Filming in the round

I have been experimenting with 360 filming, using the Samsung Gear 360 camera linked to a Samsung Galaxy phone.

Here are some of the things I've learnt:

Camera position is everything. When you film with a conventional camera, where you place it is just one of many decisions that will define the shot. (Along with framing, choosing the lens and focus for instance.) In 360, camera position is almost the only decision you need to make before pressing record: you can't even decide where to point it, of course.

If you're filming in 360, you'd better offer 'value for money' by having different things happen in as many different directions as possible, requiring the viewer to make use of their ability to track around the picture.

This is the first of my experiments, filmed with that in mind:

 

NB: If the video still frame above is the first of the images below, then you're viewing in a browser that doesn't support 360 video play on YouTube (e.g. Safari). Try Chrome, where you should see the second image below, which is how it looks when it is going to play in 360.

When you're watching, you can navigate around either using the pointers on the button top left, or by holding the mouse (or your finger on a touch screen) and dragging the picture round.

Here's my second experiment, where I attached the camera to my bicycle like this:

















This demonstrates a couple of things not to do:

First, if you view this through the Samsung Gear Headset, for the full immersive experience, it will make you feel distinctly sea-sick. Apparently that's caused by the camera tilting horizontally, as when the bicycle goes round the corner. If you want a happy audience, stay level.

Second, if you don't want to look like a grim, looming giant, put the camera at eye-level (and smile):



In those shots, I was controlling the camera (recording and viewing live what it was seeing) through a linked Samsung Galaxy phone.

So then the question is, how do you view what you've filmed? Well, first you have to save the shot from the camera, where it's recording, onto the phone, which takes a little while, depending on the length of the shot. In the process, a conversion from the original file happens.

The simplest option for viewing, playing back in the phone itself, isn't as easy as you might expect - unless I'm missing something.

The shots are saved to the phone's Gallery, as on other Android devices. But if you view from there, or through the Gear 360 app, you can't get the full 360 experience, moving the phone round to see different parts of the view. Instead, there's a choice between: Dual view (the two 180 cameras in the Gear shown as two corrected rectangles on a split screen); Panoramic (where the left side of the picture joins up with the far right side like a map of the world); 360 view (which is like a big distorted sphere); Stretched; and Round view (below), which looks like this:

Interesting, but not very useful.

To get the full, immersive 360 experience, you need to insert the phone into the back of the Gear VR headset. Before doing so, you need to go back to the Gear 360 app, and touch "View on Gear VR", which will prompt you to insert the device into the headset.

In my experience, it often takes a few attempts at putting the phone into the headset before you hear little pings on the headset that tell you it's ready for you to navigate with its controls on the right side, to find the Gallery, and press play on your video.

The immersive experience is good, giving you the ability to 'look' in different directions convincingly, although deciding to do so doesn't come naturally when we're so used to just staring ahead at video. There needs to be real motivation to keep a viewer's attention on what the director wants the audience to be seeing. Otherwise, they'll just be using the 360 opportunities to stare idly at irrelevancies to pass the time, like bored children in class.

So how do you make your video viewable to more people than can have access to your phone and a headset that takes a lot of fiddling to make work?

One answer is YouTube, and the Samsung phone lets you upload direct, which is handy. But do so from inside the Gear 360 app. If you upload direct from Gallery, YouTube won't recognise that your video is 360, and will just show it in the panoramic form, which looks weird.

Once you've uploaded, if you open YouTube on your phone, you'll get the proper effect, where you can 'look' at different things by tilting and rotating the phone.

In the next blog, I look at how to edit your 360 videos.

If you want to find out about the very minimalist controls on the camera, here's a good video that someone has kindly made. 

Understanding trees

Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

This is an odd cocktail of a book made up of three ingredients, shaken or stirred together with varying success.

First, there’s the science: beautifully written, poetic but rigorous explanations of how trees grow and reproduce: like Biology A level taught by Seamus Heaney.

Second, there’s the story of how a child from ice-cold Minnesota made her way in the world, found love and – well, I won’t give it all away.

Then there’s the inside view of academia: how a scientist makes a living; the interplay of hard graft, hard won connections and the large dose of luck needed to wring a stable livelihood from even the most brilliant work.

Put all that together over 300 pages and sample it a little at a time over a week or so and the effect is like hanging out with someone who goes on about different parts of their life in unpredictable ways. There’s no question that Jahren is an interesting companion. But sometimes you just wish she’s tell you more about the trees and less about her lab partner Bill, and sometimes the other way round.

Ah yes, Bill. It’s hard to believe that this truly eccentric character and his peculiar relationship with Jahren isn’t a work of fiction. He starts as a kind of down-and-out, living in a hole in the ground, then in a car. But he’s completely reliable, the ultimate fixer of things that need fixing in a lab. He works night and day and has no other life – living in the lab as a step up from his previous arrangements.

Jahren is devoted to Bill, and, as his employer and only source of material wellbeing, wracked with guilt about him. There seems to be no sexual or romantic side to their relationship. He’s more like a twin, but she is the leader. According to her allegedly verbatim accounts of their conversations, he’s smart and well-informed, canny and wise. Because Jahren is not hugely self-absorbed, the book sometimes seems to be more about Bill than her. If you don’t want to hear about Bill, you won’t like the book.

What makes the book better than the above may sound is the quality of the writing:

In the end, trees die because being alive has simply become too expensive for them. Whenever the sun is up, leaves are working to split water, add atmosphere, and then glue the whole mess into sugar that can be transported down into the stem, where it meets dilute nutrients that were laboriously pulled up by the roots. A plant can bundle all these treasures into new wood and use it to strengthen the trunk or branches. But the tree also has many other demands: replacing old leaves, making medicine against infection, pumping out flowers and seeds – these use the same raw materials, there are never enough to spare, and there is only so far out or down the tree can go in order to search for them. Eventually it will require more nutrients to maintain the branches and roots that do not grow quite far out enough to capture those nutrients. Once it exceeds the limitations of its environment, it loses all. And this is why you must trim a tree periodically in order to preserve it. Because – as Marge Piercy first said – both life and love are like butter and do not keep: they both have to be made fresh every day.

Whether Lab Girl is more than a set of essays, sewn into a quilt at the insistence of a publisher, is another question. But there's no doubting the quality of the ingredients.

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Another dispatch from the wild frontier of the tech business

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyon

Disrupted fits neatly into an entertaining genre of first person accounts of the madness of the tech revolution. Michael Wolff’s Burn Rate (1998) was an early classic, a hilarious account of a dot com startup that failed to deliver the promised riches to Wolff or anyone else involved. Start Up by Jerry Kaplan (1994) and The Leap by Tom Ashbrook (2000) both tell similarly sad tales of startups that are no longer with us. Then there’s Amazonia (2004), James Marcus’ record of Amazon’s messy transition from employing writers like him to deciding that algorithms did a better job. Douglas Edwards’ I’m Feeling Lucky (2011) is set in the bizarre world of Google. And there are more.

The best of these books are written by journalists who were unable to resist the promise of easy money, and, foolishly, it usually turned out, jumped on the tech bandwagon. Things never quite work out as hoped, and, either to exorcise the disappointment or because it’s the only work then on offer, the ex-journo, having left the business, produces a book about life in the crazy world of tech startups.

What makes Dan Lyons’ account special is his extreme cynicism about the company he’s joined from the moment he walks in the door. Indeed Hubspot, as it’s called, does appear to be gripped by its own brand of world class lunacy. The inevitable decoupling between our hero and his techie colleagues is especially bloody.

HubSpot is (still) a Boston-based marketing company. Lyons’ descriptions of it reminded me most of a fictional tech business, The Circle in Dave Eggers’ 2013 book of that name. There are the same armies of eager young people, the same cultish devotion to the company’s ideals and the same grandiose ambitions, somewhere between inspired and unhinged.

I mean, would Eggers have considered this plausible? HubSpot’s co-founder, Dharmesh Shah, brings a teddy bear called Molly to meetings to represent the customer, because in the words of Shah’s manifesto for company culture Hubspot should always be “solving for the customer” (shortened to “SFTC” in the company)? Hence Molly sits there, to remind everyone of the customers. Shah even posts a picture of Molly in her little chair at a meeting on LinkedIn. Lyons is not impressed:

“Here are grown men and women, who I presume are fully sentient adult human beings, and they are sitting in meetings, talking to a teddy bear. And I am working with these people. No: worse! I am working for them.”

Then there’s the company mantra of HEART, the values HubSpot aims to live by: Humble, Effective, Adaptable, Remarkable, Transparent. Everyone gets a mark for each of them from their manager, which as Lyons points out, seems more like just a measure of how much their manager likes them.

All that kind of thing may be silly, but is unlikely to give anyone a nervous breakdown. What might is the way Lyons was ostracised by his colleagues for not being ‘HubSpotty’ enough (the term being a straight imitation of Google’s ‘Googly’). Meanwhile, his bosses switch unpredictably between non-communication, being warm and supportive, and subjecting him to bullying campaigns of nit-picking micromanagement in which, by his account, he was constantly tripped up despite playing along with the demeaning tasks he was set.

The story is a gripping and pacey tale of highs and lows, with some vivid character studies. But Lyons uses them to make bigger points. First, he shows how a narrowly-defined company culture in which people are praised for being ‘a good fit’ can be a proxy for a discriminatory regime. In his case, for example, he claims the culture disadvantaged older workers like him. Lyons called out the co-founder for as good as admitting as much in a published interview.

Second, he puts HubSpot’s IPO - from which, against the odds, he profited modestly - into the context of other tech flotations in today’s bubbly market. He argues that while the venture capitalists and founders get extremely rich, the ordinary workers don’t – at least not as much as they used to. And that the business fundamentals of the likes of HubSpot are not as solid as they should be for a stock market flotation. They are often still not profitable, and may never be. For the market, the only metric that counts is sales growth. But while that may impress share buyers who provide the original investors with a windfall, it’s not a good basis for a long-term bet on a company.

If you’ve been surprised by the book, you’ll be astonished by the epilogue. Serious but unspecified crimes are alleged in connection with some of the people he’s depicted, about his writing the book you’re reading. But far from that making publication a problem, Lyons goes the other way: he gives us the real names of more of his protagonists. It’s a dramatic and disturbing end to the story.

So what did HubSpot say about Lyons’ apparently damaging portrait of its strange (at best) ways? Well, they addressed some of his complaints in a statement on Linkedin. There are a few admissions, including on diversity. But many questions remain unanswered. There’s no comment, for instance, about the extreme treatment to which Lyons was subjected by his manager. Nor of the criminal allegations.

There’s enough in this book to make great film but it would be much darker than The Social Network. Lyons describes his trademark journalistic attitude as “acerbic”. I’d say it ranges from caustic to, occasionally, plain bitter – albeit with apparent good reason.

It remains to be seen whether in years to come Disrupted will be of interest on account of Lyons’ attitudes as an older worker having difficult adapting to the 21st Century workplace, or because of Hubspot’s bizarre but, it turns out, transitory workplace and business practices.

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