Circadian Rythyms and Smart Light Bulbs C by GE review

Updated March 12th, 2016 12:08 - Added bits about Wink & Saffron's Silk

I had high hopes for these new C series light bulbs from GE. The introductory starter kit includes two bulbs each of Sleep bulbs, and Day bulbs.

The day bulbs function like your standard led bulb with the exception that you can adjust their brightness on-demand with your smart phone. I think they can also turn on or off if you set scenes such as the ready-made scenes Wake Up & Bedtime scenes. When adding day bulbs to the CBYGE app, there is a tickmark that says Follow The Sun, but this appears not to do anything at all for the Day bulbs. I was a bit disapointed, I thought at the very least the day bulbs would automatically change in luminosity (think intensity or brightness), starting dim, brightening up at noon and then dimming at dusk. No cigar in my testing.

The sleep bulbs are what I was excited about. And if given a choice, I would only purchase sleep bulbs and none of the day bulbs. Unfortunately the starter packs force you to buy both. A customer support representative on the phone mentioned that they may sell sleep bulbs a la cart or packs in the future.

The sleep bulbs can change color temperature as well as luminosity. It can't quite reach the luminosity of the day bulbs, but subjectively speaking the difference is not much. It was bright enough for me, especially if you have light fixtures that use multiple bulbs. These bulbs are supposed to be able to emulate the color temperature and luminosity shift as the sun with the feature Follow The Sun, unfortunately in my experience the behavior is unreliable.

The fact is the technology relies on bluetooth, and that I have an iOS device. iOS devices like iPhones, iPads etc do not let applications run in the background without the user's explicit permission to allow it to (if the app even supports and gets approved for it). The CBYGE app does not have this feature yet, and so the app only runs for a few minutes after you close it, it will go to sleep when your screen sleeps, or when you switch to a different app.

I didn't think this would be a big deal, but it is. I expected the bulbs to have onboard scheduling capabilities, after all there are only 3 different shifts, AM (cool, bluish), Day (whitish) and PM (warm, yellowish) which would circumvent this issue with smart phones.

Unfortunately the C bulb require smart phones to be present, have bluetooth on and connected to the bulbs, and app in the foreground for the Follow the Sun feature to work. A huge disappointment for me, this was the biggest draw for most people in buying this product, better circadian rhythms! More energy and focus during the day,  and feeling tired at night for a deep and restful sleep.

So, generally the lights work like regular light bulbs, the sleep bulbs you can change color temperature slightly, the day bulbs only luminosity. The lights do stay at whatever setting in which they were last used (an improvement to Philips Hue which would reset to white every time the power went off then back on, a royal pain if you want to use smart lights with switches or if you live in a house with temperamental electricity), but that's not what was promised.

If the iOS app had background sync the experience would be much better, but the app doesn't have or use that feature yet. I was unable to find any features whatsoever for C by GE in the system preferences, nor notifications settings at all which surprised me, virtually every other app in the apple store has an entry in there.

At present only the phone that adds the lights will be able to control the lights until GE fixes the Create A New Account form, specifically the password field. It kept yammering about using numbers and letters (my password certainly used both, I generate strong passwords with 1password). I read a comment on the apple store saying that the first character could not be a number, it had to be a letter, then a number would have to come somewhere later in the password. I tried that, and it still didn't work for me. I even tried not using special characters, using short passwords, medium length passwords, to no avail. GE needs to specify their password requirements clearly and sort that out.

Personally I think C lights are doomed unless they somehow make the bulbs store the Follow the Sun settings internally and work for the most part without wifi/bluetooth etc based on an internal "clock" (if it has one). I sure am not interested in whipping out my phone to change the color temperature or intensity in each room three times a day. The range of the bulbs is quite short by the way, when I was in my room, I could not see the bulbs in the living room which was maybe 5 yards/meters away.

My recommendation is to hold off on purchasing if you purchase at all. Wait to see what GE's commitment is to improve the apps and what they can do about the bulbs themselves. These bulbs still have some potential. It is possible that the bulbs work much better for Android users, so check for other reviews to see if this is the case. I expected it to work well without relying on smart phones, and it still might be possible. An agent told me over the phone they do have a hub from a different product that is supposed to work with the C bulbs. I'll find out more about it.

Update:  After doing some digging and calling a representative at GE about an older smart home product Wink (I had heard wrongly from I think a new employee for GE C that Wink could control the C bulbs. That idea was put to rest, the C bulbs are just Bluetooth, and will not be able to connect to the Wink (or any other wifi based hub).

So, with that my final recommendation is to not buy if it's automated circadian rythym lighting you're after. For now I'm looking to Saffron' s Silk light bulb, hopefully they'll be the ones to get it right.

Use Your Phone in Lieu of Bluetooth Earphones

JLab Epic Bluetooth retails for ~$100

I wanted to take a minute to write some of you who might be drooling over the wireless bluetooth earphones (image left) on the market and thought I'd help save you some dough for similar functionality but at a much cheaper price point and more uses.

Instead of plunking down $100 and upwards for a decent set of bluetooth earphones, you can spend it on an great piece of software instead, depending on your use case.

If you need wireless because you like to run you will probably still want blue tooth earphones. But, if you simply want to be untethered from your computer while wandering around your house or work space, you can use your

Airfoil Retails for $30

phone, tablet or ipod, airplay capable devices, bluetooth audio devices or even other computers as a wireless bluetooth audio receiver.

Introducing Rogue Amoeba's Airfoil application (image right). Airfoil works natively on the Mac and Windows Operating Systems (OS). There are two parts, the host and the client.  You can think of the host as the "broadcaster", it transmits whatever source of audio you wish, be it an individual app like Spotify, iTunes, a web browser like Google Chrome, or Mozilla Firefox (so you can stream Youtube or other streaming music services like Last.fm Pandora, 8track or Focus At Will) or system audio (everything). The sky is the limit really.

If it plays on your computer, you can stream it to your phone. Install airfoil's companion audio receiver app on your phone (ios, android) plug in your wired earphones, open the Airfoil application on your computer, pick a audio source, open the Satelite application on your phone, select the airfoil host on your computer and voila. You've got untethered sound however far your wifi/bluetooth/airplay devices extends.


The cool thing is that it can also work the other way around, your phone can also transmit the same audio to all your computers, airplay, bluetooth devices as well. Airfoil is a very flexible and useful audio streaming tool.

If you are a runner, and you have the cash to drop, you might want to splurge on both products anyways. I'm certain a fair number of people already have.

Shutdown Mac after VLC Playlist Completes

So, I like to listen to music to help me fall asleep, specifically I listen to Hemi-sync & Brainsync brain entrainment music. These are very effective at what they do, and require the use of stereo headphones.
I'm cheap and unwilling to buy a smart phone or an mp3 player. I'm a minimalist computer geek, what can I say. I like to use my Macbook (now macbook pro) to listen to music in bed and nod off to sleep. I use Insomniax to stop my macbook from falling asleep when I close the lid so that we can listen to the music. Update: With newer macs Insomniax will no longer work as it is no longer being maintained. I now use NoSleep.
On my macbook/macbookpro, I just turn down the brightness all the way with the keyboard function keys to the point that it literally turns off the display (it's not just black, I think this is a very cool feature) and close the lid, no fuss or muss about it. When I want to do something on there, I open the lid, and turn up the brightness.
Now on to the meat of this article. VLC will not shutdown the computer when it is done playing your music, but we can still get this behavior using the command line and by changing a setting in VLC. Yes, you can control VLC using command line, did you know that? It's a very powerful program. But first, We need to change a setting in the Mac OS Aqua GUI, then make a script or alias with some code. So lets get started. Open up VLC and change the following setting.
VLC>Preferences > Show All > Playlist > Play & Exit
To get the behavior we want, I have discovered that it works using the ncurses interface via Bash shell. Command line to the rescue! Using the command line via the Terminal application in "Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app" (I recomend you add this to your dock if you have not already) we can tell tell Terminal to open VLC adding an option to launch VLC using a different interface - nCurses in this case - instead of the default Mac OS Aqua GUI like so
/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -I ncurses
Since we're launching this program from the shell, we can add further instructions. The following will launch VLC with the nCurses interface and wait, when the first command completes (VLC closes or crashes), it will move on to the next command, which is to shut down the computer. This is achieved using two ampersands, the && bit.
/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -I ncurses && osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to shut down'
To learn more about the && command read this tutorial.
Personally I add a bit to tell the VLC ncurses interface which directory to begin in when I open the file browser in the ncurses interface so that I don't have to browse very far to find the files I want to play. You do this by using the --browse-dir option.
So to put it all together, make an alias in your bash profile or make a bash script.
I opted to do a bash script as I want as little as possible in the bash profile, it can get messy in there once you really start to customize things to make working with command line software easier. More importantly some programs you install will modify or wipe out that .profile by overwriting it which can be a pain. In a new plain text file paste the following code and edit the paths to fit your situation and username.
#! /bin/bash
/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -I ncurses --browse-dir PathToMusicFolder && osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to shut down'
Once you have your bash script you will need to make it executable
chmod 755 PathToYourScript
The name of your script is what you use to execute it, so make it easy to remember and type in the Terminal. I call mine vlcshutdown, notice there is no extension.
Make sure your shell can find your script, you can do this by adding the directory where you keep your own personal scripts to the search path for your shell by editing the shell's profile. In this case the .profile text file in your home folder. If you don't have a .profile you can create one and follow this example.
export PATH=/Users/Username/PersonalScriptDirectory/:$PATH
If making a bash script and changing your path is too complicated you can just opt to put everything in your .profile. You only need the following text in your .profile, none of the other stuff I've written above.
alias vlcshutdown=/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -I && osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to shut down'
With this alias, you would type vlcshutdown in the Terminal to launch VLC with nCurses. Once this is open you can add things to your playlist (shift B) by browsing (using arrow keys) pressing enter to select. Then select your playlist and hit enter, your music will play, when the playlist ends and providing you don't have repeat on, VLC will close and then your computer will shut down. You can pause and resume by pressing the space bar, and fast forward or backwards by pressing right arrow or left arrow. press h for the help screen to see all the shortcuts.
One cool thing about using the nCurses interface is you can play audio from movies too, but nCurses will only play the audio from those files, not the video itself. This interface opens up the possibility of listening to your music over an SSH connection although I've not bothered to do this.
I wrote this in a way where someone who knows nothing at all about command line would probably struggle, if this applies to you, leave a comment and I'll try and help.

Update Sept 19th, 2015: The standard GUI VLC client now quits after playlist is completed when the option is selected via VLC > Preferences > Show All > Interface > Main Interface > Interface Module > Default or Mac OS X Interface (same thing either way), but strangely it seems to require a nudge on the mouse at times to quit, which kinda defeats the point. This can be worked around if one uses a virtual mouse jiggler. In Jiggler Preferences I set Time Between Jiggles to 30 seconds and left all the other settings at default.

I find it depends on what applications are running, so I have included a safeguard in my script to forcibly shutdown the computer 2 minutes after vlc quits in case the polite shutdown command does not work. I am also redirecting error messages to null because I was getting trivial errors that clutter the terminal.

One more con to the mac interface run from the terminal is that the --browse-dir is an option that seems to only work for the ncurses interface, when using the macosx interface it will start browsing at whichever directory you browsed to last time with VLC. Not a big deal.








With either interface I can't seem to find a way to shutdown the computer from a script where the computer boots up like a clean slate At the very least the terminal will always along with whatever else applications you had when quitting.

I now have two scripts, one for the mac osx interface and one for the ncurses interface both updated and shown below. Make sure you edit the --browse-dir in the ncurses example to reflect where you want vlc to start looking at media files, or remove that bit entirely.

filename:  vlcshutdownm (trailing m is for macosx)
#! /bin/bash
/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC &>/dev/null && sudo shutdown -h +2; osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to shut down'


filename: vlcshutdownn (trailing n is for ncurses)
#! /bin/bash

/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -I ncurses --browse-dir /Users/YourUsernameHere/DirectoryWithMusicEtc && osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to shut down'

Favorite Google Calendar Function

I am hooked on Google Calendar (GC), and here are a few reasons why.

I have found a way to not bother with the built in calendar of my dumb phone. I take advantage of email and the unlimited SMS text messages that my modest phone plan has.

I have set up GC to automatically create reminders for me which send me emails and text messages on my cell phone. I have it set to send me a email one day in advance (in case I have something early in the morning the next day, wouldn't want to sleep in and miss it) and to send me a text message two hours before the event, giving me enough time to wrap up whatever I'm doing, travel to my destination etc. This is just a default whenever I create a new event, it's easily adjusted whenever I create a new event.

The other thing I really like about Google Calendar is how robust it is about repetitive events. For example, Thanksgiving (TG) is fast approaching, Google is kind enough not to make assumptions and add holidays to calendars for it's diverse and global consumers, appropriate I'd say. So lets add TG  ourselves, feel free to substitute for a holiday of significance to you.

According to Wikipedia, TG happens every 4th Thursday in November.

On first thought you might select repeats > yearly but that won't give us the desired effect, TG is not on the same numerical day of November each year, sometimes it will be the 24th, others the 25th, so this will not work as a set it and leave it solution.

The trick is to select repeats > monthly (12 months) > day of the week. Read the Summary to be sure you're getting what you want. Mine says "Summary:Every 12 months on the fourth Thursday." Ditto.

Johanna Simonsson Music Recomends

Johanna Simonsson's new-to-me music recomends in order of my preference:
Anna Ternheim, Johnossi, Moto Boy, The Sounds

Music Video - Tin Drums by Brainstorm

Enjoyed the dancing and music. Note the acceptance of same sex attraction.
Lyrics
HD Video

Yes Man Concept - Sept 26 2011

I was thinking of the movie Yes Man. I thought of how excruciating and tiring it would be to attend all invitations. But then a thought bubbled up. On the flip side, you don't have to decide yes or no, just yes. Making decisions is very tiresome. Enough to wear you out when you're indecisive like me. To live like every day is a marathon for awhile is a kind of release. Getting unstuck. A circulation of stagnant blood or energy. It's also irresponsible I suppose. The idea is very attractive and novel from my shoes sometimes.

The Invitation

The Invitation

by Oriah Mountain Dreamer

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love,
for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched
the centre of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain! I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it, or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul; If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty, every day, and if you can source your own life from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure yours and mine, and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,“Yes!”

It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

Source: www.oriahmountaindreamer.com
Olivia Boucher shared this wonderful piece of writing with me after a wonderful morning of walking several trails in Islesboro Maine in mild rain.

Animal Themed Day

Today was a strange "animal" day for me. On the ride home from work I saw a small dead bird on the side of the road. I picked it up and apart from two stray feathers it looked fine. I was really sad, the bird was beautiful in a non gaudy way. And so soft! Thoughts in my mind were of what a shame it is that people are such a threat to birds that they must avoid us. I was going to put it to rest in bushes nearby but with all the garbage there and the noise of vehicles passing I couldn't do it. So I brought it with me and put it to rest in the remains of what used to be a tree close to the stream next to the RIT dormitory where I have cleared most of the garbage already.

When I stepped out of the woods from doing that, on the other side of the road on the stream was that turtle again! The same turtle that I had seen the last two days doing the same thing. Taking it easy and baking in the sun on the same drifting log. Today however it had a baby turtle for company. While this is happening a young beaver is gnawing away on a branch not 15 feet away, and in the corner of my eye I saw an otter or ferret scurrying away among the tall grass. As per usual after a few minutes the turtle would plop back into the water and swim away.

How did we ever get so far removed from things like this? What a treasure it is to see other animals live their lives. That reminds me.. Even insects can be fun. I remember a grasshopper attatched to a tree next to me. It was very well camoflauged, I only saw it because I was standing there for awhile. Then when I went to look at it closer, it just crawled sideways around the width of the tree. So I moved around too, and again it crawled around farther. I was essentially playing peek a boo with a grasshopper lol. I was really impressed because it knew I was there, and that I was specifcally looking at it, but it was refusing to fly away and yet it was making sure I didn't injure it or eat it etc. Just goes to show how much we underestimate animals.

Fantastic Frank

I am doing a internship with a non profit agency PRALID which stands for People, Rebuilding And Living In Dignity. Their mission is to assist disabled people to lead as independent and fulfilling lives as possible. Some live in PRALID group homes, most live in the community with family and a few live alone. The first person I met that PRALID serves is Fantastic Frank. He gave me his business card, and I really enjoyed meeting him so I decided to check out the website address on his business card.

FantasticFrank.com

Be sure to check out this story about him, and check out Frank's impassioned project entitled The Young Explorers to create a film for children.

Frank is but one person of this extraordinary group of individuals. Each one of them will make an impression on you if you take the time to listen.

Inspiration; Art & Music

It is a common thing for students and professionals in the computer graphics industry for artists to listen to music for entertainment and as a source of inspiration. An article I came across as a subscriber to CGSociety's newsletter tells of a story where the opposite is also true. Music inspired by Art! Read for yourself =).

Amazing Image Resizing Technology

If you work with images for any reason, you should check this out! I came across this video on Youtube by accident with a Google search about re-sizing algorithms e.g Nearest Neighbor (preserve hard eges), Bilinear, Bicubic (best for smooth gradients) Bicubic Smoother (best for enlargement) Bicubic Sharper (best for reduction).

Two Israeli computer science students Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir developed a content aware image resizing algorithm also known as seam carving and demoed the technology with software they developed. Apparently this technology has been included in Adobe Photoshop CS4. I am not sure how complete the feature is however. Will have to come back and do an update after I explore this technology more. I did a Google search for FOSS alternatives and found Seam Carving GUI Which makes me a happy camper especially since there is a pre-compiled binary for Macs available for download. Pretty nifty stuff. I have been a stickler for proper aspect ratios and have had to make some tough cropping decisions. It's nice to have this new possibility to be able to re-size an image with acceptable distortion that can respect the important content of the image.

CeltX

Since we are on the topic, another software package that I have yet to fully explore related to media is CeltX This software focuses on the pre-production stage and provides all the tools needed to write and plan media such as films or plays.

Artwork by Andrew Binkley & processing.org

For Spring break I went to Hawaii with my girlfriend Dora. Several cousins of mine live in Maui on adjacent property. Andrew Binkley the son of my cousin Andrea Binkley was a buddhist monk in Thailand for several years. Andrew has a wonderful website which shows some of his work in the photography medium. www.andrewbinkley.com



Andrew and I only had a few minutes to talk. I told him about Hugin, and in return Andrew directed my attention to processing.org. Apparently it is a programming language with the visual medium in mind. Some very cool visual effects can be generated with this software/language. Quite a few are even interactive and real time which is very impressive. Fortunately this too is free, open-source & cross platform =).

the weekly mage - a blog by Alexyn Britt

Hi guys, an old friend of mine Alexyn Britt is up and running with a blog at www.theweeklymage.blog.com. If you are into fantasy or concept art at all take a look. Be sure to check out the various pages to see the character concepts.

Accidentally deleted all images

I accidentally deleted all images from the Picassa image host service which are hot linked from this blog, woops. Not to worry. I have established a new website from scratch. You can see a gallery of my works there. I'll be adding some images soon though, no worries.

Digital Sketching

Have you ever experienced times when several coincidences occur that are related that makes you suspect that maybe coincidences are something more sinister than mere chance? A friend Brian Thuringer just gave me a heads up on a new open source digital sketching program in development called Alchemy. Alchemy too is cross platform, Mac, Windows, Linux. If you go over to their website you can download it and try out the alpha version. The focus of this software is for speed sketching but it really does stand out from other sketching programs I have seen for the concept art niche. They don't make the download obvious but you can go here for the download, or just join the mailing list to get notifications when new versions come out etc. If you like Corel Painter, Art Rage, or Alias Sketchbook, you definitely should check Alchemy out. The interface is super minimal and it is not bogged down with tons of options. Overall it is a real pleasure to work/play with. After test driving it I found it somewhat unconventional with no undo's, and the choice of output (what formats you can save in) is odd. I liked being able to save to pdf though. That way I can open it in Adobe Illustrator and everything is in vectors, so you can delete stray lines and edit it to your heart's content add fill or strokes, do colors/ gradients etc. Being able to do this more than makes up for the lack of the undo function. Then of course you could put it in Adobe Photoshop and further enhance it. I have found this program an excellent and easy way to create interesting geometrical backgrounds and designs for my various school projects with just a little post processing necessary.

Off Topic Open Office

At long last Open Office is on the Mac & Aqua! This means that Open Office is now fully native/supported on the mac. No more X11 junk, rejoice I say rejoice! To be fair Neo Office has been my trusty low end word processor for awhile now. It has been a valuable tool opening Microsoft Office files and saving in the .odt open format, the 2007 .doc and even the new 2008 .docX format which is impressive for a program that is free and can be used commercially. Truth be told Open Office does not really have anything more to offer in comparison to Neo Office that I am aware of at the moment. They are virtually identical except in the splash screen. But I feel that Neo Office was created to fill a need that Open Office was unable to fulfill. Now that is no longer necessary as Open Office has finally got it's act together on the Mac platform. It's nice knowing that I can use just one open-source cross platform program -be it Windows or Mac, or even Linux, for anything Office related.

Beyond Photoshop

Here's a new image I made for a Book Cover project I have for my graphic design class. I was asked to choose a book I have already read and to design a book cover for it. I wanted to do The Tao of Pooh but the cover for that just can't really be beat. So I decided to do it for Sidhartha instead. I have been reading the book and I came across a passage where Sidhartha was disilusioned with being a Samana, and he felt like he was stuck in the wheel of samsara, but his best friend Govinda told him that it is more like a spiral, and that yes we go in circles, but ever upward. I liked that optimistic view and I knew that I wanted that spiral to be a part of my design.

For me the spiral represents the life span. It starts in a small limited orbit, then the circle becomes considerably larger in mid life, and then it eventually winds down to stillness and death in late life.

I used Blender, a free & open source 3d application to create the 3d spiral in Grayscale. Then I imported the final render into Photoshop where I converted it to a hue, played with blend modes and did color correction. For the glow I just duplicated the spiral and applied gausin blur and applied an alpha mask so that the original spiral render showed through completely crisp. Not impressive at all in terms of technical ability or 3d skills, but the result is pretty.

Voting Poster

I did a strange thing recently. I created a poster encouraging my peers (18 to 24 years old) to vote when I myself have never voted. It was very exciting for me to learn about voting and it was very interesting convincing myself to vote in order to try and convince others to vote. I thought the original design was prettier but with the changes my teacher Kathy Voekl suggested it is much more readable and the message is clearer. The focal point is much stronger now which is worth the sacrifice of the colors of the veins/pulse of the right arm in the original.

3d Animation Poster

click image to view the animation in a new tab/window.

Head on over to rabbitholes.com to see and learn more about this amazing new way of viewing art and apparently advertisements. The first thing that comes to mind is that it might become very hard to ignore advertisements in ten years or so. Of course these videos are only simulations of the real thing and I have yet to see it for myself but this is a pretty neat idea. I just think it might get old pretty quick with the nature of how it works as a flip book. And it does seem important in what direction you pass the poster if the animation is linear for example in Batman Darknight 2 below a guy shoots a shotgun which destroys some fabric. It doesn't look right seeing it happen in reverse passing the poster from left to right but when seen passing the poster from right to left it plays normal.

click image to view the animation in a new tab/window.

In short the technology is cool but is pretty limited at this point for example it can only display 7 seconds of animation at the most. I'm very eager to see improvements on this concept and further exploration and exploitation of what is already available.