All posts by: Kevin Conklin

Immortality Project

Is the carrot out of reach? After giving your heart and soul to an effort and results are not there, most responsible adults hang on. Try a little harder. Stick it out a little longer. The light at the end of the tunnel must be just around the corner. But there comes a time you cut your losses and move on.

It could be that there was no overarching vision. No mission that is bigger than you. Or, there was one but you have become disillusioned and you think you see through some veil of lies.

Or perhaps this indicates that you didn’t like the process. That you are only in it for that carrot at the end. And that your priorities are misplaced.

But to you, there is only an illusion of a carrot. And it’s always just out of reach. And at the end of the day, all you are left with is a big juicy nothing burger. Spent, filled, but unfulfilled. You feel duped.

**

I was a hang glider pilot for nearly 25 years. During one flight I got to 10,000 feet above the ground. My longest duration was a flight of over 7 hours. I felt like a real bad-ass. Why did I do it?

It was the exhilaration that initially drew me. But there was also the subtle desire for attention and admiration. Spectators were almost always present. And there I was, the guy “up there”. The guy that really knew what he was doing. The daredevil that was the envy of the groundlings. Each time I floated overhead or I swooped by, I would whoop it up and feel like I was getting another 15 minutes of fame.

But in participating there is a focused attention, a sense of really being fully present in the moment. Especially at times when the danger is closest, like take-off, landing, or flying very near cliff faces or trees. It is after moments like those that the rest of life comes into a different perspective.

You begin to think, “how will I be remembered?” What is my “immortality project”? For my 15 minutes of silly fame? This “illusion” that enabled me to feel heroic for if but a brief moment?

**

That brings me back to the carrot.

If you are a believer in the vision and mission, part of an “immortality project” that you have subscribed to, then the carrot is always within reach. It is the fulfillment and satisfaction of being part of something much greater than yourself. Some would call it building someone else’s dream. But it could be your own dream also.

But if there is no mission or you are not buying it, then carrot or not you will remain unfulfilled. Getting the carrot reward may keep you fulfilled for a while, pay your bills, and fill your bank account, even give you the opportunity to get good at doing silly things like hang gliding, but it will leave you empty. Like you just sucked down that big juicy nothing burger.

Cut your losses. Find your immortality project. Be part of something for which you will be remembered.

Go and do!

360 View VR Tours Image Capture Process

So many people have been asking what process we use to capture our images and assemble them into 360° view VR tours that I am going to outline it here.

At one time we thought it was going to be much simpler than it turns out to be. Not that it is hard to do, but there is more to the process than we initially expected. At first, I thought we could simply use a Ricoh Theta 360 camera and use those panographs to build the tours. There are a number of issues with that.

At first glance, the images coming from the Theta look good but under closer examination, they are severely lacking. The dynamic range is not good enough to get details in both the shadows and the highlights by windows unless the room is very well lit. Additionally, the colors are oversaturated for my taste – they look great at first but are overwhelming after a while. Also, the images are only 14MP and it shows if you zoom in even just a little bit. The clarity and sharpness just are not there for anything off-center of the lens.

One of our requirements was to stay with something extremely small and light, so for us, a DSLR is out of the question. Not only is the camera bigger, bulkier, heavier, but also it would require a heavier tripod and a pano head designed for a specific lens.

GoPro Hero 5 and either Pano5+1 MarkII or PanoHero Maxi H6B pano head

Enter in the GoPro Hero 5. Why the GoPro? First, it shoots in RAW format. Second, there is an app that automates the process of taking bracketed exposures. Third, there are two different pano heads available – the Pano5+1 MarkII, and the PanoHero Maxi H6B. In a future post, I’ll review them both and show you why one is definitely better and allows for more reliable 360×180 panograph stitching than the other. Lastly, the stitched panograph is 65+ megapixels and looks great!

So here is the process. If inside, light the room as much as possible. Set up the tripod and pano head and camera and take 5 bracketed exposure shots for each of the 8 pano head positions. The shots are triggered remotely using the GoPro HDR from an iOS device. The exposures are -2 EV, -1 EV, 0 EV, +1 EV, +2 EV. So for one 360 panograph, we essentially take 40 exposures. We sometimes take the shots from more than one position in the room depending on the size of the room and the expected flow of the final VR tour. We DO NOT take a set of shots every few feet as you see with some other VR tour companies (…never to be mentioned here again…). Ok, maybe just this once – they are the number one VR tour company in the country and have a slick front-end and sales pitch, but we think they have a fatal flaw. We believe strongly that the number of images is way too much and leads to a very tedious user experience and causes a very high viewer drop off rate.

Photmatix Pro 6 – No more! Now… Aurora HDR 2018

Next, we take each group of 5 bracketed exposures and merge them using an HDR (high dynamic range) application. Using that software, details in both the highlights and shadows are enhanced as is the entire tonal range of the image. We export the result as a 12 megapixel, 16-bit tiff file. That is done for each of the 8 shots that will make up the one panograph. That seems like a lot of work, but once the settings are determined for the first shot, we can batch process the other HDR’s for each pano.

To process the HDR images we used to use Photomatix Pro 6, which was the industry standard bearer for a long time. But we have recently switched to Aurora HDR 2018 which has had so many improvements it is now much better than Photomatix.

PanoramaStudio 3 Pro

We then take the 8 HDR merged and tone mapped images that will make up each panograph and import them into PanoramaStudio 3 Pro. If shot correctly with the pano head, the images will stitch correctly with no visible seams or parallax errors. If we used the Pano5+1 Mark II pano head, we mask out the head from the nadir shot. We end up with 65+ megapixel 360×180 equirectangular panos. A great benefit of creating panos with the GoPro and the pano heads is that you can shoot in very tight areas (like car interiors) or really small rooms (like bathrooms) and you’ll have very little parallax or stitching seams.

Pano2VR

Once we have all the panos ready to go, we create a new tour in Pano2VR. That is the software that we used to develop our VR tour platform. We spend many months developing and testing what we believe to be an extremely user-friendly system. This is where we add all the links from image to image, room to room. We add custom information about the tour, the property, and the rooms. The bulk of our processing time is spent here.

This all sounds like a lot when it is written out, but it all flows along very nicely as a process. And it is quite satisfying to see the images go from very flat, drab RAW images to beautiful panographs! Once in the final VR tour, it creates a very immersive experience that I love.

Restoring Accountability

Accountability and personal responsibility cannot be mandated. They are individual choices, but choices for which we must hold responsibility.

A man I knew was complaining about the clients, the work, the demands, the expectations. He was even complaining about his life. And he had excuses for every failure and for every complaint. Everything was outside of his control, or so he thought. Join my pity party. Drinks are on me.

That man was me. A colleague said “You make a decision every day to walk through that door and work here. No one is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to do this. And when you do, you lose your right to complain about it.”

Ouch. It stung. I knew that they were 100% right. At the time I truly despised that person for that comment and breaking up my party. Though I may have felt trapped, I did choose to walk through that door every morning. Truth be told it wasn’t all that bad. Actually, it was pretty damn good. I actually had it easy and had I so chosen, I could have build a small dynasty for myself.

Every morning I packed my bag full of excuses and took that with me to the office.

But like so many are, I had been infected. I caught the negativity and excuse making virus and didn’t realize it until the negativity had spread throughout every fiber of my being and clouded my vision such that I had lost my way. I didn’t even know there was any other way. Bitterness has set in and left me cold and without passion. I may as well have been dead – metaphorically speaking. I was not taking 100% responsibility and accountability for my own life. Every morning I packed my bag full of excuses and took that with me to the office.

I am 100% responsible for everything in my life.

I had lost touch. So I left and went into a self-styled “recovery program” – self-imposed sabbatical where I completely decompressed and did a lot of reading. It took months to I realized just how bad I had been. I had excuse after excuse as to why I was unhappy. But I finally accepted that my colleague was right. It was my own choice to walk through those doors. And that I am 100% responsible for everything in my life.

In an organization, saying you will “raise the bar” and hold other people accountable will not solve the problem. All too often it will only serve to exasperate it. Raising the bar does not necessarily give people the desire to reach it. And holding people accountable, does not affect change to create personal accountability in people. Although it may be possible to “prime”¹ people to make the individual choice to be more accountable and take more responsibility, it will not work with a simple mandate. As someone in a leadership role, you need to inspire and encourage everyone to come to the realization on their own that personal responsibility and accountability starts with their own life.

So what does one do? How can accountability be restored to an environment where it is on shaky ground?

Here are tips to get you started:

1. Be a highly-visible example of accountability. Only after you have a proven record of personal accountability can you state that you expect the same from colleagues.
2. Show that you do not provide excuses² for your life and business circumstances. That you take 100% responsibility for the state of your life and of the business.
3. Make it clear that you expect your colleagues to do the same – no excuses – at least regarding work-related issues.
4. Never shift the blame and never permit it in your organization. Take the hit no matter the outcome.
5. Set a rule: habitual complaining will not be tolerated. Complaining goes hand-in-hand with excuses. Eliminate one and you can eliminate the other. If you are not using any excuses, then you have no ability to complain and whine about your situation. Legitimate complaints should be taken directly to upper management and issues should be addressed. But you need to cut ties with habitual complainers.

If you still have some who use excuses, engage in blame-shifting, or continue complaining, it is a sign that they are not embracing personal accountability and it may simply be time to part ways.

1) “primed”: Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell. P.52-58
2) A list of excuses from “Excuses Begone”, by Dr. Wayne Dyer, that you should reverse in your mind: It will be difficult, It’s going to be risky, It will take a long time, There will be family drama, I don’t deserve it, It’s not my nature, I can’t afford it, No one will help me, It has never happened to me before, I’m not strong enough, I am not smart enough, I am too old, The rules will not let me, It is too big, I don’t have the energy, It is my personal family history, I am too busy, I am too scared.

If you do not Fail, you are not Trying Hard Enough

Unless, of course, you aren’t trying at all.

I know, just last week I wrote about “Why I Don’t Believe in Failure”. I stand by that statement and the perspective behind it. That when something doesn’t work, or go as we had hoped, or doesn’t lead to instant success, it is NOT a failure. Unless you throw in the towel. If you give up on your dream, well, then perhaps it is a failure. After I posted that I received the following comment:

“. . . positive affirmation type messages are actually just a form of rationalization – A bad habit of not facing reality head-on. I see feelings as mostly petty and self-absorbed. How I feel doesn’t matter.”

True, “feelings” don’t matter. But dude, you missed my point. Ask yourself this – “why do people fail?” Is it because they are lying to themselves and not facing the reality of their situation? That may play a part for some. Or, is it possible that they are not taking 100% responsibility for everything that is within their control, and not trying hard enough? By saying “I don’t believe in failure”, I am not advocating for lying to yourself. I believe in softening the blow by knowing it is not an end, but a pointer. You must embrace it, study it, and learn from it. Then correct. That is how we learn. It is difficult to duplicate success without reviewing the “failures” that pointed us in the right direction along the way.

But if you don’t have those moments when a plan falls through and you have to switch things up, I say you are simply not trying hard enough.

I am sure most of you have seen the graphic at the top of this post. The hard truth is that in order to be wildly successful you will go through times that are not quite so glamorous. The road to success is paved with characteristics and challenges such as:

Dedication, hard work, discipline, disappointment, sacrifice, failure, persistence

I see two ways to push through to success.

Enjoy the journey.
Live every day for the excitement and challenge of the moment. If it is drudgery for you, how will you ever endure? Chunk up the big dreams into smaller, boulder-sized goals. Then break up those boulder goals into rock-sized tasks, and make those goals. Break them down even further one more level to pebbles that are each easily achievable. Celebrate your victories and have fun with it.

Never give up.
Look for opportunity in disappointment and failure. Obviously, wildly successful people never gave up, even though many if not most went through very difficult times. They see the fruit of dedication and discipline. Because they are 100% committed to their success they are able to sacrifice in the short term and put in dedication to the hard work that is necessary to reach their dream.

As an example, I was confronted with a significant challenge that for a short time had me concerned that a business I was starting was sure to fail – even before it got off the ground. I was sure I saw a door closing. Disappointed, I dedicated some time to research all the possible options available to me even though none of them seemed like viable solutions. But during that research, I happened across a new and relatively unknown product that had recently been produced. It took some digging and I had to place an order directly from a producer in China as it was not available from anyone in the US. I had discovered a solution. It did require a change to my plan, but it was quite a good solution and I was thrilled that another door had been opened up to me.

But that solution and step toward ultimate success came after a disappointment and setback. And it was only revealed to me after going through some due-diligence, hard work, and persistence. Though I was initially disappointed, I remained positive and figured I would either find a solution or start something new.

To ask a rhetorical question, are you failing? If you answered with a “no”, I say you are either not looking closely enough or you aren’t trying hard enough. And if “yes” are you studying them, and learning from those failures? Or are you trying to ignore them and plodding on doing the same things and expecting different results?

Take failure in stride, gracefully. Use it to your advantage to learn and improve.

Reset. Refocus. Go and DO.

Eliminate Failure from your Life