Have you ever been overwhelmed by the amount of pictures on the internet? Did you ever wish for a way to swim through them seamlessly like Tom Cruise does in Minority Report? CoolIris Inc. – a company founded by Stanford University Alumni – with the introduction of PicLens has taken us one step closer towards that dream. PicLens is a user-friendly 3D photo web plug-in for the common web browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox that displays relevant search pictures on a three dimensional “wall”, allowing users to skim through hundreds of related pictures at the flick of the finger.

On Friday, March 28th 2008, five of the core developers of PicLens at CoolIris visited ETC-Silicon Valley. The visit commenced with the two project teams, ProjecX and Project CA, presenting their work to CoolIris, followed by a discussion with CoolIris on the success and future of PicLens.

The success of PicLens can be boiled down to two elements. First, to quote CoolIris, PicLens is a total immersive experience. Unlike typical search engines like Google images, when users view relevant images on the “wall”, they lose all context information and enter a seamless space containing hundreds and hundreds of images. In my opinion, this is as close as one could get with current technology to “diving into the web”. The result of such immersion speaks for itself. According to CoolIris, on average a typical user spends up to 2 hours in PicLens per session while a youtube user may only spend about 40 minutes.

Second, because PicLens is an immersive and engaging tool, from a business point of view, it is also the best immersive advertising platform. During their demonstration, CoolIris showed us a few example sites which used PicLens as a shopping and advertising interface. For example, a customer at a clothing online store may quickly load up all the sweater sample images onto his or her “3D wall”. If a sample image catches the customer’s eye, he or she could click on it and an integrated shopping interface will emerge providing detailed contextual information. To me, the example not only demonstrated PicLens’ advertising capabilities, it also showed potential in leading a revolution in the online shopping experience.

With a million users in the month of February and with the number of users increasing exponentially in the past few months, CoolIris’ future seems extremely promising.

On March 25th, ETC Silicon Valley had a guest speaker, Troels Folmann, from Crystal Dynamics, a game company based here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Troels is a producer and also an award-winning composer for many games. Currently, he is a producer during the day, and enjoys working on his art work in his free time.

Troels gave a two-hour presentation mainly focusing on production and leadership, nurturing us by sharing wisdom found from his experience, and listening to the real problems that occurred during our own production in the semester.

“If anything can go wrong, it will and it can”, said Troels, touching on how Murphy’s law applies to production. A producer should be aware of that fact and when it comes to scheduling, imbed such awareness into schedule, setting up a buffer plan. Schedule and metrics should not be solely out of the producer’s head: it should be validated by those who participate in executing the tasks. The most common issues for scheduling are dependencies, daily execution of schedule and visibility.

Troels is a great believer of the new leadership. From old management to a new leadership is a shift currently taking place in the industry and especially in the gaming industry, where many steps of development are about increasing creativity. In the old management style, a producer would provide metrics and schedules, making decisions on non-empathy basis, in a forceful manner. He gave a great example of how now leadership is different from such old management style. If you find an employer not being good at the job he is doing, instead of firing the person for not being “good enough” for the company, he would find out what would be more suitable job for his other abilities and try to retain the employee. New leadership is about being supportive and thoughtful and know you are dealing with real people.

Another interesting theory was the “funnel.” Sometimes, producers would make a mistake of entering employee’s field of specialty too deep. It is good to check in, but micromanagement would harm the productivity, and room for more creativity from the team member.

After his presentation, many questions rose, curious on his artist side. Troels spends a lot of his free time composing music, experimenting with sound and he gets time to work on his inspirations by “sleeping like Napoleon.” His artistic ego crawls out during the nighttime only, and during daytime, Troels is a great producer.

Jason VandenBerghe from Activision Underground Development spoke to our group yesterday about developing games for licensed properties.

Licensed games, especially games based on movie licenses, have had a consistent and well-documented history of generating mixed results. More often than not, the quality of most licensed games would give most players and consumers the impression that they are simply cheap cash-ins on the latest cultural phenomenon. And though high-profile attempts such as Spiderman 3 (Treyarch 2007) tend to garner and warrant mass amounts of public disappointment, the game industry has also created licensed games such as Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (Tigon Studios 2004) which gained unanimous praise as a game that delivered unique, quality gameplay while echoing and expanding the source material being licensed.

Jason Vandenberghe’s lecture touched upon the many challenges that developers face, and how and why the majority of licensed games fall between these two examples. To be fair there are licensed games far worse than Spiderman 3, but I wanted to point out a disappointment that could represent major licensing woes rather than a complete trainwreck of game development history (IE E.T. The Extraterrestrial by Atari 1983).

The first and biggest realization that Jason wanted to communicate was the opportunity that constraints can present. Though working with constraints can be demanding and myopic, the constraints themselves can be liberating. They provide a focal point which creative ideas can be judged against. Any group of game designers can come up with “good” and “exciting” ideas, but what ideas are really going to serve the realization of a living, breathing vision?

It’s a little easier to determine what design features are truly worth pursuing when that vision is already present and has its own identity, and the original property itself serves as a conceptual iteration towards realizing the game itself. A good group of developers can use a set of constraints to identify ideas that will enrich an experience instead of coming up with ideas that don’t fit within a specific context. This is where designers can truly challenge themselves by looking toward what will entertain their audience by forcing developers to understand what fits into audience expectations. Understanding this will allow a designer to identify the appropriate opportunities to surprise and be unique while being true to the source material.

Working with constraints requires one to extend the creative process beyond the development team; it also includes the creative input of those who are granting a license. Communication and an understanding of how a property should be represented needs to happen within a studio in order for a given project to succeed. Developers working on licensed properties need to be aware that this understanding needs to be extended to the owners of the license who most likely possess zero understanding of how games are made or even played.

Bottom line, the results that both parties want to achieve are the results that can’t be argued with, and focused understanding on both sides of a license is one of the key development components that needs to be obtained.

Ralph Guggenheim is CEO of Alligator Planet, and was a producer at Pixar on Toy Story. Yesterday he visited us and spoke on what it’s like to be a producer in the entertainment industry. He discussed his work on “Toy Story” and several other projects, but kept to the producer discussion about them. For me this was a good talk to listen to as last semester had I taken the opportunity to be a producer for an ETC project. A lot of what Ralph talked about I found to either relate to that or I saw how it could be applied to my experiences last semester.

Briefly, my project last semester was called “Bamboo.” At the first pitch the team would simultaneously integrate key next-gen video game graphics features into the Panda3D game engine  and provide teaching assistance to students taking the “Building Virtual Worlds” course. The team was composed of two artists, two programmers and myself as the tech artist and producer.

” – never enough money and never enough time”

For an ETC project, 14 weeks can sound like a lot of time at the beginning of the semester. I was surprised to find out that four years to create “Toy Story” was a short time. Though it dawned on me over the course of the talk that this phrase rings true if the team is unrealistic. In an ideal world, a realistic team and producer wouldn’t run out of time or money due to their experience and ability to predict work time. However the ideal team’s schedule would probably fall apart due to unpredictable factors anyway. Unforeseen budget cuts, or natural disasters, bad blood between team members, anything completely unrelated could all effect the team’s success at accomplishing their true vision.

“its like being a conductor of an orchestra”

Symphony orchestra conductors keep the beat and rhythm going despite having little knowledge of how to play every instrument. From my experience playing in orchestras, it became clear that the better conductors were the ones who had experience with a wide range of instruments. If one is having problems with a measure the knowledgeable conductor could give tips on how to approach that segment rather than ask them to play better. It boils down to better communication overall. Ralph said he came from a CS background and it sounds like it helps him deal with CS people much better. Though he did point out that other project managers were successful, it seemed like they couldn’t hit the ground running if they did not have an understanding of CS.

“each person is actually a producer themselves”

There are two parts to this: people do produce themselves and by doing so end up producing others. Last semester I noticed that after milestones were set, people would integrate that into their own life schedule. Granted, not everyone did this completely but it was clear that they had things in mind. Eventually team members would openly ask me when things were to double check. Due to the small project space others would hear the conversation and be reminded indirectly.

“be a supportive partner and loyal critique”

In the context of a project this sounds like the producer must always make people feel like they have someone helping them but provide sound critique when the project demands it. There were times last semester when the art team cranked out art assets for the project. Every one was really supportive of each other. However when it came down to putting that art into the engine sometimes it was either me or the programmers that had to say “this art isn’t going to look great for technical reason x, y, or z.” It was a hard thing to swallow but it helped everyone on the team learn the direction of the project and more about the pipeline we were constructing.

“lead while following”

This was an area that I had a hard time with last semester. It took me some time to finally understand how to do this. Ralph talked about making sure to “lead for everything other than the creative.” For me, this meant that I maintain an awareness of the project status and direction but not step on the toes of the team. Beyond that, Ralph said that you have to “set wild goals and realistic expectations.” These two quotes tie into each other I feel. It’s almost like having a dog sled. The dogs are the muscle that’s going to propel the sled forward. The driver or producer will stand in the back correcting the course and realizing when to push forward or stop due to exhaustion or bad weather.

“no matter what you do everyone will have a different experience with the project”

It sounds obvious at first but it’s definitely something to be aware of during a project. Ralph talked about having a daily meeting during the production of “Toy Story” where each person that had something new and cool to show presented it to the company. Later, much to Ralph’s confusion, he found out some of the FX people never got to see much of the art being developed. Looking back I’m sure that this was the case last semester. At the very least there was one person on the team that was not a teaching assistant. Each person also had their own different elective class to do work for and that would cut into the project sometimes.

Overall Ralph’s talk was very informative to listen to after having some producing under my belt. During my experience I never had anyone actually describe what the role was and Ralph’s talk helped cement the role and responsibilities of a producer. It was wonderful to hear this wisdom coming from someone who’s worked in the entertainment industry for so many years on so many different projects.