We are entering a new space
I am fascinated by the changes in our situated awareness made possible by the merges in gaming and personal technology. Chris Chesher discusses the impact of gaming on sat nav systems in the journal Convergence and how we are entering a new space as we share our control systems with our game environments. I’d like to go further and suggest that our self awareness is shifting as we incorporate visual displays onto mirrored surfaces, ranging from the rapidly becoming pervasive rear view mirror/backup monitor/sat nav, to these newer technologies in R&D.
There is a qualitative shift from the ‘shopping’ style magic mirrors, which show you with different outfits, watches etc. Shopping mirrors function as a ‘paper doll’, you are selecting outfits for yourself much as you would in real life. However, the use of mirrors as channels for other information changes the space that you (in a mirror) are in. The more you switch modes the more you are changed. All the way to the complete carnival mirror changes below!
Via Pop Sci | An Augmented Reality Mirror That Alters Your Appearance
excerpt… Using a webcam hooked up to custom PC software, a pair of researchers at Queen Mary, University of London, have created an augmented reality “mirror” that morphs your facial features at will.
Unlike existing applications that overlay virtual features onto real-world video, this program doesn’t add any synthetic elements to the video feed. It creates a 3D model of the user’s face, tracks their features, and then subtly warps the video. The user can then see how they would look with a smaller nose, wider mouth, or Powerpuff Girl eyes.
Via Mashable | via Augmented Mirror of the Future Reflects You and Your World.
excerpt… The New York Times‘s R&D Lab has developed a digitally enhanced mirror that allows you to interact with personalized data during your morning routine.
Unfortunately, the mirror won’t be making its way into your local Restoration Hardware any time soon. Rather, it’s a proof of concept designed to explore “how the relationship between information and the self is evolving and how media content from the New York Times and others might play a part,” The Lab’s team explained on a page outlining the project.
Thursday, December 8, 2011
We are entering a new space | The Robot State
State of the Technological World
State of the Art
A snapshot of the rapidly changing world of computing, communications and technology. Related Article »
A GLOBAL INTERNET
In just four decades the Internet has spread to much of the world. Now, the shift to high-bandwidth connectivity and the global availability of supercomputing is accelerating.
Related article: A High-Stakes Search Continues for Silicon’s Successor
Related article: Creating Artificial Intelligence Based on the Real Thing
A MORE CONNECTED WORLD
Cellphones are proliferating rapidly in much of the developing world. The use of smartphones and other Internet-connected devices is still low, but should rise quickly in countries like China, which will soon have the world’s largest domestic market for Internet commerce and computing.
Related article: Vast and Fertile Ground in Africa for Science to Take Root
TOWARD AN
INNOVATIVE CHINAChina is the dominant maker of computers and consumer electronics, and is readily able to adapt and improve on technology innovations made elsewhere. But innovation within the country has been limited by government controls and the relative lack of intellectual property protection.
RAW MATERIALS
FOR INNOVATIONThe synthesis that made Silicon Valley—the concentration of science and engineering talent and venture capital—is now beginning to proliferate in the developing world. China’s growing venture capital market is now the second largest in the world.
Related article: With a Leaner Model, Start-Ups Reach Further Afield
Remember that YouTube only started in 2005. That most businesses only used the internet for email in 2000 (if they used it at all!). That phones used to be just phones, not mobile phones let alone mobile internet devices.
As William Gibson famously said, 'the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.' It's worth considering the distribution of technological advances. It isn't always where you think.
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
VALE Lynn Margulis 1938-2011
Lynn Margulis 1938-2011
"Gaia Is A Tough Bitch"
Lynn Margulis [11.23.11]
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Introduction
By John BrockmanBiologist Lynn Margulis died on November 22nd. She stood out from her colleagues in that she would have extended evolutionary studies nearly four billion years back in time. Her major work was in cell evolution, in which the great event was the appearance of the eukaryotic, or nucleated, cell — the cell upon which all larger life-forms are based. Nearly forty-five years ago, she argued for its symbiotic origin: that it arose by associations of different kinds of bacteria. Her ideas were generally either ignored or ridiculed when she first proposed them; symbiosis in cell evolution is now considered one of the great scientific breakthroughs.
I have found Margulis' comments about culture and science to be very astute.
"If science doesn't fit in with the cultural milieu, people dismiss science, they never reject their cultural milieu! If we are involved in science of which some aspects are not commensurate with the cultural milieu, then we are told that our science is flawed. I suspect that all people have cultural concepts into which science must fit. Although I try to recognize these biases in myself, I'm sure I cannot entirely avoid them. I try to focus on the direct observational aspects of science."
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Nasa finds new planet
I always wanted to go to another planet. I wonder what the travel time is and when Virgin will offer flights to Kepler-22b?
excerpt from "Nasa finds planet that's just about right for life" by Seth Borenstein on suff.co.nz
Nasa has found a new planet outside our solar system that's eerily similar to Earth in key aspects.
Scientists say the temperature on the surface of the planet is about a comfy 72 degrees. Its star could almost be a twin of our sun. It likely has water and land.
It was found in the middle of the habitable zone, making it the best potential target for life yet.
The discovery announced Monday was made by Nasa's Kepler planet-hunting telescope. This is the first time Kepler confirmed a planet outside our solar system in the not-too-hot, not-too-cold habitable zone.
Twice before astronomers have announced a planet found in that zone, but neither was as promising. One was later disputed; the other is on the hot edge of the zone.
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Introducing The Robot Launch Pad
Since moving to Silicon Valley, I’ve been wondering how to combine my interest in human-robot culture (or making and culture hacking) with the strengths of the startup community and the robotics industry. Introducing ‘The Robot Launch Pad’!
We might not see a robot in every home yet, but the democratization of technology is occurring rapidly in robotics. As more robot platforms are developed and more sensor and hardware modules are improved, the price of a robot reduces, while the power increases. This allows more people to enter the robotics research and development cycle, developing new robots, new business models and more robot applications.
Robotics is still primarily industry and enterprise level, but the time is ripe for innovative thinking around robotics uses, new business cases and robotics as a service model. Small and medium enterprises may be the next generation of robot businesses, followed by enthusiasts who can finally afford to ‘play’ with advanced common platforms. This crowdsourcing (as epitomised by the DIY Drone community) can kick start another cycle of improvements and innovations.
… So, in April 2012, the Robot Launch Pad will hold the first of a series of robotics startup weekends, focusing on an existing robotics platform and inviting participants from the start up community, as well as robotics, to build new business models under the guidance of startup mentors and investors. It’s going to be an insanely fun and inventive weekend with really practical results, great panels and a bridge between the successful software space and robotics.
ICSR 2011 - social robotics is 'Alive'!
The International Conference on Social Robotics (where I’m presenting a work-in-progress) is underway with a theme of ‘Alive’. Sandwiched between keynotes from robot designer, Dr Tomotaka Takahashi and science fiction writer, Ken Macleod, are three days of social robotics papers, presentations, panels, tutorials and a design competition. And all in beautiful Amsterdam!
 | Dr. Tomotaka TakahashiRobot Designer and ProfessorTomotaka Takahashi creates, designs, and invents unique and original humanoids (Ropid, FT, Chroino, Neon). His passion for the cutting edge in robotics brings him into collaborations with other leaders in the field, researchers and corporations. |
 | Mr. Ken MacLeodScience Fiction Writer Ken MacLeod is the multiple award-winning author of many science fiction novels, including the “Fall Revolution” quartet (collected in the twin omnibuses “Fractions and Divisions”), the “Engines of Light” trilogy (Cosmonaut Keep, Dark Light, and Engine City), and several stand-alone novels including “Newton’s Wake”, “Learning the World”, and the recent “The Restoration Game”. Born on the Scottish isle of Skye, he lives in Edinburgh. |
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Obit Friedrich Kittler | The Robot State
Friedrich Kittler, the 'Derrida of the Digital Age', recently passed away. His work in theorising technological relations was hugely influential in cultural and new media theory. Kittler was neither a technophile, nor a technophobe but strongly and with great detail expressed the ways in which people were shaped by their technologies. From an excerpt of his obituary in the Guardian via Berkeley Center for New Media:
Kittler once wrote: “We are the subjects of gadgets and instruments of mechanical data processing.” He was entirely serious. In his extraordinary book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986) he argued that “those early and seemingly harmless machines capable of storing and therefore separating sounds, sights and writing ushered in a technologising of information”.
Later technologies – the internet in particular – further extended technology’s domination over us. He told one interviewer in 2006 that the internet hardly promotes human communication: “The development of the internet has more to do with human beings becoming a reflection of their technologies … after all, it is we who adapt to the machine. The machine does not adapt to us.”
Kittler, sometimes dubbed the “Derrida of the digital age”, thus tapped into humanity’s fear of being neutralised by its own tools. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter was written in the wake of such science-fiction fantasies as William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) and the first Terminator movie in which übercyborg Arnold Schwarzenegger travelled back in time to destroy humanity. Kittler’s point was not that machines will exterminate us; rather that we are deluded to consider ourselves masters of our technological domain.
The work of recent cultural theorists like Derrida, Haraway, Latour and Kittler provides the most far sighted and yet grounded suppositions about the way in which humans and technologies operate. They have led the return to investigating the 'stuff' or material of communication and culture, balanced in a the web of social and power relations. The work of cultural theory casts a wide net over the social sciences for methodology and also over the material sciences for matter. The concern of cultural theory is very relevant for robotics.
Understanding the methodology and 'use' of cultural theory is perhaps harder to grasp. Two useful articles are Ien Ang's 'Who Needs Cultural Research?' and Raymond William's classic (but difficult) 'The Uses of Cultural Theory'.
As Ang explains it, culture has little to do with 'high' or 'pop' culture and everything to do with how meaning and value are produced in the world. "In other words, culture is not only very ordinary, to speak with Raymond Williams, it is also fundamentally practical and pervasive to social life, as it is inherent to how the world is made to mean, and therefore how the world is run."
"In short, the distinctive intellectual currency and social utility of cultural studies research lies in its capacity for inducing conjunctural questioning, rather than in providing positivist answers to set questions." Ang admits this makes cultural theory resemble essay writing, however good cultural theory can provide both early response to emerging situations and the most challenging approach to accepted ones. "The very notion that culture is always contested, that meaning is always negotiated and constructed in concrete contexts, can be mobilised and applied in myriad strategic contexts in partnership with other specialist knowledge producers and users. There's nothing more practical than that."
I believe that Friedrich Kittler, like Ang and Williams, was immensely practical. His understanding of the relations between technology and war extends well beyond considering the military-industrial complex and the production of machines, but to the warring discourse networks of different technologies. His work will continue to be influential for anyone studying innovation and the global economy, and of course, human-robot culture.