One of my graduate professors at the University of Missouri is doing some work with elder care with technology like this. Getting real 3-D information from multiple cameras takes a lot of processing time, but they can segment the space in a room down to 1 inch cubes. The result is a 3-D silhouette of the objects and people moving in the room. They can tell the difference between people moving throughout the room. A small child is different from a dog in that the dog has 4 legs, for example.
They can identify whether a person is laying on the couch or has fallen. They can extract information such as the bend of the spine and whether a person favors one leg or the other. A silhouette of a cardboard cutout would appear flat to the camera.
What I described above is PHD research using some fairly complex computer vision, 3-D segmentation and pattern recognition algorithms. 3-D scene reconstruction cannot be done with a single camera. The math doesn't work. I would not expect a set-top box with a single webcam to be that good. I would, however, expect them to do motion segmentation on frames of video. Background subtraction would let them ignore the furniture in the room and identify regions of motion. From there, pattern recognition algorithms could be used to find faces and identify the relative shape of a body based on a template. Given that, you could identify whether a person was tall or short and the relative proportions of their bodies. You probably couldn't identify male or female, though. That would be a tough call. You probably could identify a dog versus a child with relative ease.
Luckily, the amount of bandwidth needed to send these images back to the cable company would be pretty massive (given everyone who watches cable in a small to medium sized city) so you shouldn't worry about that. You probably only need to worry about packets being sent back over the cable line identifying the date, time, number of adults, number of children, channel and number of seconds since the last channel change.
At work we send secure student data over FTP to be scored and retrieve the scored data in the same manner. Instead of a secure channel we encrypt the data using each others' public keys. It's fairly easy to set up and use.
http://www.gnupg.org/
I guess I've grown up in the indy comic culture. Other than the huge audience Marvel and DC comics already have, I don't see a reason to join those companies. There are so many possibilities for indy publishing out there. Granted, distribution is a problem for paper comics, but this is the Internet. We have the distribution thing covered.
My comic is 2 years old and has an international "distribution." My readership is roughly 400 and I've sold maybe 30 comics for actual money, which isn't a bad percentage as far as webcomics go. With on demand printing services like Comix Press and Lulu.com and hosting services like Comic Genesis and Drunk Duck, international distribution isn't as big a problem. Getting huge IS a problem because there's so much competition out there.
Although it's great to hear about webcomics making it big, they're just a very small percentage of online comics. Most people will never see any profits from their comics. There's no way to compete with big comic companies like Marvel in the print world. There's no way to compete with big comics in Internet either. Don't try. Webcomics have their niche. Find your group of readers and don't expect to be big. It's a good time, not a living.
There've been some distributed at various conventions in dead tree format. Watch out for "Deadly Bear Attacks"
Deadly Bears Attack can be found here. It's a thread on the Keenspace forums with links to various sites where the PDF might still be hosted. Feel free to download and distribute the PDF file. It's licensed under Creative Commons to allow making and selling copies but not modification of the content. Instructions for printing the comic are also available in or linked from the thread. If you would like to mirror the file, please let us know so we can link your mirror in the thread.
The problem with Deadly Bears is that it's a sampler of comics available online for free. I put 10 issues in my local comic store and over the course of 2 months managed to sell 4 of them.
I printed issue 1 of my own comic and put it in the same store. Again, I managed to sell only 4 copies (at least two went to people I know). People would notice that my comic was available online and not buy the print version.
Having a free webcomic is great if it's free. I see printing comics as a significant expense and would like to be compensated for that. The same with paid advertising. If I'm going to put money into my comic like that I want something in return. Art supplies and such I can deal with. $10 for a pad of bristol board every 5 months is worth while for me as an artist because I get enjoyment out of writing, drawing and inking. The bristol allows me to show off my artwork as well. It's sturdy and I don't worry about it banging it up by carrying it around in my back pack when I go to cons and get togethers. If spending $15 to advertise my comic on onlinecomics.net or gains me 2 readers, I will never see a return on that $15 unless I'm able to sell $15 worth of merchandise because of the advertising. Since I have no merchandise to speak of, I can't justify the expense.
I wish every user *would* do like I do and block the ads.
I host my comic on Keenspace, a free collective of webcomics. The only reason it's free is because hosting for these 7000+ webcomics is provided entirely by ad revenue. Artists are not required to manage the ads, buy web space or bandwidth. This is all taken care of by the people at Keenspot Entertainment who graciously host Keenspace on their servers and by the Keenspace admins who essentially volunteer their time to keep Keenspace running.
I BELIEVE the last estimates I heard for bandwidth usage on Keenspace was in the range of 140 gigs a day (feel free to correct my numbers), not counting the forums which are on a different server. A single webcomic can generate as much as 10 gigs a month in traffic but may not get enough page views to cover the bandwidth. (Mine is one of these.)
If it weren't for ad revenue, places like this would not exist and my comic would never have seen the light of day.
given the choice between paying for any of the those sites that I haven't donated to and not reading it, I'd rather not read it. I pay for sites that are *worth* something to me, sites i feel have gone above and beyond and provide something worth paying for
Okay, so tell me then how you determine whether a site is worth reading if you would opt not to read it if it wasn't free?
Seriously, my comic is MOSTLY free and clear to the world except for a single ad banner across the top of the site. By visiting my site and downloading the banner image, you are paying for my comic's hosting. (not to me, of course, but you're still paying)
Is that ad harming you in any way? Is it detracting from your comic reading experience? If the ad is beneficial to the site you're visiting and it doesn't detract from the experience, what's the problem with giving a little in return?
Slashdot Mirror
On the contrary. I bet it does.
One of my graduate professors at the University of Missouri is doing some work with elder care with technology like this. Getting real 3-D information from multiple cameras takes a lot of processing time, but they can segment the space in a room down to 1 inch cubes. The result is a 3-D silhouette of the objects and people moving in the room. They can tell the difference between people moving throughout the room. A small child is different from a dog in that the dog has 4 legs, for example.
They can identify whether a person is laying on the couch or has fallen. They can extract information such as the bend of the spine and whether a person favors one leg or the other. A silhouette of a cardboard cutout would appear flat to the camera.
What I described above is PHD research using some fairly complex computer vision, 3-D segmentation and pattern recognition algorithms. 3-D scene reconstruction cannot be done with a single camera. The math doesn't work. I would not expect a set-top box with a single webcam to be that good. I would, however, expect them to do motion segmentation on frames of video. Background subtraction would let them ignore the furniture in the room and identify regions of motion. From there, pattern recognition algorithms could be used to find faces and identify the relative shape of a body based on a template. Given that, you could identify whether a person was tall or short and the relative proportions of their bodies. You probably couldn't identify male or female, though. That would be a tough call. You probably could identify a dog versus a child with relative ease.
Luckily, the amount of bandwidth needed to send these images back to the cable company would be pretty massive (given everyone who watches cable in a small to medium sized city) so you shouldn't worry about that. You probably only need to worry about packets being sent back over the cable line identifying the date, time, number of adults, number of children, channel and number of seconds since the last channel change.
At work we send secure student data over FTP to be scored and retrieve the scored data in the same manner. Instead of a secure channel we encrypt the data using each others' public keys. It's fairly easy to set up and use. http://www.gnupg.org/
I guess I've grown up in the indy comic culture. Other than the huge audience Marvel and DC comics already have, I don't see a reason to join those companies. There are so many possibilities for indy publishing out there. Granted, distribution is a problem for paper comics, but this is the Internet. We have the distribution thing covered.
My comic is 2 years old and has an international "distribution." My readership is roughly 400 and I've sold maybe 30 comics for actual money, which isn't a bad percentage as far as webcomics go. With on demand printing services like Comix Press and Lulu.com and hosting services like Comic Genesis and Drunk Duck, international distribution isn't as big a problem. Getting huge IS a problem because there's so much competition out there.
Although it's great to hear about webcomics making it big, they're just a very small percentage of online comics. Most people will never see any profits from their comics. There's no way to compete with big comic companies like Marvel in the print world. There's no way to compete with big comics in Internet either. Don't try. Webcomics have their niche. Find your group of readers and don't expect to be big. It's a good time, not a living.
There've been some distributed at various conventions in dead tree format. Watch out for "Deadly Bear Attacks"
Deadly Bears Attack can be found here. It's a thread on the Keenspace forums with links to various sites where the PDF might still be hosted. Feel free to download and distribute the PDF file. It's licensed under Creative Commons to allow making and selling copies but not modification of the content. Instructions for printing the comic are also available in or linked from the thread. If you would like to mirror the file, please let us know so we can link your mirror in the thread.
The problem with Deadly Bears is that it's a sampler of comics available online for free. I put 10 issues in my local comic store and over the course of 2 months managed to sell 4 of them.
I printed issue 1 of my own comic and put it in the same store. Again, I managed to sell only 4 copies (at least two went to people I know). People would notice that my comic was available online and not buy the print version.
Having a free webcomic is great if it's free. I see printing comics as a significant expense and would like to be compensated for that. The same with paid advertising. If I'm going to put money into my comic like that I want something in return. Art supplies and such I can deal with. $10 for a pad of bristol board every 5 months is worth while for me as an artist because I get enjoyment out of writing, drawing and inking. The bristol allows me to show off my artwork as well. It's sturdy and I don't worry about it banging it up by carrying it around in my back pack when I go to cons and get togethers. If spending $15 to advertise my comic on onlinecomics.net or gains me 2 readers, I will never see a return on that $15 unless I'm able to sell $15 worth of merchandise because of the advertising. Since I have no merchandise to speak of, I can't justify the expense.
I wish every user *would* do like I do and block the ads.
I host my comic on Keenspace, a free collective of webcomics. The only reason it's free is because hosting for these 7000+ webcomics is provided entirely by ad revenue. Artists are not required to manage the ads, buy web space or bandwidth. This is all taken care of by the people at Keenspot Entertainment who graciously host Keenspace on their servers and by the Keenspace admins who essentially volunteer their time to keep Keenspace running.
I BELIEVE the last estimates I heard for bandwidth usage on Keenspace was in the range of 140 gigs a day (feel free to correct my numbers), not counting the forums which are on a different server. A single webcomic can generate as much as 10 gigs a month in traffic but may not get enough page views to cover the bandwidth. (Mine is one of these.)
If it weren't for ad revenue, places like this would not exist and my comic would never have seen the light of day.
given the choice between paying for any of the those sites that I haven't donated to and not reading it, I'd rather not read it. I pay for sites that are *worth* something to me, sites i feel have gone above and beyond and provide something worth paying for
Okay, so tell me then how you determine whether a site is worth reading if you would opt not to read it if it wasn't free?
Seriously, my comic is MOSTLY free and clear to the world except for a single ad banner across the top of the site. By visiting my site and downloading the banner image, you are paying for my comic's hosting. (not to me, of course, but you're still paying)
Is that ad harming you in any way? Is it detracting from your comic reading experience? If the ad is beneficial to the site you're visiting and it doesn't detract from the experience, what's the problem with giving a little in return?