just to see what will stick. It's one way to start a business. It's not that scientific but it's a lot of fun and a lot smarter than it sounds at first reading. Think about it. It means cooking up a variety of ideas like different forms of pasta and seeing what seems to work by observing first hand how people respond. It means getting in there with one's sleeves rolled up. It means cooking. It means throwing pasta at the wall which is always fun. Then there's the last step, talk the people and observe their reaction.

We combined Chris' growing fascination with and mastery of a group of Adobe Photoshop plug-ins and my contacts in the local arts community into a fun weekend recently throwing pasta and generally having a good time. First ... the plug-ins. Plug-ins are software add-ons created by one company and meant to work within another company's software package. In this case, a company created a group of plug-ins for use within the well known Adobe Photoshop. How well known is Adobe Photoshop? It's so well known that "photoshopping" has become a verb meaning "to alter a photographic image digitally using computer software." You know you've really arrived when you become a verb.

So what sort of photoshopping has Chris been up to? He starts with one of our panoramas. The Panoramas are the result of stitching together 8 standard images in another software program. They are long strange looking rectangular arrays of pixels which look like this:


They contain imagery of virtually everything that can be seen from a given point in space ... the point where we placed our camera. They remind me of those funny looking world maps that we all looked at in grade school. They looked so funny because .... well, think of an orange. You can't peel the skin off an orange and flatten it out, at least not exactly. If you make a few clever cuts in it you can almost flatten it out. You can also stretch it using the mathematics of mapping. That's how we arrived at the image above, not by doing mathematics, we're not that clever. We used a stitching program. The people who designed the stitching program did the math.

But back to Chris and his photoshopping. He's been using tools that remap every pixel in our rectangular arrays to a new location. We call "little planet view", "tunnel view". They're quite similar but think "inny" and "outy." That is to say that in the little planet view the sky ends up wrapped around the outside and the ground and the buildings on it end up on looking like a ball or little planet on the inside. In the tunnel view the sky ends up in a ball on the inside and the ground or floor ends up wrapped around the outside. They're strange. They're Alice and Wonderland meets Pink Floyd. They're a lot of fun to look at as well.

So we went looking for people to look at them. We found them at the Festival of the Arts that the Narrows Center of Fall River puts on every year. I set up on Anawan Street with 30 or so other artists and craftsmen. We'd printed out 10 of our favorites and hung them on easels. I sat and spoke to people as they strolled by. We drew a lot of comments. We drew a lot of interest. I handed out close to 100 business cards. We didn't sell a single photograph but it didn't seem to matter. The pasta was sticking.

An example: a graduate of Durfee High came by and inquired about the possibility of getting a large quantity of prints of that building perched precariously on its little planet for his upcoming class reunion. He went through High School in the 60's. He may still think Durfee High looks like that. I don't know but he loved the image and he thought a lot of his classmates might also like them. Another young fellow took the little planet concept and ran with it ... to a line of clothing. He saw his teenaged pals wearing t-shirts with strange distorted insects on them, things like scorpions with large drops of poison hanging from their tails ... and in the poison .... a little planet. My imagination doesn't run to scorpions but I can work with T-shirt. We may stay in touch.

Another fellow referred to our photographs as "fine art." I'm not sure how fine it is but the point is that the pasta appears to be sticking and we'll try our luck at "Arts Around the Block," which takes place September 20th, from 12-4pm on Purchase St. in Fall River. Maybe we'll see you there.

Fair Journey,

Brian Shriver

Aerial Vr - "Your location in high definition virtual reality." email us with your comments and ideas at btshriver@aerialvr.com & cblake@aerialvr.com For more about our services see our website at www.aerialvr.com

Gooseneck Cove - the rest of the story

Gooseneck Back 2 in Narragansett Bay

We haven't told you enough of the story of Save the Bay's assault on Gooseneck Cove. It's not just about one new culvert on Ocean Ave. It's a good deal more. There were three major obstacles to tidal flow in Gooseneck Cove: Ocean Ave and its inadequate culvert to Fishermen's Cove, a dam about halfway back and Hazard Road with no culvert at all near the back of the cove. Save the Bay took care of all three obstacles during their renovation project.

Part of the credit goes to the town of Newport. Newport realized that they could shorten emergency response times to part of their town by improving Hazard road in order to allow the safe passage of emergency vehicles. Instead of strangling STB's efforts with red tape, Newport picked up part of the cost to raise and pave the road in question, adding the culvert to improve tidal flow as a matter of course. Now the salt water courses in under Hazard Road, carrying seaweed, crabs and the occasional soggy politician pointing out the benefits of cooperation as he passes. You have to stand up and cheer when bureaucracies and organizations do smart things. So often they don't and leave the common man scratching his head in disbelief.

So, with more of the story to tell with our pictures, we went back to a location on the west side of Hazard Road near the new culvert to take a photograph that would show the area most affected by the project, ie. the area most relieved of the invasive phragmites grass "downstream" (from the standpoint of the incoming tide) of Hazard Road. We arrived at our spot at 8am on a Saturday morning. Low tide had occurred around 5am. High tide was due in at 11. My efforts at setting up the tripod were slightly hampered by our soggy location. Our endpoint in time loomed. The tide was going to get our feet wet within the hour. Chris booted his pc and switched on all the equipment that allow the camera to talk to the computer.

When everything was communicating I lifted the camera and its mount into place on the tripod and began to hoist. In my haste, I nearly overhoisted. The camera and its mount teetered dangerously towards the marsh with two of the poles nested only an inch or so. Chris gasped and my adrenaline responded in time to correct the situation without mishap.... note to self: add warning stripe of red paint to show limit of travel.

With the camera 30' up and stable despite the slight breeze, Chris began the automated process controlled by our software friend "Pappy Wizard." The mount moved and then stalled. The furrows on Chris' brow deepened. The camera came down. A few switches were flipped. The camera went up and he restarted the process. Pappy wasn't happy and we didn't know why. Pappy is young. He can't always tell us where it hurts and sometimes collapses in a heap without warning. Even a short nap in the way of a restart doesn't always help.

The tide came rushing in, cheered by all onlookers. We broke down our equipment and packed it away without really knowing if we had all of the images we'd need to create a panorama. You know we did because you see it above with all of the fascinating shapes and colors that flowing water, sand and marsh grasses can create.

With the equipment packed away we had time to chat with the natives. Jack Kelly surfaced as our insider's guide to Gooseneck Cove. He filled our ears with facts about what had transpired here, many of which found their way into this blog entry. He informed us of the presence of a Yellow Throated Night Heron down the road. Chris replies that his father's favorite bird had always been the Rosy Breasted Pushover. Clearly a friend to humans, many of Jack's friends now wear feathers and fur. He comes to the cove to feel his stress go out with the tide and points out the blue crab stalking its prey near the culvert's exit. Jack takes pictures and uses them to tell the tale of "Larry the Buck." While the big bucks crash heads, Larry sneaks in and finds out he's just what the doe was looking for, a lesson that can be applied to life, love and the pursuit of business if you care to.

Fair Journey,

Brian Shriver

Aerial Vr - "Your location in high definition virtual reality." email us with your comments and ideas at btshriver@aerialvr.com & cblake@aerialvr.com For more about our services see our website at www.aerialvr.com

Ups and Downs at Aerial Vr

It's been a few weeks of interesting technical achievements and setbacks here at Aerial Vr. It's time to let you in on part of our technical journey.

The good news first .... Chris has put his mechanical design talents to good use developing one of the world's largest camera tripods. We'll soon put a camera with its robotic remote controlled mount 50 feet in the air with perhaps a half hour of man-effort. We're proud of this of course but we're not strutting around like a north Korean with a nuclear missile either. This is not rocket science. It's also a problem that anyone with money can solve. There are collapsible tripods that will lift a camera up that high on the market already and Google will be glad to help you find them. Just get ready to drop a couple grand down your equipment hole before you lift a camera up into the sky.

We're proud because Chris did it for under $500. He's not going to tell every camera buff on the internet how either. We'll just say that he did it with an assortment of commercially available nesting fiberglass poles, some clamping blocks, some angle iron, a few nuts and bolts and hose clamps and a good drill press. The legs all collapse alongside the center pole to create a bundle 10' long and a foot or so in diameter and just light enough for one strong man to carry a 100 feet before collapsing on the pavement. It can be divided into two bundles and carried by 2 men a good deal further in a pinch, or so we hope. We don't want to have heart attacks and we don't want to hire porters. They're both expensive in Rhode Island.

We can let you in on a few more of the general operational parameters of the tripod. It doesn't have a crank. Someone needs to stand on a 6' ladder in order to mount the camera and slide it upwards into the sky one 10' pole and one clamp at a time. Finally and importantly, it will need to be guyed and sandbagged in order to go much beyond 20' into the air safely. We plan to guy it from somewhere near the top with nylon cord, probably down to its own 4 feet for simplicity. A couple of sandbags on the base should keep it stable in a light wind. I said "should." We have yet to lift it skywards with any weight on it. If we had a rocket scientist on staff we'd ask him to calculate how much weight it would take to stabilize our tripod in a 10 mph wind given our 50' max height and our 4 feet arranged in a circle 14' in diameter. It's not that we're not safety conscious or good engineers. It's that we had to lay off our rocket scientist last week due to the economy. We'll just ask our loved ones to stand clear, say a prayer and hoist away. It may not be how you put someone on the moon but it's a time honored experimental approach. It worked for the Wright Brothers. It will work for us too.

But it's not about having the biggest tripod on the block ... not really. Our palms sweat and our pulse quickens when we think about what sort of images we might capture with this marvelous contraption. We're thinking about catching the lovely curve of a coastline from up there or the majestic sweep of lawn leading up to a mansion or two down in Newport. We have a series of public service panoramas planned that will allow us to realize these ambitions without having to waste good time negotiating a paycheck. We hope to photograph Save the Bay's very green and solar panel bedecked roof using it. We may even have enough altitude to hoist the camera in the parking lot north of their building and get a view of their saltmarsh south of it. We hope to use it to photograph the front of their south facing building in the clear morning light. We also hope to capture unforgettable images of two of Fall River's iconic architectural structures: St. Anne's church and Durfee Highschool. If we have our way or should I say "if we're able to realize our ambition" then soon people from Tokyo to Taiwan will be studying these two remarkably beautiful stone facades and planning their vacations accordingly. I hyperbolize in order to amuse but the telling fact remains. We'll be using our new tripod to realize the aerial part of our name in the next few weeks or we'll collect a few bruises and a sprained back in the attempt.

But it's not one achievement after another here at Aerial Vr. We've collected our lumps as well. We won't play our violin too loudly or plaintively but this is one hell of a complicated way to take a picture. On a bad day it will send you running for your insta-matic. The lens on our digital SLR has to "talk" to our camera if you please. (We used to happy if the lens let light through. Now it has to talk and perhaps more to the point be heard.) The camera has to talk to our usb hub. The hub has to talk to our "hot spot" radio frequency gadget. The hotspot has to talk to our laptop's network card. Once inside our pc, the line of communication is more or less safe, (as safe as anything running in one of Bill Gates' creations can be) still, at least 4 pieces of software have to be opened in the correct order and dozens of operational parameters set properly in order to take the series of photographs that will become a virtual reality panorama.

One of the software programs is called Pappy Wizard. The Wizard talks to the robotic camera mount we call Ansel. It talks through the same cards, hubs and hotspots as our camera. The Wizard and Ansel communicate just fine as long as the phone lines don't go down. There are a half dozen batteries, a half dozen electrical and usb connections and about 100 ways that the whole contraption can refuse to work. The Wizard is very clever at aiming our camera with the help of Ansel's servos but don't think of Captain Picard saying "make it so!" There's a whole engineering department working hard to realize his orders. The wizard needs to be informed about the camera and lens. Everything from the lens' focal length to the camera's array type (there are 3) need to be entered correctly before Ansel and the Wizard can be set on their happy robotic way to capturing overlapping images.

All this to tell you that we went out recently with high photographic hopes and we came up short. Our Tokina lens wouldn't talk to our camera. It needs an adjustment that only the chiropractors at Tokina can provide. A second lens' focal length had to corrected due to our camera's array size. The Wizard needed to be informed of that fact and wasn't. So it was a swing and a miss. We came home without the prize we sought but just a little wiser and a little more determined to bring it home next time. Stay tuned to this station. We'll have some amazing virtual reality photos from high off the ground for people to enjoy in the next few weeks or our name isn't Aerial Vr.

Fair Journey,

Brian Shriver

Aerial Vr - "Your location in high definition virtual reality." email us with your comments and ideas at btshriver@aerialvr.com & cblake@aerialvr.com For more about our services see our website at www.aerialvr.com