Geek Gestalt

Microsoft is getting ready for a November release of new Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm, and instant movie and TV show streaming features in Xbox Live.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--At a star-studded E3 press conference last June, Microsoft touted, among other things, a plan to bring Facebook, Twitter, and Last.fm to its hit online service, Xbox Live, as well as to begin offering instant streaming of movies and TV shows.

At the time, all Microsoft would say is that it hoped to roll out these new features to the public in the fall.

Well, it's now the fall. And on Wednesday, my colleague Josh Lowensohn and I got a first-hand look at the pre-release Xbox Live implementation of Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm, and video streaming, and had a chance to talk to Xbox Live General Manager Ron Pessner about it all.

Photos: Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm almost ready for Xbox Live

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Microsoft is still not ready to let the public in on the fun yet, and today is only willing to give the launch a November timeframe--with no actual date announced. Further, since E3, the so-called InstantOn streaming feature has been rolled up into a larger Zune branding effort, something that I think is a big mistake, given the cool reception the Zune name--at least as it applies to Microsoft's music player--has received in the marketplace.

Regardless, it's clear that Microsoft is nearly ready to start letting the Xbox Live community get its hands on the Facebook, Twitter, and Last.fm features, and to begin streaming video content rather than waiting for it to download, which has been a slow, frustrating process by all accounts.

Pessner began by talking about Facebook. Clearly, Microsoft's interest is in getting the feature up and running and letting Xbox Live users begin to access the popular social network on their TVs sooner, rather than later, even though some fundamental elements of Facebook haven't been included.

According to Pessner, a chief goal of the implementation was to make it easy for users to make photo slideshows and watch them on their TVs. A quick demo revealed that much of the Xbox Live Facebook tool is built around looking at photo albums, scrolling between friends' albums and seeing who on a user's friends list has added photos to their account.

But one of Facebook's most fundamental offerings is photos and allowing users to upload them. And Microsoft has chosen, for now at least, not to let users do that. Pessner says the decision was made that Facebook on Xbox Live is about viewing images, and that anyone who wants to upload them to the social network will do so via the Web. It's a fair point, but it does seem like a major omission, and it would seem like something Microsoft will have to address soon.

Pessner also pointed to what he called Friend Linker, which is designed to help Facebook users see which of their friends are Xbox Live members, and vice versa. Among other things, it makes for an easy way for Facebook users to discover friends' gamertags and to invite them to be friends on Xbox Live.

All in all, while it's likely that many Xbox Live users will find themselves switching over to the Facebook application frequently--why move over to a computer if it's not necessary?--it's clear that there is a lot of room for more. The interface is consistent with everything else on Xbox Live, something that may please some. But frequent Facebookers might find it confusing to have to use Facebook in an entirely different format. Only time will tell.

Twitter on Xbox Live
Pessner then showed off the Xbox Live Twitter application. Like its Facebook counterpart, the interface will look very familiar to Xbox Live users. Pessner said the idea was to design a Twitter experience for the living room.

That means, of course, a fairly scaled down Twitter app. Users can post their own tweets, view friends' tweets, re-tweet them, favorite them, look at profiles, @ reply to others, and do Twitter searches. And that's about it.

To be sure, there aren't that many more features available to Twitter users elsewhere, but there are some. Again, Pessner made the argument that the idea was to optimize the experience for a living room TV and that to access a full range of features, users will happily turn to their computers.

One thing missing from both the Facebook and Twitter applications, however, is the ability to click on URLs, something that is a major piece of the social-networking puzzle these days.

Asked why not, a Microsoft spokesperson said, "That's not something we support right now. Today we're focused on delivering a great Twitter and Facebook experience which connects the Xbox Live community to friends in new and unique ways...This is just the beginning, and the great thing about Xbox Live is that we can evolve and update features based on the community's feedback."

Last.fm
The third piece of the new Xbox Live puzzle is its Last.fm application. Last.fm (which is owned by CNET News parent CBS Interactive) is a music service aimed at helping users discover new songs and artists--something Microsoft is hoping will add to users' overall Xbox Live experience.

Pessner said that adding Last.fm gives users access to a wide range of new music and music-related tools, much as adding Netflix to Xbox Live last year did for movies.

As with the Facebook and Twitter tools, Xbox Live users will find a scaled down version of Last.fm, one that Pessner said is focused mainly on music consumption, "but also on discovery."

Again, the tool has the familiar Xbox Live look and feel, and appears to be something that will expand some users' musical horizons. But it's also clear that what this is a simpler version of a service that's been optimized for a TV, and those who want the full experience will return to their computers.

And that's fine. No one is expecting Microsoft to replace their computer with Xbox Live, though I'm sure Microsoft would like to do so someday. If, for example, it ever put a full-featured Web browser inside Xbox Live, some of the missing features mentioned above could be addressed. But that's a conversation for another day.

InstantOn
The last new feature is the InstantOn streaming service that Xbox Live users will have access to. The idea is to give those buying or renting TV shows or movies through the Zune video marketplace (formerly known as the Xbox Live video marketplace) instant gratification instead of making them wait for their content to download.

The service will offer full 1080p high-definition movies and TV shows, and will let those who purchase content watch it right away or download it to their Xbox, a Zune player, or a PC. Those who rent content will be able to stream it and will have 24 hours to finish watching it once they press "play."

Pessner pointed to the fact that the service is designed to auto-detect a user's bandwidth level in order to play back the content in an appropriate quality. The idea there is to ensure that a user gets to watch what they want right away, regardless of how fast their connection is.

From Microsoft's perspective, this new set of offerings will make the Xbox an even stronger entertainment option than it has been in the past. But Pessner said there is still much more that can be added to the platform.

He wouldn't say what the next steps would be, of course, but did paint a broad picture, suggesting that users can draw their own conclusions of how Project Natal, Microsoft's forthcoming gesture-based control system for Xbox and PC "can light this up."

A scene from early in Road Trip 2009, when CNET News reporter Daniel Terdiman was charging up all the gadgets he'd brought along.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

RAWLINS, Wyo.--After staying in motels for 31 straight days, I'm taking Road Trip 2009 into the woods.

It's not that I'm going to stop filing stories and pictures. It's that I'm taking this opportunity both to (mostly) get away from people for awhile, and to see just how nimble my little collection of tech and communications gadgets makes me as a reporter.

So I'm heading into Wyoming's Sierra Madre mountains today, intent on hiding away in some little campground to enjoy the wilderness, yet still continue posting new stories and pictures. As such, I'll be porting: an Iridium 9555A satellite phone and Inmarsat's BGAN broadband satellite modem for communicating by phone and Internet; a fully charged MacBook Pro and the battery on the Audi Q7 TDI I'm road-testing to recharge from; a battery-powered and Bluetooth-enabled mobile HP printer to print photos; and a few more things, just for good measure.

Every time I write about bringing technology into wilderness, I get asked why I would do such a thing. The truth is, I would very much like to spend a few days camping with nothing much more for accessories than hiking boots and a good book, but I'm working. Road Trip is a full-time venture while I'm in the field, and so I'm trying, as best as I can, to mix reporting and retreat.

And also, of course, to test the equipment in order to see just how normal a working operation I can set up in conditions that are simply not used to seeing such things. Don't worry, for long stretches, I will turn everything off and be with nature.

I may, however, startle a few camping neighbors and see if they're interested in having photos of them out in the woods live-blogged, and if so, also instantly printing them up glossy photos. Hey, I'm a tech geek, and I write about tech geekery. I can't help myself.

Stay tuned for reports on how this experiment goes, and whether I'm chased out of the woods by tech-hating campers.

In 'Up,' the new Pixar film due out Friday, the studio had to figure out how to animate the more than 10,000 interdependent balloons that hoist the main character's house aloft.

(Credit: Pixar Animation Studios)

If you want to consider a difficult computational problem, try thinking of the algorithms required to animate more than 10,000 helium balloons, each with its own string, but each also interdependent on the rest, which are collectively hoisting aloft a small house.

That was the challenge the production team at Pixar faced when it set out to begin work on "Up," its tenth feature film, five years in the works, which hits theaters on Friday.

There was absolutely no way the team was going to hand-animate the balloons. Not with their numbers in five-figures, and especially not when you consider that within the cluster, every interaction between two balloons has a ripple effect: If one bumped another, the second would move, likely bumping a third, and so on. And every bit of this would need to be seen on screen.

Photos: How to animate 10,000 digital balloons

In "Up," the story revolves around the main character, 78-year-old Carl Fredricksen, who, frustrated with his mundane life, ties the thousands of balloons to his house and sets off for adventures in South America. A small boy ends up marooned on board, and hilarity ensues.

The cluster of balloons is so central to the film's branding--it's called "Up," after all--that to promote the film, Pixar teamed up with two of the world's cluster ballooning experts for a nationwide tour involving a real-life flying armchair and dozens of huge, colorful balloons.

"You have a movie that's about a house that flies, which is a pretty far-fetched idea," said Steve May, the supervising technical director on "Up." "We all know, from kids' parties, how a bunch of balloons behave, so if we could animate balloons in a realistic way, the believability that the house could fly would sell."

For May, "Up" producer Jonas Rivera, director Pete Docter, and the many others involved in making the film, believability was key, even within the context of a story about a flying house. And while a major part of instilling that believability must come from a well-conceived and executed story and script, the animation is no less responsible for winning over potentially skeptical audiences.

Balloons, the mother of animation invention
May said that the animation department at Pixar never even considered hand-animating the balloons. But even standard computer animation wouldn't be up to the task, because of the N-squared complexity involved in the thousands of interdependent balloons. Instead, the studio's computer whizzes figured out a way to turn the problem over to a programmed physical simulator, which, employing Newtonian physics, was able to address the animation problem.

"These are relatively simple physical equations, so you program them into the computer and therefore kind of let the computer animate things for you, using those physics," said May. "So in every frame of the animation, (the computer can) literally compute the forces acting on those balloons, (so) that they're buoyant, that their strings are attached, that wind is blowing through them. And based on those forces, we can compute how the balloon should move."

This process is known as procedural animation, and is described by an algorithm or set of equations, and is in stark contrast to what is known as key frame animation, in which the animators explicitly define the movement of an object or objects in every frame.

Procedural animation has been around for some time, but May suggested that even the most difficult uses of it in the past don't come close to what Pixar had to achieve in "Up."

Pixar fans may remember the scenes in "Cars" of a stadium full of 300,000 car "fans" cheering on a high-speed race below, each of which was independently animated. That, too, was done with procedural animation, May said, since creating so many cars individually would have been a non-starter. But even that complex computation problem didn't approach the balloon cluster issue in "Up": the "Cars" scene involved no interdependent physics.

Another animation challenge for Pixar was figuring out how to handle the feathers on Kevin, an important bird character in the film.

(Credit: Pixar Animation Studios)

Getting the simulator humming properly is no easy task, as one might imagine. May said it involves setting rules for how individual objects should behave, giving the computer these initial conditions, and then "let it run."

Oddly, because the simulator does indeed run with those conditions and rules and the peculiarities of physics, the animators found themselves without precise control of what would happen with the balloons--or other objects in the film animated using these techniques.

"If the (balloon cluster) is moving too slow, we increase the amount of wind, and then run the simulator again," May said. "Then maybe we turn the wind down. It's a little fun science experiment where sometimes, hopefully by the end, we're getting what we want."

Losing control of balloons
Sometimes, given the vagaries of physics and chaos theory, unexpected things happen. The computer team inputs the rules and because some of the initial conditions are random, "you get semi-random results." One of May's favorite examples is that early in the film, when the house first is hoisted aloft by the balloons, a small group of the balloons actually broke off of the main cluster.

May said that this breakaway group of balloons is actually visible--albeit very briefly--in "Up." Eagle-eyed moviegoers can see the escaped balloons in the upper right-hand side of the screen, he said.

"We didn't mean for that to happen," he said, "but (we said) 'It's cool, let's keep it.'"

Even being able to make such choices wasn't possible at the beginning of the film's production, however. May said Pixar's physical simulator, an open-source program called ODE, couldn't initially handle the complexity of modeling the behavior of more than 10,000 balloons.

"We could handle about 500 (balloons), and we knew we needed tens of thousands," he said. "We knew we needed to develop a new simulator software pipeline...to handle an order of magnitude more complex simulation."

Of course, at Pixar, adjusting to evolving computer needs on the fly is nothing new. In fact, May said the studio has done so in one form or another on many of its films. For example, he said that when the studio made "Monsters, Inc.," it had to figure out how to animate the movie's monsters' fur. Similarly, when Pixar made "Finding Nemo," the animators had to figure out how to simulate underwater scenes.

"We had to learn about (how light refracts under water), and murk and how particulates float under water," May said.

And in "Up," too, there were additional animation challenges. Among them were figuring out how to animate and render the feathers on Kevin, a bird that is a major character in the film, and how to make the cloth on (main character) Carl's clothes seem believable.

Carl's threads were "the hardest clothing we've ever had to animate here," said May, "in part because Carl's a (small) man in an oversized suit. That was another case of (using) the physical simulation, and of setting up rules for how cloth should behave. And the looser the clothing, the more it can behave badly."

Even Carl himself presented some animation difficulties, May said, because the character's head is shaped like a cube.

Even the face of Carl Fredricksen, the films main character, presented a new animation challenge. His face is presented in a cube-like shape, which represents his lifelong sense of being boxed in by soulless development. But for animators, making him smile was hard, since his mouth would have to curve around to the side.

(Credit: Pixar Animation Studios)

Like many other elements in "Up," the cube-shape of Carl's face wasn't a random whim of the director. Rather, it is a story element: May explained that Carl's character is based on someone who, as a young man, was vivacious and adventurous. But as he grew older, his small house became more and more surrounded by buildings, and "it's like his world has compressed him into a square."

Thus, a cube-like face. But May said animating his facial expressions, which must fit into this cube shape, was complicated. Smiles, for example, had to come up and wrap around his cheek.

Still, for the award-winning filmmakers at Pixar, the goal is to make even the hardest animation problems look simple on the silver screen.

As producer Jonas Rivera put it, "The audience looks at (the balloon cluster) and says, 'Oh, that's pretty.' But they have no idea how much work went into it. We worked on that for over a year. (Then) the kid takes off his hat and runs his fingers through his hair. My mother will never know that took 15 people six weeks."

On June 22, Geek Gestalt will kick off Road Trip 2009. After driving more than 12,000 miles in the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last three years, I'll be looking for the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more in Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and South and North Dakota. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. And in the meantime, join the Road Trip 2009 Facebook page and follow my Twitter feed.

Spoiler alert: This article describes some of the action sequences in the new Terminator movie. If you don't want to know details about some scenes, bookmark this article and come back to read it after you've seen the movie.

In 'Terminator Salvation,' visual effects and computer graphics played a big part in making many of the action sequences look realistic. This is a mototerminator, a key evil robot in the film, and one that required the visual effects team at ILM to work hard on making an exploding car do what they wanted.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET; and image copyright 2009 Warner Bros. Courtesy of Industrial Light & Magic)

SAN FRANCISCO--What do you do if you're a filmmaker trying to capture a scene in which an onrushing tow truck slams into a parked car, sending the car rolling neatly up and over the truck's back, but you face the reality that the car, vaulted into the air by a cannon shot from below, actually flies high above the truck?

If you're making "Terminator Salvation," or T4 as it's known, the latest salvo in the 25-year-old series, you turn to the visual effects experts at Industrial Light & Magic and depend on them to solve the problem.

And solve it they did. Those who see the film, which opened Friday, will see the collision rocket the car into the air and, indeed, roll right over the back of the tow truck. They'll never know that in real-life, the car actually soared high and straight up into the air.

Why did it matter? According to Ben Snow, the ILM visual effects supervisor on T4--who had the same title on films like "King Kong" and "Iron Man"--it had every bit to do with the film's story. In the scene, the driver of the tow truck is trying to derail a so-called mototerminator, a high-speed killer robot in the body of a super motorcycle that is chasing fast behind. But the mototerminator is an intelligent machine, and isn't so easily knocked down.

So, Snow said, the point of the exploding car is that it's supposed to fall over the top of the truck and into the mototerminator's path, providing the evil robot the chance to showcase its instant maneuvering skills. And to turn that high-flying car into something that looks, on-screen, just as the script called for required a whole lot of visual effects.

"Usually we try and do it" for real, Snow said, "but it would be a miracle with an effect like this. So you weigh if it's worth standing around with an expensive film crew for a day trying to get it. Do we have more than one go at it?"

Instead, Snow explained, the real-life footage of the car exploding into the air was enough for the visual effects team to get going on the computer graphics (CG) version of the sequence. They combined the real footage with a digital version of the car that was based on some still photos they'd taken, and then they simulated the desired rolling-over-the-truck effect using ILM's proprietary rigid body simulation tools in order to produce the CG version.

Snow said that the footage of the truck, taken from behind, was doctored with visual effects to show it from the point of view of the mototerminator, which has a heads-up display calculating what's happening with the car.

"The story point," Snow said, "is that this mototerminator is reacting to the car, and able to do an incredibly nimble evasive maneuver to get out of the way. So we're trying to tell the story of these things being really bad-ass."

In the past, a movie studio might still have tried to produce a similar effect but Snow said that filmmakers might well have been less likely to turn to CG for the effect.

"I think we would have tried a lot harder to get the effect for real with the car," he said. "I can now depend on effects. I can take existing material and re-project it and get it to do what I need to...I can count on the fact that I can get a believable rigid-body simulation of something like a crumpling, rolling car. I mean, we were doing those kinds of things (a few years ago) on "Twister" and "Star Wars." But if you compare the realism of what we're able to achieve now to what we were able to achieve five years ago, it's way more realistic now."

That sort of advance, Snow continued, means that Warner Bros. and director McG can "make a Terminator for the 21st century...updated to give it a more gritty, edgy feel. Instead a guy puppeteering the robot, we're able to have the robot running around and chasing people."

Explosions on a bridge
Another of T4's major action sequences involves a large-scale battle that includes several forceful explosions on a bridge high over a river gorge. But Snow said that since it was obvious that the filmmakers couldn't conduct the explosions on the actual bridge--the fantastic Rio Grande Gorge Bridge near Taos, N.M.--it was necessary to film the sequence in three different places and then blend the footage together using visual effects and CG.

The sequence was shot on the bridge, on a nearby roadway and on a set on a field in Albuquerque, N.M., where they could actually blow up a truck.

Creating this action sequence required shooting at three different locations in order to make a truck explode on the bridge, something that the filmmakers could not do in real life. Then, it was up to the visual effects team at ILM to stitch it all together using newly-developed CG techniques.

(Credit: Image copyright 2009 Warner Bros. Courtesy of Industrial Light & Magic)

The sequence, then, involves combining footage from the three different locations, going back and forth between them depending on the severity of destruction in each frame, and using CG to patch them together seamlessly.

Snow explained that putting the sequence together meant marrying footage from all three locations, adding digital backgrounds when needed, adding railings to the CG bridge, and adding the CG truck to the bridge.

"We re-projected this onto the (CG bridge) so I could have the truck fall over the edge, because in the original, it didn't fall over the edge," Snow said. And "those sort of techniques are just some of the things that we've been perfecting over the years: re-projection, the ability to say, 'Well, we can go and do this, shoot at three different locations, and we don't always have to use blue screen.' ...We can make it so you don't know which bit of the bridge is CG."

And, importantly, it means that for the filmmakers, there's no worrying about whether they can fulfill the all-important script element of blowing up a truck on a bridge.

Molten metal
For Snow's visual effects teams, the hardest part of working on T4 was getting the film's molten metal sequence just right. This meant making a scene in which melted metal pours through a terminator look believable, even though it's done in CG.

"We have some very good fluid simulation tools that we've developed over the years," Snow said, "but getting the molten metal to pour in and through this skeletal robot and look believable involved a lot more computing power than we've (ever used before). That was surprisingly hard, given that in the end, it's only in a few shots." It's funny seeing the film now, Snow said, because it's over in seconds and took days and more than a hundred high-power processors to create.

By comparison, Snow said, previous fluid sequences in films like "Pearl Harbor" used 30 lower-power processors and were considered beyond state-of-the-art at the time.

Today, visual effects teams like those at ILM still struggle to do realistic digital doubles and CG fire, Snow said, but the barriers to such effects are breaking down rapidly. And that could mean that in the near future, filmmakers can turn to CG to get just about any effect they want.

"The sky is the limit with digital technology," Snow said. "We're not limited by physical constraint. And so there's no time for complacency."

Photos: Terminator visual effects--smashing cars, taking names

On June 22, Geek Gestalt will kick off Road Trip 2009. After driving more than 12,000 miles in the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last three years, I'll be looking for the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more in Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and South and North Dakota. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. And in the meantime, join the Road Trip 2009 Facebook page and follow my Twitter feed.

ILM visual effects and animation teams had to employ some of the latest tricks in the industry to make the new "Star Trek" film feel both realistic and true to the classic franchise. Among the biggest challenges was updating the Starship Enterprise for 2009.

(Credit: Industrial Light & Magic)

SAN FRANCISCO--For Paul Kavanagh, the animation supervisor on the new "Star Trek" movie, one technical element of the film was particularly challenging.

During live-action filming, director J.J. Abrams had done something unusual: In a bid to incorporate a shaky, handheld effect, Abrams would frequently sit behind the camera and literally tap on the back of it with his fingers. But "Star Trek" is jam-packed with computer graphics, and for Kavanagh, it was imperative to find a way to replicate the effect of that finger tapping, even in the purely digital sequences. Not to do so, he said, would have created a visual inconsistency that threatened to disrupt the audience's experience.

Back at Industrial Light & Magic, where Kavanagh works, he considered several ways to solve the problem. He talked to the people in ILM's motion-capture department, who showed him a number of 3D mo-cap cameras and techniques, but he felt those were too time-consuming and expensive.

Still, the mo-cap folks had another technology that was both simple and cheap: an orientation sensor that could be plugged into a computer with a simple USB connection and used to record motion. So Kavanagh and his animation team figured out that if they tapped on a desk while filming scenes with CG cameras--on-screen camera viewers that incorporate realistic lenses--and layered the motion from the orientation sensors underneath, they could get the same effect as Abrams got with live-action.

"J.J. did come down to visit us, and he loved it," Kavanagh recalled. "He definitely wanted the same kind of handheld look, but (what we did) was a big surprise for him. He loved that the look carried across the shots."

As you might imagine, "Star Trek" is a feast of effects and animation. According to ILM's Roger Guyett, the film's visual effects supervisor, it has a full hour of visual effects in all. "Every aspect of (the effects has) to be planned and thought through," Guyett said. "It's easy to underestimate the amount of work that goes into creating" an entire world.

Yet Abrams wanted a very tactile feel to the movie, Guyett said, and that meant filming as much as possible and adding in visual effects, rather than relying entirely on CG. "It was closer to the model of the original 'Star Wars' movie"--building actual sets that audiences can react to--"not filling in all the blanks (with CG) later on."

For example, when considering how to create a shuttle hangar, Abrams decided he wanted an actual set, rather than crafting it digitally. That meant finding a suitable space and then lighting it to match the look and feel of the rest of the film.

One benefit of that, Guyett said, is that it helped the actors to have a real set to work on, because they had to imagine less. "You've got actual wind blowing in your face," he said, rather than having to act like there's wind.

For Guyett and his team, another big challenge was figuring out how to handle a massive amount of destruction in the film.

For example, he said, they had to bring photo-realism to the way two colliding spaceships would fall apart. But the physics involved in something like that happening in space are far different than they would be inside the Earth's atmosphere. Similarly, the team needed to figure out how to realistically show what the explosion from a missile hitting the Enterprise would look like.

"The rules of physics aren't the same" in outer space, Guyett said. "Explosions behave in a different way."

Making the physics of an explosion in space look right was no easy task. But Guyett said one of the biggest advantages of working at ILM is that the company is rife with "geniuses" who he can consult with on just about any kind of scientific conundrum.

"You can e-mail a guy," Guyett said, "and say, 'When a ship explodes in space, what actually happens?'"

Then, because of ILM's latest tools--which accurately model the way gravity, or the lack of it, would affect an explosion in space--the filmmakers can find a way to make it look as close as possible to what the in-house science experts say it should.

Guyett explained that ILM's computers allow teams like his to simulate happenings like a nuclear explosion on film and not have it be prohibitively expensive. Just four or five years ago, he said, such a thing wouldn't have been possible. As an example, he said that creating a crash sequence in "Men in Black" had been very expensive because it involved breaking up a costly model. On top of that, they'd had only one chance at getting the shot. But back then, he added, doing it in CG wouldn't have worked because the technology didn't yet exist to get the physics right.

Another challenge, Guyett said, was finding a way to update iconic "Star Trek" elements for a 2009 film without upsetting hard-core Trekkies.

For example, he said that he and Abrams had labored endlessly to try to create a transporter effect. "It's a very iconic thing in the 'Star Trek' world," Guyett said. "It's a sound that everyone knows."

One problem they had to solve was that the transporter ended up looking different on each of the different sets were used in the film. "So we'd just have to adjust it (each time)," Guyett said. "The seemingly smaller challenges can take the longest to figure out."

In animating the new "Star Trek" film, animation supervisor Paul Kavanagh crafted a unique hybrid team of animators interested in camera work and camera department people interested in animation. Each member of the group would be given responsibility for working on individual shots.

(Credit: Industrial Light & Magic)

For animation supervisor Kavanagh, working on "Star Trek" presented the chance to do something he'd never done before: create a single working group of animators interested in camera work and people from the camera department interested in animation, and let individuals take responsibility for individual shots.

"We haven't tried that before at ILM," Kavanagh said.

He explained that for his eventual team, "Star Trek" was start-to-finish crunch time. They had to work on 860 shots in less than six months, and sometimes Abrams would toss in wild cards by deciding to change the story during sequences, and ask the animation department to do their own pre-visualization, something the director is usually in charge of.

In the past, it would have taken too much time, but because Kavanagh had created his hybrid working group, they were up to the task. "The benefits that came from it is that we came up with new camera techniques for all-CG shots," he said.

One of Kavanagh's favorite sequences is one in which Captain Kirk is banished to an ice planet and ends up in a battle with a beast known as a polarilla.

Crafted in CG and meant to be a hybrid of a polar bear and a gorilla, the polarilla was the animation team's responsibility, and Kavanagh said it was up to them to find a way to both breathe life into the creature and give it character.

He said they did a number of animation tests on the polarilla, trying to find the best creatures to base it on from a series of reference sources, including the BBC's Motion Gallery, YouTube, and visits to the San Francisco Zoo. In the end, they decided it would run like a polar bear, but have the rear quarters and hanging knuckles of a gorilla. It would also feature the weight of a grizzly bear.

In the sequence, however, they had to animate another creature, known as Big Red, a lobster/crab hybrid that jumps up through the ice to challenge the polarilla for the chance to attack Kirk.

Big Red "was fantastically fun to animate," Kavanagh said of the beast, which has 120 eyes in the back of its head.

As the chase sequence evolves, he recalled, they had to figure out how Big Red would reach out to grab Kirk's leg, as spelled out in the script. But because the creature's mouth was "so long," the animation team felt it didn't work to have it grab Kirk with its arm.

"We thought, what if its tongue is what grabs Kirk's leg?" Kavanagh said. "We had to figure out how that creatively looks. And that's really the fun part of the job."

They decided to have it slip and slide, Kavanagh said, but no so much "that it looks comical.

It seems that in the end, that was a challenge that both Guyett's visual effects team and Kavanagh's hybrid animation team had to tackle. But in updating "Star Trek" for 2009, will true Trekkies recognize the latest iteration of the franchise?

Judging by the mostly enthusiastic reviews, the answer seems to be yes. But Guyett's less interested in reviews than whether he did his job.

"Oh yeah," he said. "There are nods to the history of the series, what has happened and what will happen....But we just made it contemporary."

On June 22, Geek Gestalt will kick off Road Trip 2009. After driving more than 12,000 miles in the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last three years, I'll be looking for the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more in Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and South and North Dakota. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. And in the meantime, join the Road Trip 2009 Facebook page and follow my Twitter feed.

CNET News reporter Daniel Terdiman takes a ride in a flying armchair. The chair is suspended underneath what is known as a balloon cluster, and the ride took place at the Emeryville, Calif., headquarters of Pixar Animation.

(Credit: Raquel Baldwin)

EMERYVILLE, Calif.--You might think sitting in a flying armchair would be a blood-pumping, adrenaline-rushing, and terrifying pastime. But I'm here to tell you that it's pretty darn smooth sailing.

I know because on Friday morning, I got a chance to take a ride on, yes, a flying armchair. And while I didn't crash it into power cables or cause a major blackout like Larry Walters, aka "Lawnchair Larry", I did take some serious air.

This was a rare opportunity to take part in what I suppose is the little-known sport of cluster ballooning. Ultimately, it was part of a high-flying promotion for the forthcoming Pixar animated film "Up."

"Up" hits theaters on May 29. As IMDB puts it, "By tying thousands of balloons to his home, 78-year-old Carl Fredricksen sets out to fulfill his lifelong dream to see the wilds of South America. Right after lifting off, however, he learns he isn't alone on his journey, since Russell, a wilderness explorer 70 years his junior, has inadvertently become a stowaway on the trip."

According to Disney spokesperson Raquel Baldwin, "Up," Pixar's tenth feature film, and the first done in Disney digital 3D, included 20,622 hand-animated balloons that Fredricksen uses to hoist his house aloft. Of course, Baldwin added, researchers at Pixar discovered it would actually take several million normal-size balloons to get much lift on a house.

Still, what better way to promote such a film than to hire two world-class cluster balloonists (Troy Bradley and Jonathan Trappe) to conduct simultaneous tours around the American West and East, respectively, giving local media rides in an armchair suspended from dozens of huge, brightly colored balloons.

I arrived at Pixar's campus here at about 5:15 a.m. Friday, just as a woman named Devony Corry, a longtime commercial hot-air balloon pilot, was holding onto one of the large, helium-filled balloons. It was clipped onto and tugging insistently at a belt loop on her pants. "This is what we need for guys who wear their pants too low," she joked, adding, "I'm just afraid it's going to rip the belt loop off my pants."

The armchair is seen in the early-morning light, before being rigged up to the balloon cluster.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

Here in Emeryville, Bradley (who along with Richard Abruzzo, became the first two people to fly a balloon nonstop from North America to Africa) is in charge of a group of about 10 or so people who are rapidly filling the large balloons with helium and clipping them into a quickly-growing cluster.

"We're hoping we'll lose a few people for good footage," Bradley joked as I arrived.

At this point, with the sky still in its pre-dawn state, Bradley and his crew had gotten the cluster to just 13 balloons. But he said the ultimate goal was to reach between 64 and 70 balloons, which, combined, will contain about 8,000 cubic feet of helium and have about 500 pounds of lift.

For now, the 13 balloons (which quickly become 14, then 15, 16, and so on as team members clip new ones onto the cluster) are tethered to two giant helium tanks. A brown armchair rests on the ground next to the tanks, seemingly calling out to take someone skyward.

Photos: Getting an armchair off the ground

As the sky begins to take on a little color, it's clear we're going to be blessed with a spectacular day complete with what Bradley calls "absolutely awesome conditions." Read: no wind.

At the core of the cluster is a small set of 8-1/2-foot balloons, around which are being added a set of 7-footers. Later, the cluster will be filled out with a large number of 5-footers.

As she holds on to one of the 7-footers, I chat with Corry, who tells me she's been piloting hot air balloons for more than 25 years. She said she had learned about the cluster ballooning event here by reading an e-mail chain inviting qualified folks to "come out and crew."

After awhile, the cluster is getting too big to remain tethered to the helium tanks, and Bradley and a couple of helpers carefully clip it to the armchair. But because of the lift from the cluster, it's necessary to seat someone in the chair, and so a woman named Carol Bair takes the plunge. Still, the cluster of balloons is testing Bair's weight. "He (Bradley) said the chair tips forward and I don't have my seat belt on yet," Bair joked.

One by one, team members arrive from helium tanks arrayed around the amphitheater here where the event is being held, ready to help add to the girth and wild colors of the cluster. There's actually a queue, as it's faster to fill a balloon, it seems, than to clip one on to the cluster.

"I can't afford to lose any weight," Bair said. "I have to be ballast."

The balloon cluster begins to take air as it approaches completion. At its base is an armchair in which Carol Bair sits patiently.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

Indeed, as a couple more balloons are clipped in, Bair gives a little shout and we can see the foot of the chair begin to move around on its own: Armchairs suspended from cluster balloons clearly have a need to take to the sky.

Carol's husband, Ray Bair, is another member of Bradley's traveling team. The three of them, plus two others, have come from Albuquerque, N.M., and have hit cities like Chicago, Cincinnati, Seattle, and St. Louis with the promotional balloon cluster on their way to Pixar. Bair tells me a cluster like this is intended to look like a lightbulb, though "it's a little different every time."

As the early morning sun crested the trees near the entrance to Pixar's campus, the balloons become brightly lit and, with the sky a brilliant blue and the balloons' various colors almost glowing, it looks absolutely glorious.

"It looks like a perfect morning," Carol Bair said.

"Oh yeah," Bradley answered, "You can't ask for better."

Taking air
The plan was that at 8 a.m., the balloon team would be done and could start giving journalists rides in the flying armchair. There were a lot of other reporters who had signed up for the privilege, but none of them had gotten to Pixar at 5:15. So I got to go first (see the video below).

I sat down in the chair and several people began strapping me in, even as two people sat on the arms to keep the cluster, the chair, and me from flying away. The wind began to pick up a little, and I could feel the chair sliding around a little bit underneath me. Just then, Baldwin handed me a waiver to sign. I joked I'd sign it when the ride was over.

Finally, we were ready, and the chair began to rise. It was smooth, almost surreally so. If I hadn't known what was going on, I wouldn't have known what was going on. They let me rise up to about 30 feet in the air, and then say a few words into a small microphone attached to my shirt, since they were filming the whole thing.

In fact, because there were already a bunch of other reporters lined up to take an armchair flight, the ride lasted just a few minutes. I would have liked to go up much higher--maybe not as high as 20,000 feet, what I understand is the rig's limit, but a little higher. But oh, well. Beggars can't be choosers.

I touched down, just as quietly and smoothly as I'd taken off, and then, just like that it was over.

You can call me "Flying Armchair Daniel." Or maybe something a little catchier than that.

On June 22, Geek Gestalt will kick off Road Trip 2009. After driving more than 12,000 miles in the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last three years, I'll be looking for the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more in Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and South and North Dakota. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. And in the meantime, join the Road Trip 2009 Facebook page and follow my Twitter feed.

CNET News reporter Daniel Terdiman's in-laws peruse the Internet via a Wi-Fi connection at their mountaintop, off-the-grid house.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET Networks)

NICE, Calif.--Over the last few days, I spent hours with my wife's parents, Tyler and Donna, helping them adapt to the first Internet connection they've ever had. For them, living on top of a mountain at 4,000 feet, in the middle of a national forest, and entirely off the grid--this has been a big step.

For my wife and I, it's also been a big project, at least in terms of teaching them the basics, and helping them get ready to learn on their own. While their Internet proficiency is still low, they are learning fast, and over time, it should be interesting to see how much progress they make, and how they make it.

Three-part series
Getting my in-laws online, at last
Big progress for off-the-grid Net-newbie in-laws
Making an Internet list, and checking it twice

Over the few days that we just spent on the mountain with them, these are many of the things (in no particular order) we talked to them about, showed them on their new MacBook, and explained that they might want to investigate in the future:

• Undo/Control-Z. They wanted to know if there was any way to undo a mistake on their computer, and we explained that Control-Z (Command-Z on a Mac) is the way to do that.

• Pandora. They haven't used it yet, but we explained how this free service makes it easy for anyone to create a totally custom Internet radio station based on their musical interests. They asked how Pandora makes money. I couldn't answer that very good question.

• Rotten Tomatoes. We explained that this service is among the very best for crowd-sourced movie reviews.

• IMDB. They watch a lot of movies, and often want to know more about the actors involved. We explained that IMDB is the only site they needed to go to get fully cross-referenced information on actors and filmmakers.

• Skype. For my in-laws, Skype will be key in helping them save money on their cell phone bill. We showed them voice calling and Skype instant messaging.

• iTunes Store. Tyler was looking for a specific song by an artist, and I showed him how he could use the iTunes Store to listen to short clips of artists' songs.

• Downloading photos from digital camera. We recently gave them a Canon PowerShot G2, and now that they have a new MacBook, we showed them how to easily download photos onto the computer.

• iPhoto. After downloading photos, we showed them how to organize the pictures in the Mac's built-in photo management software.

• Printing wirelessly. Now that they have a Wi-Fi network (running on an old AirPort Extreme) I talked to them about setting up wireless printing to their HP DeskJet printer.

• Connecting the Mac to a TV. I bought them the connectors for linking their MacBook to their TV. At first they didn't see the value of doing this, but they eventually saw that as their vision gets worse, a larger screen will make computing easier.

• NeoOffice versus OpenOffice. They've been using OpenOffice on their Windows computer, and we loaded NeoOffice onto their Mac. I haven't used it, but I explained that my research concluded that NeoOffice is better on Macs than OpenOffice.

• Second Life. My wife and I are both longtime Second Life users, and we talked to them about whether they'd want to use the virtual world. However, their download limits (200 megabytes per day) would likely make it difficult for them to use such services.

• PayPal. They hope not to buy very many things over the Internet, but they do understand that having a PayPal account will make it easier for them to do transactions on services like eBay.

• Amazon.com. We walked in on them looking at prices for tarps on Amazon.com. My reaction was "hide the credit card."

• Facebook. While social networking is likely something they won't deal with for some time, we talked about how many people have used Facebook to connect with friends from past lives.

• Twitter. They have heard a lot about Twitter, and we showed them how the microblogging service is a great way to see what people around the world are thinking about things in near-real-time.

• YouTube. Among other things, I showed Tyler how he could use YouTube to find obscure songs he might be looking for.

• Netflix. We've managed a Netflix account for them (they would pick up the DVDs at their P.O. box) for some time, since they didn't have an Internet connection. Now that they do, they've taken over management of the account. I had high hopes they would be able to watch Netflix streaming movies, but their download limits may prevent them from doing that.

• Google Earth. We showed them Google Earth and used the service to locate their house, a process that took even them some time, given the remote location in which they live.

• Gmail. They are using Gmail for e-mail, and we set them up to be able to send and receive their Gmail messages using the Mac's Mail application.

• Control on PCs/Command on Macs. We explained that anything that uses the control key on a PC (Control-C to copy, or Control-Z to undo) would utilize the command key instead on a Mac.

• Windows Security patches. I uploaded Service Pack 3 and six Windows security patches on their PC.

• WhiteHouse.gov. They were excited to be able to send messages to the president and to be able to watch his weekly video addresses. They also were happy to be able to easily e-mail many other government officials.

• Instant messaging. We explained that instant messaging is a terrific way to carry on informal conversations, and we discussed some of the etiquette of IM.

• Commenting on Web sites/blogs. We talked at length with them about how comments are implemented on various Web sites and blogs, and how people use them for different purposes.

• Wi-Fi. We set them up with an Apple AirPort Extreme and made it so their new MacBook could be connected to the Internet throughout their house. They were more excited by this than by anything else.

• USB hubs. Tyler wanted to know how to print wirelessly and I explained that he would need to get a USB hub to split the cable coming from his printer.

• Bookmarks. We provided them with a long bookmarked list of Web sites, and showed them how to add new bookmarks so they don't have to type in entire URLs for sites they hope to visit a lot.

• Delicious. We want to see what kinds of sites they are interested in and encouraged them to use Delicious.com to share their discoveries with us.

• Safari versus Firefox. I explained that Firefox is generally considered the best Web browser for the Mac, but told them how to use Safari is they were so inclined.

• Never using Internet Explorer again. I said that because of its many security holes I would never let them use Explorer on their PC again.

• Registering for Web sites. They were interested in why people would provide their e-mail address and/or other information to register for Web sites, and we explained the many reasons people are willing to do it, and why sites want it.

• Adding an AirPort Express to extend the Wi-Fi network's range. We told them that by adding an AirPort Express to their wireless network set up, they could extend the range of their Wi-Fi connectivity to a metal shed near their house. It also happens that that is where my wife and I sleep when we visit during cold months.

• Google News. I showed them Google's clearinghouse for news stories. They didn't seem particularly interested in it, but I'm guessing that will change as they realize the site's utility.

• Using wireless keyboards and mice. If they do decide to connect their Mac to their TV, we explained, they would likely want to add a wireless keyboard and mouse so they could have more freedom of movement in their living room.

• eBay. We explained that this service would be a fantastic way for them to find the kinds of supplies that their local merchants often don't have, or charge too much for.

• iPhone (for the future). We touted our beloved iPhones, and tried to get them excited about the devices as well. This is clearly something for another time.

• Blogrolls. They asked what blogrolls were, and we showed them how many blogs offer lists of other sites they endorse and suggest readers look at.

• Using the trackpad on the Mac instead of a mouse. Having only previously used their desktop PC, they weren't familiar with laptop trackpads. So we spent some time explaining how they work, including how to use two fingers on the MacBook to scroll up and down pages.

• Wikipedia. I had already been touting Wikipedia, but now I explained how anyone can edit any page, and how it is possible to see the entire history of changes for a page.

On June 22, Geek Gestalt will kick off Road Trip 2009. After driving more than 12,000 miles in the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last three years, I'll be looking for the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more in Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and South and North Dakota. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. And in the meantime, join the Road Trip 2009 Facebook page and follow my Twitter feed.

While it may seem normal to have several Net-connected Macs among a small group of people, this is the first time such a scene happened at the off-the-grid, mountaintop home of CNET News reporter Daniel Terdiman's in-laws.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

NICE, Calif.--As a San Francisco-based Internet junkie, I can't count the number of times I've been in groups with almost as many wirelessly connected Mac laptops as people.

So the scene in front of me shouldn't be new: four people, three connected Mac laptops.

But there's something completely novel going on: I'm visiting my in-laws at their off-the-grid, mountaintop house in Northern California, about four hours northeast of San Francisco. And I can say with absolute certainty that this is the first time such a scene has played out here.

How do I know? Because it's been less than two weeks since my in-laws, Tyler and Donna, had Internet installed on their property for the first time--in their case, the only available option was satellite--and it's been just hours since I personally set up their wireless network. In other words, Wi-Fi is a newly arrived house guest, and judging by the concentration on their faces, the occasional smiles, and the superlatives coming from their lips, it's a very welcome one.

For years, my wife and I had been trying to get her parents to cotton to the idea that their lives, at 4,000 feet, surrounded by national forest and steeped in the necessities of growing most of their own food, could be improved by getting online. But they'd gotten by just fine, thank you, for more than 30 years, without even a television.

Now, suddenly, there is a Wi-Fi network set up in their house, and I could see my in-laws' lives changing before my eyes.

For example, Tyler said excitedly to me one morning during my visit that he'd figured out how to use e-mail and the Web to do many of the things that used to require him to stop at the post office and get stamps.

"That's the end of snail mail for me," Tyler told me. And, he added, no more catalogs would be cramming their P.O. box.

Yesssss!

Working so much better now
My wife and I had conveniently--and coincidentally--managed to time our last visit to the mountain with the HughesNet satellite installation. But as I wrote previously, those first baby steps didn't go so well.

Thanks to glacially slow initial download speeds, the unexpected realities of a 200MB daily download limit, and the necessity of loading countless Windows updates onto their 2-year-old, Internet-chaste PC, we had retreated the mountain almost embarrassed by how badly it had gone.

This is the screen HughesNet customers can use to get up-to-date information about their Internet connection.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

So, I set out to make it all better by bringing them a refurbished MacBook, pre-configured at home with everything they'd need for a happy Internet life. I even unhooked my home Wi-Fi network and donated it to the cause.

After a less-than-stellar first attempt to get his in-laws online for the first time from the off-the-grid, 4,000-feet elevation house they've lived in for more than 30 years, CNET News reporter Daniel Terdiman and his wife are returning to the mountain this week with a new Mac to help make the process better. And what could be better than a great view to go with your Internet?

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET Networks)

Could a Mac be what it takes to get my in-laws to love the Internet?

Last week, I had the very rare opportunity to help get my in-laws, who live off-the-grid at 4,000 feet in the middle of a national forest, online for the first time and, my wife and I hoped, to instantly end more than 30 years of their being cut off from media innovations.

As I wrote afterward though, their initial experience was quite a bit less than stellar, mainly due to the vagaries of navigating what seem like fairly restrictive download threshold policies implemented by their satellite Internet vendor, HughesNet: After hitting the download limit of 200 megabytes in one day--which I'm certain we actually didn't hit--the connection slowed to less than 2Kbps.

But there were other problems, too, that had to do with what it takes to make a 2-year-old Windows machine that's never been online safe for play dates with the Internet. And for my in-laws, who had no experience whatsoever with downloading security updates, and XP Service Packs, and virus protection, I can only imagine how daunting it must have seemed. Even for me, a longtime computer user--albeit a Mac loyalist--it was confusing.

While my wife and I were on hand the day Hughes came to install the satellite, we had only that one day up on the mountain to help get things set up properly. But given that we ended up wasting hours trying, and failing, to download those security patches and virus protection packages, we weren't able to get much done before we had to leave. We couldn't even get their new Gmail account working.

But we have a plan. And it involves a computer that simply doesn't require security download after service pack download to be safe online.

Monday, a new (well, refurbished) MacBook arrived at my house, and over the next couple of days, my wife and I are going to load that computer up with as much necessary and fun software (starting with OpenOffice) as we can find, and then cart it back up to her parents' with us later this week. In addition, we're going to bring them an Airport Extreme so that they can use that new computer wirelessly all around their mountaintop property.

After all, while they may not understand the sense of freedom that a wireless Internet connection provides, we hope they will soon realize that sitting on their deck, looking down over the treetops at their stellar view, is a much better place to be online than stuffed into the tiny windowless office where they have their PC.

As for Hughes, after I contacted them last week to comment for the story I was writing, I was told by someone in their public relations department that the company would do what it can to help my in-laws. I'm not entirely sure what that means, but sure enough, the in-laws did get a phone call from someone in tech support, offering to work through any residual issues.

Originally, that call was supposed to happen Monday, but I suggested that they postpone it until Thursday when my wife and I will be back up on the mountain, so that we can help diagnose the problem and describe it to the technician.

That's important since, as I wrote previously, my in-laws don't have anything to compare their online experience to, and therefore would likely have trouble describing exactly what the problem is. But I can: Even before being booted to under-2Kbps speeds for supposedly going over the 200MB download threshold their account allows, the top speed they were getting on their 1.0 Mbps account was about 13 Kbps. Hardly high speed. So, we'll have to see if Hughes can do something about that.

Still, on Sunday, as my wife and I were hanging out, spending a little time online, an e-mail popped into her in-box. It was from the in-laws. And for us, having spent the last nine years working hard to get them to embrace the Internet as a way to stay in touch with us--and the rest of her family--it was a rather big moment.

If you have suggestions of important software that we should put on their new Mac--especially if it's free--please send them to me by Tuesday evening.

On June 22, Geek Gestalt will kick off Road Trip 2009. After driving more than 12,000 miles in the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last three years, I'll be looking for the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more in Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and South and North Dakota. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. And in the meantime, join the Road Trip 2009 Facebook page and follow my Twitter feed.