3D Virtual Reality on my iPhone

One of the current tech trends is 3D virtual reality (VR), so I decided to get some first-hand experience in this area. Perhaps one of the best known companies in this space is Oculus VR which was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for a boatload of money and whose Oculus Rift head-mounted display is considered by many to be one of the industry-leading virtual reality devices even though it is only available for pre-order at the time of this writing.

On the low-end side of VR devices are a number of Google Cardboard viewers. These products are literally made of cardboard, they require manual assembly, and they all adhere to the standard Google Cardboard specifications. And as the name implies, they are all dirt cheap. While there are many to choose from, I purchased the EIGHTones VR Kit XL ($16.99 plus tax at Amazon) for my iPhone 6 Plus. Assembly was aided by a helpful video and was pretty straightforward.

After getting my device assembled, I downloaded some virtual reality apps from the Apple App Store. Here are some free iOS apps that I played with:

• Dive Zombie: This is a zombie shooter game where you aim your gun by simply looking in the direction of the oncoming zombies. The gun fires automatically since there is no "trigger" for the user to pull.
• Moorente: This is a duck hunt game that is similar in concept to Dive Zombie. Note that the app is written in German, but it is fairly easy to figure out how to operate the game even if you cannot read German.
• Roller Coaster VR: This is an app that demos VR capabilities, it basically allows you to look in all directions as you ride a virtual roller coaster.  Pretty neat if you've never seen VR apps before.
• Dive City Rollercoaster: More or less the same as Roller Coaster VR, and this one features a 360-degree loop.
• The Height: In this app, you basically walk through a VR landscape and collect as many items as possible. The only confusing part of this game was that it took a while to figure out that you have to look down to start and stop walking.

All of these apps were more or less designed to showcase VR capabilities so were not rich in features. I suspect that VR games will improve in the future, but playing with these apps was a fun way for me to explore new and interesting 3D worlds on my iPhone.

Lee Family 2015 Year In Review

 

Here is our Lee Family 2015 Year In Review. It is our 10th edition, and all prior editions are available here.  Also visit Victor's Picasa Web Albums site and YouTube channel.

Thoughts on Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens

Today I saw Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, and in the words of Darth Vader from Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, "This will be a day long remembered." Like many Star Wars fans across the galaxy, I have been anticipating the arrival of this movie for quite some time and alluded to it in a prior blog post.

SPOILER ALERT: I'm sure you can get detailed summaries of the movie plot elsewhere, so I'd like to focus on some things that I liked about the movie as well as some things that I think could have been done differently.

Things I liked:

1. I celebrate the gender and ethnic diversity with the introduction of Rey and Finn as main characters. I especially liked the portrayal of a female protagonist as the hero of the movie, as I try to instill positive values and beliefs in my 6-year old daughter. Rey and Finn brought a fresh new look to the Star Wars franchise, and I look forward to seeing them in subsequent episodes.
2. Finn's character development was done well. His defection from the First Order was a nice twist, reminiscent of the Star Wars Rebels cartoon series, and his initial reasons for siding with the resistance were flawed which generated my interest in the plot.
3. It's nice that BB-8 had some personality like R2-D2 did. When I first saw Episode IV as a 6-year old, the droids played a big role in capturing my imagination. But of course they had to instill some cuteness into their droids to promote merchandise sales!
4. It made a lot of sense for Kylo Ren to be Han and Leia's son, those midichlorians gotta come from somewhere!
5. Kylo Ren's light saber--the crossguard has the same coolness factor as Darth Maul's double-bladed lightsaber. Why can't the good guys have such cool toys too?
6. Han Solo's death was probably unexpected, but I welcomed it not because I wanted to see Han Solo die. Rather, I agree with Harrison Ford's comments from a prior interview that killing off his character would have strengthened the original trilogy by adding more dramatic effect, so I guess he eventually got his wish.

Things that I think could have been done differently:

1. Kylo Ren was portrayed a rather weak villain, and this was my main dissatisfaction with the movie. Yes, he did mercilessly kill his own unarmed father, but his character development was incomplete in my opinion. He also had poor fighting skills, especially as compared with Darth Maul (who is my favorite sith lord out of the entire franchise, despite the original 6 movies really being a story about Darth Vader). Additionally, why could Kylo Ren not dispose of Rey and Finn in a light saber battle when apparently neither Rey nor Finn had never even previously wielded a light saber? It is clear that Rey is a Force user, but she was a novice and should not have been able to fend off an attack from Kylo Ren.
2. Part of the appeal of the original trilogy came from the sarcasm, humor, and punchy lines which I can see were attempted in Episode VII but fell short. For example, compare Han Solo's famous "I know" line from Episode V to his no-look shooting of a stormtrooper or his witless bargaining with bounty hunters in Episode VII. Those scenes simply don't measure up to the same entertainment value as the playful banter from the original trilogy.
3. I don't understand why R2-D2 had to emerge from "low power mode" so late in the story, as there was nothing in particular that seemed to trigger his awakening. In fact, if he had awoken earlier, he could have easily provided the missing piece of the galactic map that would have led to Luke's whereabouts, and he could have helped fight the battle in Episode VII. I guess we'll see a lot more of Luke in Episode VIII. It might have been nice to develop a better rationale for the timing of R2-D2's completion of the map.

Overall I enjoyed the movie, and these are only my initial impressions after my first viewing.  Perhaps I have missed portions of the movie that would change my opinion of some of the above points, and of course I do plan to see the movie again (and again). While I chose my first viewing to be in 3D to focus on visual effects and to get a general understanding of the plot, I think I prefer my subsequent viewings to be in 2D so I can focus more on story details. What did you think of The Force Awakens? Leave a comment below.

A Fortunate Mistake

Yesterday was Halloween, and we had planned to attend a costume party with several other family members.  I thought it would be a good opportunity to play around with green screen (chroma key) photography.  I brought my portable studio equipment which includes a Cowboy Studio backdrop stand, Cowboy Studio umbrella lights, clamps, my camera equipment with fresh batteries, etc.  But as I finished assembling the lights and backdrop stand, I realized that I forgot to bring one important thing: the green screen.  Doh!

Normally I would shoot subjects in front of a green screen and then use FXhome PhotoKey to subtract the green background and superimpose it on a creative background.  As a substitute, I borrowed some bedsheets.  One was beige, and the other was pink, so I decided to go with pink since nobody was wearing pink that day, or at least not that particular shade of pink.  Despite PhotoKey autodetecting what seemed to be the correct shade of pink as the key, I was unable to tweak the settings so that it would only subtract the background without interfering with the subjects in costume.  This is not a criticism of PhotoKey; if anything, it is likely user error or simply not possible given the colors in my setup.

I have manually masked photos using Photoshop in the past, but I know it can be a laborious process.  Therefore, I decided to experiment with masking applications that claim to save a lot of time.  I landed on Vertus Fluid Mask, and I really liked the application.  I don't know anything about its edge detection algorithm, but basically it does a really good job of finding edges and allows you to designate certain areas to be included or excluded (masked) by simply pointing and clicking.  Here's what a sample photo looks like after Fluid Mask automatically detects edges (and before I make any of my masking selections):

From there, it is easy to use a brush to click or paint in any region to mask it.  There are fine-tuning options that enable you to manually mask where edge detection has failed, but I found that I didn't really need to use it often since my subjects were pretty well lit, and the default edge detection seemed to be highly accurate.  Before my daughter could say "trick or treat" one last time, I was compositing images like these:

I consider myself fortunate to have forgotten my green screen, as it forced me to look into other masking options.  I guess masking is easier than I thought, especially with an application like Fluid Mask to help you out.  In fact, I'm wondering if I really even need the green screen as much as I thought I did in the past.  My next step will be to see how well masking works under the typical lighting conditions that I have without my studio lights.  In the meantime, may the Force be with you!

Forcing Synchronization of Contacts in iOS9

I recently upgraded to iOS9, and sometime after that (it might have been immediately after the upgrade or a short time after the upgrade but I'm not sure), I noticed that when I received phone calls and text messages, I would only see the phone numbers of the callers and senders but not their actual names.  It turns out that some (but not all) of my contacts disappeared.  So in an attempt to re-synchronize my contacts from my iMac where all of my contacts remained intact, I plugged my iPhone into my iMac and synchronized through iTunes, but to no avail.  Rebooting the iPhone didn't help either.  I searched online for solutions, including an Apple discussion forum (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7221426) and this trick to force contacts to sync (http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/ios-refreshing-icloud-contacts-calendars), but nothing worked.

Your results my vary, but here's what worked for me.  I simply created a fake contact in my iPhone Contacts application, and that resulted in a synchronization as evidenced by the spinning icon.  This went on for about a minute, after which all my contacts in my iMac re-appeared in my Contacts app on my iPhone, and my Phone and Message apps displayed names once again.  After that, I deleted my fake contact, and order was restored to my universe.

Xbox Live Woes

For the last 4 days, I have had trouble logging into Xbox Live. Looks like Microsoft is aware and working on a fix:

However, in the meantime some of my Xbox 360 functions are more or less crippled.  For example, while I could play games and watch DVD movies, I cannot use any apps that require me to first login to Xbox Live.  Namely, we often watch videos on our 60" HDTV through the YouTube app on our Xbox but now are unable to do so.  It would be nice if I was not required to first login to Xbox Live in order to use an app.

Anyone know if there is such a requirement for Apple TV?

Mercedes-Benz Navigation Option

We recently bought a Mercedes-Benz 2015 C300 for my wife, and I am generally pleased with the performance of the vehicle.  However, I am very disappointed with the navigation system which is one of the major features in the "320 Multimedia Package" that was priced at an additional $2,690.  The navigation system is laughably horrible to use.

For starters, the user interface is based on voice input and a scroll wheel, so touch gestures and typing are unavailable.  That in and of itself would not be hugely problematic if they could only get creative with the way drivers input information, but that is where the comedy begins.  It is virtually impossible to jump straight to a point of interest search for destination input.  As an example, if you just say "McDonald's" (after all, the presence of a McDonald's validates the existence of a city, doesn't it?) it will choke--instead, you are required to enter a physical address.  Well what if I don't know the physical address?  All the popular map applications (eg, Google Maps, Apple Maps, Waze) let me search for a point of interest without knowing the physical address.  Major fail.

I later discovered that there is a point of interest search, but it too has its limitations, but this time in terms of map data comprehensiveness.  I searched for my daughter's school, but the only entry it could find was a school of the exact same name but in a city that was hundreds of miles away.  Given that it was a brand new car (and therefore should have a relatively recent map version installed) and given that my daughter's school has been around for a very long time, and given that all the other popular map applications that I listed above know where my daughter's school is, the Mercedes-Benz navigation fails again.

So finally, I look up the physical address of my daughter's school, painstakingly enter the information via voice command, and I try to save the address for future reference and easy access.  Rather than let me save the entry with a voice-inputted name and perhaps an assigned numerical ID that I can later scroll to and select or say a number command, the navigation system asks me to speak the name of the entry.  On the positive side, it asks me to repeat the phrase with the same intonation to make sure it properly stores my digital voice signature so that I can ask for it again by the same name.  On the negative side, I had to repeat it several times because there were slight variations in how I spoke the name, and it did not accept those names as equivalent voice commands.  I wonder how likely I am to replicate my voice signature for that destination entry to be able to successfully recall the destination on a different day?  And while I haven't tested it, I suspect that if I fail to replicate my own spoken destination just a few seconds apart, I highly doubt that my wife will be able to retrieve the same stored destination using her voice command.

In conclusion, if you are considering the 320 Multimedia Package to get the navigation feature, I would recommend that you seriously reconsider.  If you have a smartphone, you already have access to a wide variety of free turn-by-turn navigation applications that are far superior to the Mercedes-Benz navigation in terms of usability and map data accuracy.  I do like the 8.4" color display that comes with the navigation package, but unfortunately the display does nothing to compensate for a completely useless navigation system.  If I've just saved you some money, please comment below!