Stereoscopy is what scientists (and Wikipedia) call creating or enhancing the illusion of depth in an image. This is achieved by presenting two offset images separately to the left and right eye of the viewer.

Engineers have come up with three methodologies to create the illusion of depth. Two of them involve eyeglasses to either combine separate images from two sources or filter images from a single source to each eye separately. What is working best are liquid crystal shutter glasses. They alternately darken over one eye, and then the other synchronized with the refresh rate of the screen. And how well they work!!! If you have ever asked yourself why your eyes hurt after a 3D movie….It’s because you have a colibri in front of your eyes for two ours.

The real illusion is to believe however, that the third, glassless methodology is ever going to work for a broad audience. The basic idea behind it is to have the lightsource split the images directionally into the viewer’s eyes. But as the viewer moves his head from left to right, or up to down the image in his head changes. The first commercially available displays try to solve this issue by introducing an eye-tracking device. Recently LG presented the first commercially available screen for multiple users.* While LG is positioning itself as an innovator, they weren’t really the first one’s to come up with that technology. Plus it doesn’t seem to work too well. Imagine 9 people in the room all seeing a different image of the screen….

In their desperation to sell 3D home TV’s marketers have identified glasses as the scapegoat for lame global revenues. Some argue there wasn’t enough content to incentivize consumers to buy 3D TV’s. But what if the real differentiating element of cinema 3D was the screen size? In that case I see Sony on the right track, having started to experiment with virtual reality again. Watching a movie per se has never been a social experience anyway.

*http://www.lgnewsroom.com/newsroom/contents/61554

Guillaume manipulating a touchscreen to navigate through a 3D landscape

SquareClock crew watching stereoscopy enabled landscape prototype

That is also why there is a treat at Squareclock, every once in a while. You know what happened the day before, when you enter the office and there are two bags full of croissants and pains chocolates. Someone just broke Releasedev, the Queen of all workspaces.

It hasn’t happened in a long time, so I needed to take this shot at the bakery…

Retailers of home equipment products are aiming for more space, light and a superior experience that puts their products on perfect store display. They invest a lot in ever more retail space, so furniture can be shown as if in their customers houses. We wanted to go one step further and display consumers individual homes around these products.

Some home equipment retailers passed by and asked us to remove the weight and difficult handling of their products and let them look good, everywhere at any time. Squareclock can teleport bulky, static objects into virtual space. It can put them into everybody’s virtual home and pass or fail the test of personal fit. Odd enough that consumers still want to see the real thing, still want to spend their Saturdays in shopping malls. At least they can now experience the real thing after they have virtually planned and cofinigured in almost the same visual attractiveness.

Initially the Squareclock pioneers Guillaume, Eric and Vincent imagined phaser-proof car protection systems, new generation jet packs and ubiquituous media broadcasting units based in space, as their source of revenues. In the end however, reality caught up with them and let them work out a 3D technology for interior design that comes with a cloud based raytracing engine. Not as sophisticated, there appeared to be some commercial use to it. Their first clients from the old economy considered homes in virtual reality, shared and distributed through the internet, pure science fiction.

We keep up with the spirit of tomorrow as a troup of fearless r&d fighters. In small teams we challenge the rules of old industries so to reduce complexity. In teams we find bugs and kill them with deliberate satisfaction. When an airstrike hits, we duck, hide and reboot. When we are ambushed by a crash, we take it easy, figure out a plan and escape with all the brainforce the collective can afford. When storm shuts down the power supply of our office, we go home to our families and wait for the French government to act.

Here in Courbevoie next to Paris, specialized, large scale development efforts are compensated by lateral, concurrent brainmixing. Armies of developers are replaced by a commando of warriors who engage the force of mathematical algorithms to visualize simplicity. But: we don’t cherish the less is more approach. There is a massive brain behind the cute, easy to use applications we build. Our value is built on integrated thinking.

You can’t use a battery, ballpoint pen, air freshener, rubber band, tweezers, nasal spray and a turkey baster to create a bullet proof protective shield around a hamster. Or can you?

As long as big corporations and researchers develop the ingredients, folks like us can choose the best patch it together to more than just the sum of all components. And that’s exactly what we do here, at Squareclock. We compile, integrate and rethink.

Just because it is a gas guzzler, doesn't mean it's my only one.

Just because my car looks like a truck, doesn't mean I am a redneck.

Just because it looks ugly, doesn't mean it's cheap.

Just because it looks ugly, doesn't mean it's cheap.

Attention is hard to get. Understatement isn't.

I will change the time-space CONTINUUM.

‘Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.’*

Imagine, you drive a gas guzzler that looks like a truck and will never get you the sympathy of planet earth. But driving it, you feel all the freedom and self confidence that you will ever get on this planet. What reputation do the products we wear, drive, watch and listen to communicate to other living creatures? Symbolic values and differentiation lead us to purchase decisions for the sake of our egos. None of these make us feel like millionaires, movie gods or rock stars. It’s just that we think so.
Product innovation, be it symbolic or functional aims to make life easier, more entertaining and yes, happy. But what does a good life consist of, exactly?
The New Economics Foundation’s happy planet index (HPI) says it is made of life expectancy, life satisfaction and the ecological footprint of a population. A contradiction in itself? Yes to the understanding of western society. No for some of the less developed societies on this planet. And what does that have to do with a car? Doc Brown knew the answer in 1985. He must have changed the time-space continuum with his actions. After all, the future he experienced is set in 2015.

Happy New Year,

Wilfrid Utz & Clemens Schrenk

*Robert Zemeckis, ‘Back to the Future’, 1985

Here is something I could never write within a resume, but still holds true.
What it really means to be a consultant. It means that you get a flight ticket and you wake up on a plane, just to present yourself as the long awaited expert for something that you a) don’t have the faintest clue about b) have heard about but never worked on or c) that you know about but is close to impossible to realize. Ok there are some d), e) and f) alternatives, but for new assignments they are rare, especially in the early years. Maybe it is the same situation, but just a different feeling later on, as you know that experience is just another word for knowing how to approach things that you don’t know anything about.

The problem is, that after all that experience your environment can assimilate you back into a world of darkness. Darkness being the feeling that only profound knowledge and expertise within an area can lead to being hired. Darkness being the reality of many companies being convinced about the exclusiveness of their business. Darkness being the self imposed limit to corporate fit.
Would they actually pay for someone who doesn’t live their everyday reality, so that he can bring another perspective? Usually quite a lot, see a), b) and c). (But consultants are never hired by human resources) Now what can you expect from someone that is trapped in the darkness, but is supposed to hire you? As for me, he will hire someone else, of course. My environment is leading me into darkness, and so does everyone who has become a part of its institutionalized framework.
As Randy Pausch put it, brickwalls are there for a reason: They let you know how badly you want something. After all I achieved, went through and overcame, I find myself in front of a tremendous brickwall. A resume is simply not the right tool to break the wall. It might be useful for open doors, useful to overcome a filter, but not more. Which is why I should discard the whole idea of using it, or simply stick with the elite, that the mainstream career service thinks I am a part of.