May 2004

Hello friends,

This time I'll write you about shopping experiences in Toronto. Toronto has huge shopping centers. 99% of the products you can find also in Israel, and there are things in Israel you can't easily find here. The difference is the attitude. Shopping here is a sort of sport or entertainment. The place were you get the real lesson is the supermarket, or more specifically at the cashier. First, the cashier has younger faces than in Israel. They could even be high school students. They wear a white shirt and a tie.
So you come to pay, and the cashier woman says "Hi" with a big smile. Shops in Toronto are filled with invisible cameras. If shopping is a sport, shoplifting is its more adventurous form. Who knows, maybe these computer vision guys already implemented the smile detection system, and if her smile is not wide enough, she is at risk of becoming a change collector. Let me explain something about the change. Since every price is *99, you always get change. Apart from the psychological effect of lower price, there are other explanations for this. One says that by forcing the cashier to give the client change, the cashier cannot take the money to her pocket. I think people also like to "get some money back". Anyway, change here is heavy, and there is not much to do with the cents. Many beggars live from this change. This month they put a revolutionary machine near the cashier. People come with bags of change, and pour it at the top. The machine counts the cents, and produces a voucher to purchase products at the same day. That's what I call to close a small cycle! The falling coins inside the machine sound like a slot machine that always wins, so people are watching the miracle while waiting on the line. Is this service free? No, they charge 9.8 cents for every dollar. Gee, that's the gravitational constant! In fact, some slot machines are designed to return 90% of the money, so this is nothing but a deterministic slot machine. I appreciate the ingenuity of the engineers who built this machine, and in particular their ability to deal with fractions of cents, but what about the beggars?

Let's move on. The cashier puts your groceries in bags and asks you: "AIR MILES?". I don't have the air-miles card. Everything works here with plastic cards, and I carry only nine. Is she going to call the security? No. She says: "NO, NO AIR MILES?" That means: "You still don't have our exclusive card that makes our clients happy just by carrying it? We are disappointed". The thing is that the more experienced ones know that I don't have the card just by looking at me. But they always validate (who knows how far the voice recognition community will go).

More "serious" stuff: we had a guest visitor from Electronic Arts (EA), whose base is in Vancouver. He said the size of the computer games industry will soon match the size of Hollywood. They predict that within ten years the hardware will be so powerful to produce photorealistic animations without special programming effort. The claim is that game design is shifting from computer graphics to the design of game experience. He also said many consider NHL94 to be the best hockey game they ever developed. Its code is full with hard-coded constants made by a programmer who left the company, and with all the modern 3D graphics they can't reproduce the experience.

Speaking (maybe too early) about the end of research in computer graphics, have you heard about the animation film Ryan? A professor and one of the students here were involved in the production of non-linear projection effects. Instead of twisting the geometry of objects, they use a combination of several projections to distort objects in the image. What computer vision people consider wrong is considered in computer graphics to be artistic. Ryan was very artistic. Check out what he is doing today.


Ady.