WTF?
Monday July 11, 2022
But first – Elvis, the movie. Terrific. Warning – it is almost 3 hours long. Drink no liquids before hand.
Okay so, hum, when I was in Angkor Wat the guards yelled at me, “No GoPro360.” I had no idea what that was. I thought they meant putting a superwide angle lens on a GoPro. But no.
360 photography refers to a new breed of camera. GoPro makes one as does a firm called InstaCamera.
The idea is that you have a thin rectangular camera with lenses on the front and back. They take video both front and back as you move about. With the Instacamera model the lenses overlap and the software in the camera is smart enough to eliminate the stick you are holding the camera with. Therefore the shot looks in someways like it was done from a drone, if you hold the stick high in the air.
InstaCamera makes another camera – very tiny. They provide a round magnetic pendant. The cord from the pendant goes around your neck. The magnet goes under your shirt. The little camera attaches magnetically to the round pendant. The camera lets you know what it is doing (ie photo, video, etc.) by vibrating and making a little noise. There is also a little light on the thing. It glows blue. I don’t know what it means because there is no instruction telling you what it means.
Likewise, there are no instructions telling you what any of the buttons do on the other camera. Yes, there is a picture with tiny print pointing to the buttons. There is a thing you can scan to get the app on your phone, which is the way to see what you’ve shot. It’s not clear of course, if each camera has a separate app or if it’s all in one app.
Then I got a little thing that looks like a small stopwatch in size. There’s no dial, only a screw that you can attach your bigger of the two cameras to. Cool. Why? There’s also a little thing that looks like the kind of a handle like on the bottom of a tripod shoe. Again, why?
Fortunately, the thing was marked with a label mentioning “Bullet Time Cord.” Again, cool, what?
I Googled “Bullet Time” and I get tons of videos of people using a string to swing their camera around their heads. They get a 360 view of their surroundings in slo-mo. One of the videos showed my little stopwatch thingee. It holds a cord. You can screw your camera into the top piece and then pull the camera away from the hub and a cord comes out. You can then swing the thing around. However, you are not in bullet time.
Okay great. What the hell is Bullet Time? More googling. it’s what they did in the movie The Matrix. It’s when you are in slo-mo and the camera is moving about the subject.
If you want to make bullet time stuff you have to go to the app, poke at the std time icon which will raise a slide bar of options. Bullet time is not listed. If you don’t know it’s a slide bar you won’t know to slide the icons to the left and the Bullet Time icon will appear on the right. You need to select Bullet Time. Then you need to hit the cog icon twice to go back to where you were.
No manual. No instruction in the box. Just scan and watch a bunch of idiots swinging around their environment.
I learned how to operate it from some guy with an eastern European accent.
This is the equivalent of when I was trying to learn some of the controls in iMovie where they had young spindly arm girls yammering on about what you might want to do all the while waving their arms in the air and giving a bunch of “you may want to do this. You may want to do that…” then they’d show the iMovie screen for 3 seconds and do what you wanted to learn. I’d have to stop the action and move slowly through the sequence only to discover they had a different version and what they were doing, my version didn’t have the screen they had.
I think these techie folks are missing a much bigger audience. New technology has five groups of adopters: bleeding edge, early adopters, middle of the road, “I’ll do it if they do it”, and “this is a bad idea. we should kill it”.
It seems the GoPro and InstaCamera are appealing to the first two groups and trying to bring the middle group along by having some really cool videos. It doesn’t really work that way. You want the middle group and the “I’ll do it if they do it” group because that is where the money is.
I saw this in the kiting community with multi-line kites. The manufacturers went after the super-rad athletic types. They got some fabulous performances but didn’t sell much. I mean if you want to sell a kite ya gotta get something a fumble-fingers dad can do with his kids. You need to explain, to show, to have really good instructions.
If you want to sell your cameras. The people with the money are not the folks swinging a camera around on a string. Yeah, it’s cool, but then what?
And if you are going to sell this stuff it would be a really good idea to explain on your website what it is your product does.* Just a thought. I ended up buying both camera because I didn’t understand the difference and the two together on sale were under $1,000. Not everybody can spend that kind of money to find out. Or would care to.
*Yeah. And whole sentences? And as Arlo Gutherie would say, “pictures with circles and arrows.”
Me? I wanna try and show what it’s like to descend a tunnel in and Egyptian pyramid. I don’t know what’s the best way to do that is – yet.
I think the little magnetic guy is the lead contender.
Tomorrow is the hearing. I’ll be back on the beat. I think I’ll sell little Voodoo dolls of various people – politicians. Yeah, that’s it. that’s the ticket.
PS Pictured: The Bullet cord, a GoPro, the pendant, the little white InstCamera 2 and the 360 InstaCamera model One X 2
PPS If anyone says something like, “Of course, everyone knows what bullet time is” or makes similar comments about 360 photography and you begin feeling a little tingling in your body, like someone is sticking a pin in you it cold be because they are. Sometimes the old tech works the best.
“Oh no, Mr. Bill.”
