A possible inconvenience

VIDEO: Innovative 'new economy' ideas for marketing machine-vision products may have an unexpected cost--time

Editor's Note: Watch the video version of editor Andy Wilson's "My View" blog, where you'll get Andy's unique take on what's buzzing through the machine-vision marketplace or just what's been buzzing through his mind lately. You can also read Andy's "My View" as seen in the January issue of Vision Systems Design.

Several years ago, I had the pleasure of attending a talk presented by Chris Anderson, the author of The Long Tail (http://www.thelongtail.com/). If you have read this book, you will be aware of its simple but powerful message.

In essence, Anderson points out that the economy is shifting away from a focus on a relative small number of mainstream products and markets at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.

Take a bow

Editor's Note: Watch the video version of editor Andy Wilson's "My View" blog, where you'll get Andy's unique take on what's buzzing through the machine-vision marketplace or just what's been buzzing through his mind lately. You can also read Andy's "My View" as seen in the December issue of Vision Systems Design.

America's Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) encompasses radio and television stations that transmit some of the finest programming in the country. Before tuning in to the Fox News channel to hear biased right-wing reporting (while at the same time having a few laughs), I always check whether my local public station is broadcasting something more important.

One night, I tuned into a concert by Hector Berlioz called the Symphonie Fantastique being broadcast on WGBH in Boston. Conducting the orchestra was a certain Michael Tilson Thomas, an American conductor, pianist, and composer who is currently musical director of the San Francisco Symphony. (Watch the video below.)

An invasion of privacy

Editor's Note: Watch the video version of editor Andy Wilson's "My View" blog, where you'll get Andy's unique take on what's buzzing through the machine-vision marketplace or just what's been buzzing through his mind lately. You can also read Andy's "My View" as seen in the November issue of Vision Systems Design.

Once or twice a year I have the pleasure of traveling to Germany to visit companies and trade shows. To take full advantage of the trip, I often fly to England to visit my brother and bring him duty-free cigarettes. Since smoking is now banned on most international flights from the United States, the six-hour trip often reduces my nails to a fraction of the length they were on boarding the aircraft. (Watch video below.)

Bitter about Twitter

Editor's Note: Watch the video version of editor Andy Wilson's "My View" blog, where you'll get Andy's unique take on what's buzzing through the machine-vision marketplace or just what's been buzzing through his mind lately. You can also read Andy's "My View" as seen in the current issue of Vision Systems Design.

Before the age of information technology, the employees of many companies drove to work and, upon arriving, often spent half an hour gathered around the water cooler to hear the latest company gossip and scandal before retiring into separate walled offices to work. That is where socializing ended. (watch video below.)

The royal 'we'

Editor's Note: This month we launch a video version of editor Andy Wilson's "My View" blog, where you'll get Andy's unique take on what's buzzing through the machine-vision marketplace or just what's been buzzing through his mind lately.


Last month, I again had the pleasure of attending a very large trade show. There, as every year before, hordes of engineers demonstrated the latest machine-vision products. What makes this conference and trade show unique, however, was the fact that a large number of young engineers are present, many of whom have recently graduated from university (watch video below.)

A glowing future

Ever since I was young, I have always liked taking things apart, and my father, being a mechanical engineer, was only too willing to encourage me in my endeavors. And so in 1979 when his expensive, wooden cabinet-sized tube-based stereo system failed, I decided to attempt to repair it.

After my brother and I lifted the cabinet to the center of the living room, I unscrewed the stiff card backing of the machine and peered inside. There, in a large metal chassis was an array of valves that stood proudly in shiny round sockets.

I instructed my brother to turn the equipment on while I watched to see what happened. During the next few moments, theglass valves began to warm up and emit their eerie orange glow. That is, of course, all but one. This, I thought must be the culprit so, after turning off the stereo system and letting it cool down for ten minutes, I removed the valve in question.

Being a member of the press, I then tried to leverage my contacts at Philips to obtain a free sample of the Mullard valve in question. After being informed that Philips had not made the product for more than ten years, I was told that they could be obtained from a small company in India. My contact generously offered to obtain the product for me and ship it to my dad's house. I was delighted.

Several weeks later, a package arrived at the door from Philips. Excitedly, I opened the package and gazed upon the shiny newdevice. Following the same procedure as before, I located the socket of the defunct tube and placed in the new one.

To my delight, after switching the stereo system on, the voice of a BBC newscaster sprang from the speakers. Without engineering drawings, signal generators, or oscilloscopes, I had brought the stereo back from the dead. Even my old man could not believe it. In the decades that followed, valves were replaced by discrete transistors, transistors by TTL logic, and TTL logic by microprocessors, VLSI devices, and gate arrays. And, of course, everything is now smaller. In the machine-vision industry, for example, system integrators can now purchase a smart camera replete with sensor, CPU/DSP, memory, interface, and on-board software for less than $2,500.

System integration par excellence
Nowhere, however, has this level of integration been more significant than in the development of consumer products. To develop products such as mobile telephones, MP3 players, and portable televisions, engineers use sophisticated electronic and mechanical CAD packages rather than data sheets and drawing boards.

Using these packages, it is possible to cram more technology into a single square inch than ever before. And, if well designed, these products are less expensive, more reliable, and longer lasting than any valve-based system could ever expect to be. For those tasked with repairing such devices the task is more complex. More than likely, should the devices fail under warranty, they are replaced free of charge by the manufacturer.

Today, it has become more expensive to repair these devices than replace them with new ones. Although this is not yet the case in much of the machine-vision industry, those developing products for this market are also concerned with reducing cost and size.

To gain an advantage in this area, inquisitive engineers may want to take a look at what their counterparts have accomplished in the consumer market. Although purchasing every latest miniature device, tearing it apart, and characterizing each design may not be a wise idea, companies such as Portelligent (Austin, TX, USA; www.teardown.com) have emerged that can provide this data for you.

Replete with external and internal photographs, parts lists, component counts, and a manufacturing cost analysis, the reportscould provide you with just the edge you need when developing your next product. And you will not need a screwdriver, signal generator, or an oscilloscope -- just a check or credit card.

Ready for prime time

It has been 36 years since I last watched a motion picture in three dimensions. That particular motion picture, Andy Warhol's Frankenstein, as most critics would agree, featured the highest camp this side of the Appalachian Trail. Although the movie itself was awful, the 3-D effects that were produced were as I recall rather impressive.

So, when the prospect of watching another motion picture in 3-D arose last month, I was eager to see the progress that had been made in 3-D cinema over the last three decades.

Early one Saturday morning my son and I drove to the nearest 3-D cinema to view Pixar Animation Studio's latest masterwork Up. Duly equipped with digital cinema servers from Doremi Cinema, the state-of-the-art cinema we attended featured more comfortable seats than can be found in the first-class cabin of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

Upon entering, every audience member was handed the latest X101 Series 3-D active glasses from Pasadena, CA-based XpanD. Unlike the polarized 3-D glasses of the past, these digital glasses use the company's patented "pi-cell" liquid- crystal cell to deliver alternate right- and left-eye images and thus the perception of depth.
This, the company claims, produces the brightest, flicker-free stereoscopic image possible. Unfortunately, as the company should have mentioned, only the brightest image possible with this particular technology. Because despite the all-digital cinema, the loss of luminance caused by donning the all-digital glasses rendered the image somewhat dark.

Sadly, I must report that, despite the advent of all-digital cinemas, the progress made in 3-D projection technology in the past 30 years has been minimal. However, the advances in computer animation techniques have proved just the opposite, making Up the best motion picture Pixar has ever produced.

Up, up, and away
For those involved in machine vision, the advent of 3-D systems has resulted in a number of different technologies being deployed in an increasingly larger variety of applications. However, rather than advancing the way images are displayed, these technologies use a variety of methods to capture and process 3-D image data.

Using single and multiple camera-based systems, time-of-flight measurement sensors, and structured light-based cameras, system integrators are now deploying these technologies in applications for bin picking, robotic-guidance systems, and depth perception. Last month, many of these different technologies and applications were on show at the International Robots, Vision & Motion Control Show held near Chicago, IL. As well as highlighting these technologies, a system integrator pavilion allowed attendees to interact with system developers who proudly showed what they had accomplished.

Just as the machine-vision industry has evolved to embrace these new technologies, so too has the business of trade publishing. For those of you who could not attend the show, Vision Systems Design magazine decided to enter the motion picture business, producing a number of "shorts" that allowed vendors, system integrators, and manufacturers to broadcast their messages.

Although not quite as well produced, directed, or written as Pixar's Up, these videos do reflect the progress made by automation companies using 3-D technologies. And, rather than pay a $12 fee to view these videos, we have made them freely available on our web site at www.vision-systems.com.

In the coming months we will be adding more of these videos. Then, later this year, our trusty film crew will also be in Stuttgart, Germany, to bring you the latest news from VISION -- the world's largest machine vision and image processing show. We are sure you will find these videos informative and hopefully entertaining.

Although embracing new technology may not be a wise choice in certain consumer industries, it is certainly applicable to boththe machine-vision and publishing fields. And, for those of our readers who might be wondering, our videos can be viewed without the use of 3-D glasses.