Feb 20, 2007
Amgen: Quokka redux
It lives:
The 2007 Amgen Tour of California started this weekend. It looks like some of my former colleagues at Quokka who are now at Macromedia Adobe have been working on the realtime race tracker.
Francis Potter from Adobe sent over the annoucement from Yottapixel:
An engineering team at Adobe has been working for a few months on the Tracker. Many of the team members worked in 1998-2001 at Quokka Sports, a dot.com-era startup which pushed the envelope at the time with live sports coverage. In many ways, the Amgen Tour Tracker represents the culmination of what that team was trying to accomplish years ago.
Some of the stylistic elements in the Tour Tracker pick up where Quokka left off. The live video feed resizes to fit the user’s browser — even if that means the video is pixelated. Data, commentary, and image thumbnails are overlayed on the edges of the video, sometimes obscuring the action. There are lots of shades of grey in the interface. The end result delivers a rough, cluttered look which emphasizes the liveness, urgency, and experimental nature of the medium.
I think it's good:
I've been watching throughout the day; the coverage is pretty spectacular. This certainly isn't the first time something like this has ever been done; but it's certainly the best I've seen so far. It's the liveness of the thing that's quite remarkable; the thing is actually tracking grade, GPS positions, live updates, and it's looking really very good the whole way through. I'm also delighted that the video is grainy and full-screen (neave.tv does this well, thought not live), and that it drops out from time to time.
A few suggestions:
- it should be able to tell whether the video is running properly; the video was really choppy earlier, which was fine, but the audio kept dropping out and made the whole thing seem broken. I'd be fine with choppy video if the audio wasn't choppy to match.
- I'd also like to be able to have a bit more control over the interface; the fullscreen video and maps are great, but it feels like the flickr photos and stage stats (and other interface elements) are layered over the background. You can make them smaller, which is great; but you can't make them bigger. This choice makes the interface a bit clearer, but it feels less immediate to me than it could be.
- No RSS feeds? They may be available in other places on the site (I'm scared to close the browser in case I lose my internet connection); I don't see any links on the tracker. They might also be violating the Flickr Terms of Use by not providing links to the photos.
Problems with this kind of thing:
The last point is not so much a critique of this particular piece, but more about the state of the art generally. We (Stamen, Adobe) make these beautiful environments that pull together all these disparate data types, display them in compelling and innovative ways, get people really involved, and then once someone wants the original source for any of this data... they have to leave this environment.
This happens on Digg Labs too: it's great to get involved in these dynamic interactive environments that give you a real sense of the pulse of Digg and what's happening on it, but once you want to interact with the stories, you have to leave and you're suddenly in a whole new space. There's a unaddressed split here between immersion and research, between entertainment and analysis; one that needs to be resolved if this kind of thing is really going to have legs.
In any event, it's a great piece of work, I've been watching it all afternoon and I'm delighted to see that after a few uneven fits and starts, Quokka's vision for live internet sports events is alive and well. It was a good idea during the salad days; it still is, if only you can find someone to pay for it. Congratulations to Michael, Julie and Gever at Quokka/Macromedia/Adobe.
Ah, history...
On the one hand, I wish Stamen had done this work; on the other hand, we sort of already have. Once, not nearly as well, last year, when we were called in at the last minute by Adobe to build with the video and mapping portions of the '06 Live Race Viewer:
Stage 1 in San Francisco.
And then of course during the salad days when I worked at Quokka, back when full screen pixelated images freaked people out:
The old Whitbread Chronicle; pixelation ahoy!
The above image links to a 30mb quicktime demo that Kirk Clyne and I built when Quokka was looking for funding. There's also a climbing Mount Everest version, for the nostalgically-minded.