Surrogates

An incomplete piece, but if I don't post it soon I never will.

tags: movies, technology

7 aug 10

A interesting movie. Better than I thought, this movie took a lot of care
to not be a complete piece of fluff.

Obviously it used a lot of CGI effects, but they also paid a great deal of
attention to how they set up and filmed each shot. They went to Panavision
and asked for some slant lenses, which hadn't been used since the 1960s.
Slant lenses have a different focal length across the width of the lens,
allowing the camera to keep two different points at different distances in
focus, which is how they framed many of their shots.

They explored the concept of action at a distance (occasionally a safe
distance) throughout the movie, and the advantages and disadvantages of it.
They also played with the huge social implications of these machines,
specifically the idea of deception. First in the arena of personal
appearance (to include age and gender masking), through the full spectrum to
include impersonating someone by taking over their surrogate (after
murdering them) to fatal effects.

There were a couple of ideas they didn't really play with, such as one
operator controlling many surrogates, or of computer control of surrogates,
creating in effect an autonomous robot.

(Incidentally, I think the widespread use of "surrogates" by the populace as
depicted is unlikely. There are technical reasons, but I think the biggest
is that the machines would be expensive (lots of metal, lots of moving
parts), beyond the reach of most people. They would be the mark of the rich
and powerful. Their use in combat as depicted seems quite likely.)

photo meta-data

Continuing the inconsistent series on digital history...

Facts about files are often written into the files themselves. This
information is called metadata. A common example of this is digital photos.
Most digital cameras will record stuff about the photo, such as the model
camera used, the date and time the picture was taken, camera settings like
f-stop, etc. Newer devices like the iPhone that have built in GPS receivers
will also add lat-long coordinates, which allows for some very cool indexing
after the fact, like listing all photos by location, or by location and
time. (It also leads to some pesky security problems, such as a photo
posted to flickr giving away your location.)

This metadata is referred to as exif, and you can view and edit it with the
appropriate software. See below for more.

http://regex.info/exif.cgi

http://www.friedemann-schmidt.com/software/exifer/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exif

tags: software, history-digital, privacy, security, links