UPDATED 13:05 EDT / DECEMBER 28 2009

Microsoft’s Mobicast Heralds a New Twitter Generation

image  The new wave of the Twitter generation is upon us.  A new project from Microsoft’s Labs in Egypt are working on a video synthesis product that recognizes when uploaded content from multiple cell phones are being recorded from the same location.  Called Mobicast, the service would then combine the videos in order to create a single scene to be used for footage.  Great for journalists and media distributors, but what about the rest of the world?

Mobicast can be done in real time, so an event being captured by several mobile video cameras can be meshed to create a singular form of footage.  The combining of several vantage points is always a topic of interest when it comes to firsthand reports, and the web has made it easier than ever for citizen journalists to utilize such mobile devices for their own content production and publishing.

Twitter has helped to push the real time vantage-sharing, especially as third party apps such as TwitPic and others provide mechanisms for sharing media on Twitter in real time as well.  The result is an instant gratification around the presentation of shared media, creating a series of unique perspectives that can offer a new sense of completeness around a given event.

Real time search has already demonstrated the benefits of aggregating multiple perspectives, lending an ear to the ground for discussions that indicate a level of importance for our current global culture.  Such democratization of content is exemplified when placed in the context of real time, even though we have yet to figure out the working details of real time search’s true benefits.

imageMicrosoft has a particular interest in real time search, as it has already fostered deals with Twitter and Facebook for accessing status update content for the purpose of providing real time search results.  As Mobicast could present an interesting tool for personal and enterprise use, it also has possible ramifications in a country’s legal system as well.  Eye witness accounts are one thing, but synthesized video content is another.

There are dangers, however, around the altering of reality in such a way.  Even beyond an eye witness account backed by a service such as Mobicast, video synthesis is still not reality–it’s a combination of recorded video content that has been altered in order to create a single video.  While this process may give us a better handle on reality, it only does so by altering what an individual’s true reality was.

Nevertheless, Mobicast is not a current product available to the public, so there are clearly several issues yet to be worked out.  But something like Mobicast could have a serious impact on real time content-sharing, and it is particularly relevant to our Twitter generation.  Keeping all of this in mind as we work towards future iterations of real time content-sharing will be an important aspect around the techonology’s evolution, as well as our use cases for the potential behind such technology.


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