Working on Beau Lotto and Amy O’Toole’s new TEDTalk, the team at Mozilla used their new web-based video editing / annotating tool, Popcorn Maker. Today’s TED Talk from Ryan Merkley offers an early look at the tool from this summer at TEDGlobal.

Watch Beau and Amy’s talk below and click on the pop-ups to grab links to their papers, video, maps, Wikipedia references and much more data — as well as inspiring quotes from experts in the field of play and education.

At TED, we’re excited by the potential of Popcorn Maker to create an ecosystem of deeper, richer information around TEDTalks — from our editorial team, from speakers, and from you, our audience. Check out the beta version of Popcorn Maker yourself — and play.

You can remix the Beau Lotto video here >>

… or use this same link and follow the onscreen prompts to remix your own video.

Important: This is late-stage beta software, Version 0.9, so it has all the features of the full release version, but is not yet final; work created in the beta may not be saved once Version 1 is released. Mozilla has made this beta version available so you can play, get to know the tool, and give feedback. Join the Popcorn Maker QA community >>

And if you create something you’d like to share, hit the comments below!

Version 1.0 of Popcorn Maker will launch on November 9.

Below, read Mozilla’s FAQ about Popcorn Maker.

FAQ:

What is Popcorn Maker?
It’s a free web application that lets you augment any video or audio file on the web by layering in services and content from the web, using a simple drag-and-drop interface.

Who is it for?
Popcorn Maker is for anyone who wants to quickly create video and audio experiences that weave in content from across the web to add context and added relevance to their media.

Why Popcorn Maker?
Video arrived on the web in a small box, and there it has remained. In over a decade, the only thing that has changed about video on the web is the size of the box, and the quality of the picture.

But video has changed dramatically for creators. Once the domain of professionals, video can be made and edited by anyone at any skill level. All you need is a camera and a computer — or a mobile phone.

And while the web has come to be defined by remixing and sharing with simple web tools, video has been left out: It is still mostly a one-way medium. Something we make and send, not remix and interact with. Popcorn Maker changes that.

Popcorn Maker puts the the power to create interactive video that works like the web into the hands of anyone with an idea and a web browser.

Who built Popcorn Maker?
Popcorn Maker is a unique collaboration with Mozilla, the Centre for Development of Open Technology at Seneca College, and volunteers from the Mozilla community. The project is a result of the Mozilla Webmaker project – over several years, Mozilla has participated in a joint innovation effort with young media makers, filmmakers, journalists and aspiring creators to develop this tool.

What is Popcorn.js?
Popcorn.js is the open source software library that powers Popcorn Maker. Creators from PBS (Public Broadcasting System), NPR (National Public Radio), the NFB (National Film Board of Canada), Arte France, The People’s Choice Awards, Zeega.org, and countless individual webmakers use Popcorn.js every day to create next generation multimedia experiences.

TED’s tips:

The TED Blog is hosted on WordPress.com, which accepts video from trusted sites using a shortcode. WordPress sites with the protected embed tool will be able to embed it. That tool looks like this, on the post authoring toolbar:

(Thanks to our own Aaron Weyenberg for that tip.)

If you want to play with your own video, click to edit Beau and Amy’s talk, then click on the “Media” button at right to insert your own online video from YouTube, Vimeo or a few other sources. In the clip above, we’re starting to Popcorn up our legendary 1984 demo of the compact disc …

Few scientific papers are written in crayon and begin with the words, “Once upon a time.” But then again, few scientific papers are written by a group of 8 to 10-year-olds.

In this adorable talk from TEDGlobal, neuroscientist, artist and educator Beau Lotto shares why he thinks children have an edge when it comes to scientific inquiry — they are able to celebrate uncertainty and ask wonderful questions. An experiment is actually a form of play, says Lotto, who invited a group of 25 students from a small school in the UK to make a useful contribution to science by asking a question of their choice.

The question the students came up with: can bees think like human beings?

Student Amy O’Toole joined Lotto on stage to explain the experiment, which tested whether bees could solve a puzzle and learn to fly to a specific color of flower in a specific pattern. Indeed, the bees could.

“This project was exciting for me because it brought the process of discovery to life,” says O’Toole in this talk. “It showed me that anyone, and I mean anyone, has the potential to discover something new.”

To hear more about this non-traditional experiment and the two-year struggle to get it published in the journal Biology Letters, watch this wonderful talk. (You can actually read the Blackawtown Bees study here.) Below, see eight talks from other impressive kids on the TED stage.

Adora Svitak: What adults can learn from kids
Childish thinking is worthy of real attention, says 12-year-old short story scribe and blogger Adora Svitak at TED2010. Instead of looking just to teach kids, Svitak urges grown-ups to try to learn from them too.

Sirena Huang: An 11-year-old’s magical violin
Sirena Huang began violin lessons at age 4, and made her professional debut at age 9. In this talk from TED2006, Huang shows great maturity and charm –  taking the time to praise the design of the violin.

Thomas Suarez: A 12-year-old app developer
Perhaps you have used Thomas Suarez’s most famous iPhone app, the whack-a-mole game “Bustin Jeiber”? While most kids his age were playing online games, Suarez was learning how to make them. At TEDxManhattanBeach, he shares how he is sharing his knowledge and teaching other kids to develop apps too.

Lauren Hodge, Shree Bose and Naomi Shah: Award-winning teen-age science in action
At TEDxWomen 2011, three teenage scientists share the discoveries that helped them sweep the Google Science Fair. 13-year-old Lauren Hodge uncovers the truth about grilled chicken: it may not be as nutritious as you think. Shree Bose exposes the possible resistance of chemotherapy by ovarian cancer. And after realizing the dangerous effects of indoor air pollutants, Naomi Shah shares her startling revelations about how to better approach asthma.

Tavi Gevinson: A teen just trying to figure it out
15-year-old Tavi Gevinson was struggling to find strong female role models, and noticed that many of the women represented in the media were lacking depth. But Gevinson wasn’t disheartened, she says at TEDxTeen. Instead, she created a space where girls like her could find each other and redefine modern feminism.

Richard Turere (age 13): My invention that outsmarted lions
Tourists come to Kenya for the lions. But lions also attack cattle in towns and villages, at great cost to the locals. When he was 11, Richard Turere developed a device — made from five flashlight bulbs, a car battery and a solar panel — to keep lions away. At TED@Nairobi, he shares his invention.

Jennifer Lin: Improvising on piano, aged 14
In this moving performance and talk from TED2004, Jennifer Lin shares her process of creativity. Syncing together inspirations to create her own structures, Lin discusses how her love of drawing contributes to her often-improvised musical compositions.

Jack Andraka: A test for pancreatic cancer
15-year-old Jack Andraka has developed a promising new test for detecting pancreatic cancer early, because too often the disease isn’t diagnosed until it has spread throughout the body. Down the road, Andraka’s test could save many lives. In the meantime, it has netted him a win in the world’s largest high school science competition. (Read our Q&A with Jack.)

Neuroscientist and artist Beau Lotto joined the TED Blog for a short Q&A after his 2009 talk from TEDGlobal. He covered some of the fascinating, perception-bending projects he wasn’t able to cover in his talk — an iPhone game that substitutes sound for sight; a new way for composers to experience their music synesthetically — and detailed an ingenious education project that gives children the chance to participate in real science experiments.

I see your studio has created a game called Bing Bong. Tell me about that.

Bing Bong is an iPhone game. It’s a video game in sound. In the game, the player has to catch a ball, but they must do so without seeing it. They must position a paddle to catch the ball, but they can only hear the ball falling, relative to where the paddle is.

Hopefully, Bing Bong is fun in and of itself — all of my projects have to work at the immediate level, whether that be aesthetic or fun — but, more deeply, it’s a game that’s about getting people to experience the process of having an experience, of seeing themselves see. In doing that, people can better understand how intimately tied they are to their environment, and their interaction with their environment — in other words, their ecology.

How does Bing Bong fit in with your wider research?

Bing Bong is part of a larger program of research, which is sensory substitution or sensory augmentation.

When I say to people that the light that falls onto our eyes is meaningless, people find that really hard to believe. You open your eyes, you look around, you see nothing but meaning; you ask yourself, How could it be meaningless? But that’s of course because you’re not seeing the light that falls onto your eye, but your brain’s perception of that light. You’re seeing that light in the context of the millions of years of evolution that our brains have gone through.

But if I translate that light into sound, and you instead hear the visual information, you directly experience the meaninglessness of it.

Then, through interacting with the world through sensory substitution, you experience yourself literally making sense of it. You begin to hear patterns. Those patterns start having a meaning for you. You’re actually an observer of yourself as you do this.

Through sensory substitution, we can create prosthetics for the visually impaired — to make the world navigable. But we can also do things like make music from color, which is an element that I touched on during my TEDTalk.

The brain almost doesn’t seem to care what type of information it receives — it just starts decoding any information it is given. Do I have that right?

The most fundamental thing the brain does is it evolves to evolve. It adapts to adapt. The brain is wonderfully plastic. Now, it’s a plastic of different levels of flexibility — the brain couldn’t function without some stability as well.

The reason why we survive in the world is not because we evolved to see the world as it is; it’s because we evolved to be able to adapt to a changing world — and to continually redefine normality. And that process even exists at the level of evolution. Evolution itself has evolved to have something called evolvability.

In my lab’s research, we not only work on networks of the brain, but also networks of genes, and networks generally. In doing that, we evolve what we call artificial life systems, or artificial life agents.

If you give these artificial life agents an environment, and in the environment there is a problem, the agent that evolves the solution to the problem faster will out-compete the one that evolved it slower. Both evolved the solution, but the one that did it faster was better. The successful agent is actually more evolvable. Its evolvability helped it survive.

There is evidence that organisms have evolved to be evolvable. They have evolved to be adaptable. This quality is something that is relevant to any adaptive network — not merely the brain.

The aim of much of your work seems to be making science and art accessible to everyone. Talk a bit about that.

As far as I’m concerned, science is nothing more than playing games. And in that case, everyone does science. There’s nothing special about science or the people that do it. The only thing that makes scientists different is that they formalize the process; they have access to certain tools that other people don’t have access to.

In the education center we’re trying to build, we want to give people access — and the confidence — to do real scientific experiments. The education center will be fundamentally about discovery. It might be discoveries that no one else has made. Or it might be just discoveries that are relevant to each individual that participates.

What’s a specific example of the sort of discovery you mean?

The Mother program is about enabling musicians to use musical instruments as an interface to a computer. And what happens is the musician can play the instrument, and the music they play gets visualized — not in the way that, say, iTunes visualizes music; the Mother visualizations are far more complex than that.

The significance here is that the musician can develop an intuition about the visual images that will be created by the way they gesture, the way they move their hands, the way they play their instrument. And what can then happen is, the musician can now create music not just according to what it sounds like, but also according to what it looks like. And that itself can feed back and alter the kind of music that the musician plays. They discover new music by being able to experience their playing through senses other than hearing.

You mentioned an education center. Talk a bit about your current work on education.

I’m doing a project with a friend and collaborator, Dave Strudwick. His background is working with kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, whom he calls “excluded” kids.

I came to him with this concept of “seeing yourself see.” I told him we were exploring this concept in the context of architecture and art. I asked, “What might we be able to do with this, in education?” The premise is that education is fundamental to everything. It’s not just school: it’s everything that humans do. That question led to a series of conversations and meetings about creating a framework for education that we call My School. We call it My School because the people in the school have ownership of the school.

My School is all about education that is specific to the individual. The aim of the education program is to create a curriculum in architecture grounded in the idea of seeing yourself see, emphasizing everything that the education system does — what we call the five Cs: compassion, choice, community, creativity and confidence. Seeing yourself see leads to these five Cs.

The education system is about facilitating people to become aware of how they’re shaped by their experiences. The point is that when our kids are our age, they will be dealing with careers 90% of which do not exist now. They’re going into a world that is incredibly dynamic, unpredictable, uncertain. So, really, the program is about celebrating uncertainty, which was the point of my TEDTalk: giving people the agility of thought to adapt and to thrive in that kind of uncertainty, and to create.

Can you give a specific example of the sort of work you’re doing now with kids?

One particular project is taking the bumble bee arena — we’ve had it as an installation in the Hayward Art Gallery and various other places — and taking it to a school, and going through a process of experimentation with the kids where it’s very much them-led: the kids lead the process.

We started getting them to think about questions such as, “If you were asking someone a question, but they couldn’t communicate an answer except through their behavior, how would you find the answer?” We created games and puzzles to help them figure out how they might solve a problem like that.

We showed them that they can do this sort of puzzle not just with people, but also with other creatures, such as bumble bees. We got them thinking about what kinds of questions they might want to ask a bumble bee if they could. In doing so, they had to put themselves in the perspective of a bumble bee: What’s important, what might be interesting to a bumble bee?

The kids came up with a list of questions. They collectively decided on one of those questions. Then they designed a set of experiments to ask that question of a bumble bee using the bee arena.

We installed the arena in an old Norman church next to their school, and I carried out their experiments over the next two weeks. The process is still going on; in total, it’s been about three and a half months. The actual experiment took about two and a half weeks. The experiments took place on Sundays during church services. There was a funeral at one point. The whole community got involved. People from the community would come up. Parents would come by before and after school.

We got the data, and then the kids analyzed the data. Then they began writing up the paper. I would open up my laptop and say, “What do we write?” We’ve now just finished the paper. Everything is in kid-speak. For instance, they wanted to start the paper with “Once upon a time,” which we’ve done. In one of the methods sections, they had to describe the second test for the bumble bees, and they said [ominously] “Bum bum bummmmmmm!” So, that’s in there too.

All the figures are hand drawings in crayon.

We’ll be submitting it for publication by the end of this week. If it’s published, there will be 25 authors, all of whom are 8 years old or younger. If it’s published, it means they should all get master’s degrees, because by definition they’ve all made a unique contribution to science.

It will be interesting to find out whether, in fact, their paper will be published. Being someone who does bee research, I know the findings are unique. But a “real” science paper has references in it. You contextualize the study. You say, “This is what’s been done before, this is what we’ve done, and this is what it now means in the context of what other people have done.” Of course, as this is a paper by 8-year-olds, they don’t have that context. They don’t know the literature.

Will the community publish a paper with genuine results, but without the contextualization? It’s an interesting question. Their introduction to the paper is what led them to do the experiment. Their discussion is what the results of the experiment might mean to them, and what it might mean to the bumble bees. So, the paper might never get published because it’s in kid-speak and it’s not contextualized — but the data is strong.

I wanted to switch gears and circle back to your work on perception. Several TEDTalks feature illusions. How do you respond to artists and scientists who use illusions to show that you can “hack” the human mind?

There’s an artist — I won’t bother naming him — who was up for a prize, and he often used illusions in his work. One critic said his work demonstrated the “fragility” of the human senses. Artists and others often use illusions to demonstrate how our senses are susceptible. But, as I said in my TEDTalk, if our senses were fragile, we wouldn’t be here.

The whole concept of an illusion is predicated on a misconception. The misconception is that we evolved to see the world as it is, and that to see the world differently from “as it is” is an illusion. But the point of my TEDTalk is that we actually can’t see the world as it actually is. We have no direct access to the physical world. All we can ever do is see it the way it was once useful to see.

Illusion is more a state of the world than it is a state of mind. What’s being presented to you is an unusual situation. What you see is what would have been useful, given that situation in the past. That’s significant because artists often use context in order to manipulate what people see. But they often don’t go beyond that.

The far more interesting question is not that “context matters” — not that we see illusions — but why we see them. When you see illusions, you’re entertaining two realities at the same time. You’re seeing one reality (two gray squares look different) but you also know another reality (that the gray squares are, in fact, physically the same).

You’re in the position, at that moment, of actually experiencing yourself having an experience.

Do you find that your work is in conflict with philosophy on perception or consciousness? Are angry philosophy students knocking on your door?

Well, first of all, philosophy isn’t going to answer many of these questions about perception.

I have a very good friend, Tom Polger, who is a philosopher, and he and I have written a paper on why we see four colors. He was a great person to talk to — a very interesting person, generally. The debates were complimentary.

If anything, my research is about taking these concepts in philosophy and trying to ground them. One idea is as good as any other — but if you can ground them in true, real experiences, and then share these experiences with the public in a way that is intuitive.

So no, my work isn’t in conflict with philosophy in that way. I don’t get very many angry philosophy students.

What’s the takeaway from your work, as a whole — the big lesson you want your art and science to teach?

The lesson is that the brain evolved to continually re-define normality, and that understanding that creates the capacity for compassion and creativity. What’s true at the simplest level, seeing lightness — it doesn’t get any simpler than seeing lightness; even jellyfish see lightness — has got to be true all the way up.

Find more Q&As on the TED Blog:
+ Oliver Sacks on neurological curiosities
+ Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on Iran’s nuclear program
+ Garik Israelian on the secrets of spectroscopy

Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/3m

Watch Beau Lotto’s talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 500+ TEDTalks.

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Unedited running notes from TEDGlobal 2009.

Beau Lotto began with a simple game for the audience, based on an illusion. He showed two panels covered with large dots of a variety of colors. The backgrounds of the two panels were white and black, respectively. He then surveyed the audience to find which dots across the two boards were the same colors. The audience split three ways in their guesses, and most were wrong. Lotto said that this tendency to see color “incorrectly” based on context uncovers a crucial fact about the way we’re wired:

We have no direct access to our physical world other than through our senses, and the light that falls on our eyes depends on the color of objects and the color of the space between us and those objects. For this reason, the same image with any single parameter changed would have a completely different appearance.

The patterns of light that fall on our eyes is meaningless — it could mean literally anything. And that’s true of sensory information generally. So, how do we see? The brain evolved to find patterns and associate those patterns with behavioral meaning.

Our brain is good at quickly re-defining reality. He showed two identical desert scenes, one below a red panel and another under a green panel. As you stare at the images, the brain learns that the green and red are important for context. When the context is removes the scenes’ appearance dramatically changes. (The crowd oohed when Lotto removed the colored panels.)

These various illusions illustrate how the brain modifies meaning based on sensory information. But we are not the only creatures to see illusions. Bumble bees see illusions in much the same way as we do. Lotto shows this with a science-art project called the Bee Matrix. Using colored lights, he shows that bees’ behavior can be manipulated with color information that interferes with their ability to recognize patterns in order to find nectar.

Illusions are often used to demonstrate “the fragility of our senses.” Lotto says this idea is rubbish. If our senses were fragile, we would not be here. We evolved to see the world in the way it was useful, and how we see is continually re-defining normality.

How can we exploit this tendency for the better? He shows an amazing wearable interface that interprets visual information as sound, and this allows a blind person to successfully navigate the room based only on the sound information.

No one is an outside observer of nature. We are not defined by the bits that make us up — but our environment, our ecology. Only through uncertainty is there potential for understanding.

Photo: Beau Lotto at TEDGlobal 2009, Session 5: ” Hidden algorithm,” July 22, 2009, in Oxford, UK. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

There is no inherent meaning in information, it’s what we do w/ info that matters (Beau Lotto) — ruthannharnisch

Beau Lotto: “the brain evolved a way to see because it proved useful in the past” — kevglobal

Lotto: We see by finding patterns and associating these patterns with behavioral relationships in the world. — brainpicker

Beau Lotto’s talk will be super-popular as an opener at TEDx events, I predict, for showing ppl how perceptions are shaped, amusingly. — ruthannharnisch

Beau Lotto: “No one is an outside observer of nature.” — frogdesign