Which is a ball you throw up in the air and it takes 36 photographs that are stitched together by it’s accompanying software, creating a sphere you can zoom in and out of. I think it has inbuilt accelerometers so it takes the photo at its Zenith… the age of sensors etc. Pretty cool – a bit like the opposite of those micro-planets I was on about before, but not really.

Those multi-depth-focus cameras have just hit the market (almost) as well… in a toy version basically.

So that’s kindof cool as well… although I have this sneaking suspish that it will be more of a novelty than anything. Photography is generally about directing attention… to a thing. Not to two things, seperately… although it would be kindof neat to be able to dispense with that whole focusing thing and still get a shallow depth of field. So maybe I’m wrong. I think the files are pretty massive though, and I think it’ll be quite a while (if ever) that the quality gets to the point where the people who actually care about shallow depth of field consider it to be anything other than a novelty.

Anyway… add to that, this:

which has been doing my head in for the last couple of days because the tab has been open in my browser, and every time I start it auto-plays, and there’s some shouting-twat who sounds like he’s faking some sort of insincere sex thing… “Oooh ooh, more more” he goes. Something like that – although it IS actually shooting back at him with a paint-ball gun so maybe he’s getting off on that. You go in as a normal human-being, come out “painted”. A person of colour etc. Whatever – I hate that damien omen choir music as well. Having a whole fucking orchestra going off isn’t scary. Total silence, with the sound of something dripping nearby is scary. Anyway. Cool floor… cool 3D projections, though possibly not quite as cool as this military sim thing

Which is a 14 10Mp projectors seamlessly projecting onto the outside of a sphere, while you sit on the inside.

Which is what it’s going to be like when we do actually get proper space-fighters like the ones off Battleship Galactica, because normal windows won’t work because if you’re anywhere near a star, it’ll go from blindingly bright to totally dark just by doing a roll etc. So what you’ll have is cameras on the outside and some sort of stitched together monitor on the outside – preferably a sphere like the one above… and you won’t actually need to be in the spaceship itself… you might just as well be flying it remotely, which means there won’t be any difference between a simulator and the real thing.

All is simulation. This is a simulation now… you’re actually a detached consciousnous remotely piloting a virtual representation of what you think of as “yourself”, in an entirely artificial reality filled with idiots. Think about it. You know it’s true.

I don’t know who this guy is, or what he’s doing, but he’s brilliant in every conceivable way.

You can read about him here and here.

Mind you, you’d need to have some pretty awesome skillz to not feel like a total twonklet wearing that eye-bluetooth thing… but if you’re anything like me, you feel like a total twonklet most of the time anyway, so what difference would it make? Maybe you ARE a twonklet? A Borg Twonklet. Maybe we all are. Already. Maybe we’ve already been assimilated.

It’s growing outwards in all directions. We’re evolving so fast we don’t know who we are any more, but… it all feels kindof normal – apart from this vague sense of encroaching disenfranchisement, combined with a sort of detached foreboding. Not so much “We are Borg” as “Everyone is Borg Except Me”.

Which would be just typical.

Augmented Shadow_document from Joon Y Moon on Vimeo.

Via

Which is to say, it overlaps with a bunch of things that I find interesting, ie:

a)

The flirtation/vacillation/onion-skin-layers of reality… in love, war, fiction, art. Sex, Fighting – the more primal ends of the human condition. Because reality is not enough… but fantasy can’t sustain interest.

Apparently monkeys masturbate… ok you knew that… and (I’m never going to find a cite for this) they even masturbate to monkey porn… but unless there are real monkeys (presumably of the “required” sex) around, after a while, they give up and stop. They need stimuli from reality to keep their fantasies going.

I think a similar sort of thing happens with humans – but it’s not just sex, it’s also violence and art. The Shock of The Real. Prostitutes are not enough – not even goddesses from Eastern Europe, so there’s an entire genre “Girlfriend Experience”. Punk swept Prog-rock into the water and suddenly pop music was about describing people’s actual lives, rather than going on about Lord of the Rings etc. The only way to top Avatar is to make something real. In fact the mere fact that a movie has cost $300 million dollars, and is about sexy tree-smurfs should be ringing out as an opportunity in the minds of… people who can make it real.

Because that’s the other thing… when things are real, more people get to participate. Or at least it feels that way.

b)

Alternative currency

Although this one is harder than it looks… and I think the way he’s describing it here is a bubble waiting to happen. Any currency which isn’t a linear function of value being created, is a recipe for fuckup.

But what in this context is the value being created? At it’s rawest, I tend to see value as the reversal of entropy. I don’t think advertising creates value – aside from the occasional cultural icons/input. At best it transfers value… so I don’t think a currency which is based upon gaining points from looking at adverts in the long term, is sustainable. I mean basically you’re paying people to look at your ads. You can’t base an economy on this.

c)

Games as pavlovian motivators for… doing good. I think this has huge potential – and is the basis for my notions of how smart-meters should work… and there was a pedometer thing recently that was pretty cool.

ie: everything has a tamagochi inside – hijacking human powers of empathy, anthropomorphism, competition etc to get them to do… chores.

d)

Stuff we didn’t see coming.

Yup. I wouldn’t have picked Guitar Hero. I wouldn’t have picked Wii. There are all sorts of things that I’ve got flat wrong… and for some reason, having this pointed out to me fills me with a sense of relief.

“What the fuck are we building here?” or
“How to make Skynet in 5 easy lessons”

1) Genetic Algorithms again.

Genetic algorithms are simple little programs that simulate evolution by (re)combining groups of actions, keeping the ones that works best, ditching the rest, then recombining again. They can arrive quite quickly at solutions to complex problems.

Here’s a fairly remarkable video where a simulation of a person teaches itself to walk

2) “Situational Awareness”

O how I love it when my hysterical bug-eyed predictions come true.

Some Australians have spent a mere million dollars and invented a thing which stitches together all of their CCTV camera feeds so you can walk around in them like doom. You could use augmented reality to turn the homeless people into Zombies so you don’t feel bad about killing them.

These are using existing CCTVs… but you could just as easily (in fact more easily) achieve the same thing using

3) Perch and Stare bots

So you just fly a bunch of these things into an area and position them such that you can create a 3D map of the place… with proper depth-perception (as is on Darpa’s shopping list) maybe.

I learned how to use these

last week – they’re little mesh-networking things… cheap as chips with a line-of-site range of about a mile… works through walls etc to a more limited extent. I saw one this morning that had a range of 40 miles… which is… miles!.

I’m not sure that these would have the bandwidth to transmit real-time video (my ones run at 38400 baud)… but you get the idea. It’s not entirely outside the bounds of possibility to drop a cluster bomb of CCTV cameras over an area and operate them from another country. They’re so cheap though that you and I could probably do it.

4) Automated Kill Zones

As being set up by the Israelis.

Accompanied of course by flying drones, and flotillas of euphemisms designed to obscure the fact that what’s actually happening here is that people’s Dads, Brothers, Sons, Daughters, Husbands, Wives, Mums… are being killed.

Still as long as they’re not controlled by n’ n’ n’ nineteen year olds, what could possibly go wrong?

Anyway… enough about that… back to the warm, touchy-feelyness of

5) a plane that looks like a dolphin

The cool thing about these, is that they’ve actually made them, and they actually go… quite well.

It’s electric – hydrogen fuel-cell powered. Lots of specs and whatnot on the site, though right now they’re just tinkering with the toy-sized version – the skin of which is made with a CNC milled mold… which is used to shape fibre-glass.

Something well within the abilities of 5th generation repraps in other words… something largely creatable from a direct digital->physical process in other words.

So maybe you wouldn’t have to drop a cluster-bomb filled with Perch-and-Stare drones, but a single reprap with a load of vitamin parts.

A way to go yet of course. I’m still of the opinion that humans are the ultimate vitamin part… and whatever emerges, it will be a human/machine symbiote, rather than a machine takeover.

I mean in a way we’ve already got this – except that the machine, isn’t a physical object… it’s a set of formulas, laws and conditions – it’s debt-based currency and corporatism, with it’s grotesque and alien offspring… “defence” industries, privatised prisons, privatised water/food/health systems, derivative colonialism etc etc.

We’ve actually already got the monster. Skynet is just something that will flex its muscles in the sunlight (one bright morning), several sheddings-of-skin into the future.

Now I’m not so sure.

There’s this environmental monitoring… pond called Pachube.com – where you can dump all the data that you collect with your environmental monitoring gear. Up-dumping. Cloud-dumping. The Sky is a Landfill.

Obviously you don’t have any environmental monitoring gear yet, but you will. Your cellphone is doing it right now… pinging the mothership, but some other fucker is collecting all the information… but in the next decade, most of the traffic on the internet is going to be machine-generated. Smart-metering is probably going to become compulsory… or maybe it won’t have to be, because it pays for itself so quickly and you can do cool things with it… like turn the gas off from 2300 miles away.

I got a special invite to the Pachube.com beta about 1 day before they made it public. Pachube.com is pronounced Patch-bay. Phonetic opacity at it’s worst. The people working on that project are going to spend the rest of their lives spelling it to people over the phone.

Anyway, t’other day they made this video.

Which kindof gave me an “oh holy fuck” moment… if you can make hyper-links-for-the-chosen in actual reality by drawing on a wall with chalk (or spray paint) then it all changes. Suddenly a million possibilities come flooding in.

Like Hobo Codes on steroids

Or early Christian Symbols or the Key of Solomon etc.

There’s this whole avalanche of possibilities not to do with ramming even more information into people’s faces or advertising to them (because everyone hates advertising except advertisers) but for secret, back-channels of communication. Languages that only teenagers can understand.

So… I’ll change my prediction for AR – it’s not necessarily a dork-alert – like tourists standing with maps next to Nelson’s Column… and it’s probably not even that good for this sort of nonsense

which is basically just replacing a mouse control with a bit of paper… it’s all “neato” but it’s not doing anything that you couldn’t do without having to faff about with a piece of paper…

… but something really cheap and nasty – like a cross between graffiti and SMS. Like MySpace escaping from the internet and daubing itself on the back of every bus seat.

It could be quite mental actually. Have you seen the phone boxes in London where every square inch of available glass is covered with prostitute calling cards? Imagine going in there with special glasses on and having he whole lot come to life on you. Holy crap, it’d be like some really tacky 2nd Circle of Hell.

A tiny French microcopter that’s getting spookily close to the thing I described last year… and have been going on about ever since… first personism… Tourist drones… Spy drones, and iPhone as controller for everything.

This one ticks a lot of boxes: it’s packed with sensors for flight stability, augmented-reality-capable, first-person POV, controlled over wifi via iPhone’s tilt-sensors, open-platform for developers. AND IT RUNS LINUX

I also love the fact that it’s French – because the French really were THE aviation pioneers… and I do so love seeing high-tech gadgets flying over cobbled streets :)

(obviously being a New Zealander, I do also have to point out that Richard Pearse flew a plane before the Wright Brothers… but apparently the Brazilians also have a claim for this one. Morphic Resonance etc. Parallel Evolution. We’re all eyes in the same head)

Anyway, back to the Parrot… various things can be gleaned from the specs over here…
– 15 minute flight time
– 90 min charge time
– 18 km/hr
– 360g (is that about the same as a can of coke? Seems heavy to me)
– 640×480, 15fps video
– 45cm x 29cm

and so on. Other things I’d be interested in are flight-range and load capacity… ie: how much can it lift? And the obvious ones… how much are they? Where do you get them? As far as I can gather they’re not on general release yet, although there’s a lot of videos and photos and so on.

So anyway… brilliant. Love it.

Further boxes to tick:

- A ‘glasses’ display so you actually feel like you’re the… parrot.
- bifocal/3d vision.
- the ability to control peripherals etc.
- solar charging? Solar is pretty weak mind.

(bit of a longer-shot)
- the ability to place an iPhone (and by that I mean android) on the device itself… so the brain of the copter becomes another iPhone… rather than being essentially a thin-client, which is kindof what it is at the moment I suspect. A longer shot though granted – rightly or wrongly, I just have this instinct about this.

In addition to this, there are all the usual pressures – better resolution, faster, stronger, smaller, bigger etc etc… these will evolve over time though.

I’m not sure how ‘open’ the software etc is, but this really needs to be (and will be whether they like it or not) a platform rather than simply a device. From the look of the site, they’re investing a lot of headspace into augmented reality and gaming… but I think this gadget is more useful for interacting with the real world, rather than turning reality into a game-zone.

As a platform, controllable over the web, the possibilities for this are absolutely huge.

(via)

… but that’s not them, although it could be. They remind me of one of the very first Arduino Art Projects… wigs that sing when you brush them…

See… these people have natural harmony and rhythm and whatnot. Unlike the dancing robot that from a recent dancing robot competition…

Which for reasons unknown, they’ve dressed up as a schoolgirl – at a single stroke, transforming it from “probably quite impressive” to “actually, slightly weird”.

Speaking of which, we saw that Surrogates with Bruce Willis in it recently – in which people “live” through robots… they don’t actually leave the house themselves, but instead remotely control robotic versions of themselves that have a similar type of dress-sense/polish etc to C-Grade American soap-operas from the 80s. Like everyone has suddently decided to become a Stepford Wife of some sort.

The hell with that – I can’t imagine anyone living through a robotic device without immediately going for the “can fly” option. If I was Bruce Willis I’d have been a bird. That would be cool. I’d be a Bruce Willis bird, and I’d crap on cars. I’d crap on cars a lot.

Speaking of which – I see they just google-street-viewed Pompeii…

View Larger Map

Which is quite fantastic… but a bit boring because that particular bit of Pompeii is a bit fucked really, on account of that volcano in the background blowing up a couple of thousand years ago and trashing it. I actually find the “living” Pompeii a lot more interesting, though perhaps a little less poetically resonant. The new one has Pizzarias and proper Italians and things.

Still… It does conjure (to me at least) this vision I have of UAV tourism… where you hire a little copter type thing that you can “see through” and control over the web from your PC (or phone or whatever) at home – preferably with some of those 3D goggles and a smellovision plugin.

From there it’s a short (cognitive) leap to doing a whole augmented reality number on it… so instead of flying around in 2010, you’re flying around in sometime in 79AD. Mind you, if you were going to do that, you might as well not actually fly a real thing about – you might as well just do the whole thing in simulation… like the thing you’re looking at above. There’s a fine line between photograph and simulation anyway. One so very quickly becomes the other. The moment is everything.

And that’s the thing about augmented reality. You don’t actually need the reality.

Is that impressive? I guess it is.

Begin’ your pardon, but me being a harbinger of doubt and doom… isn’t this an app for turning the interesting bits of town into the incredibly fucking boring bits? that look the same in any town, anywhere on the planet?

How about an app that doesn’t add big-chain franchise advertising, but erases it… not just from virtual reality, but from actual reality as well? A sort of Augmented Reality, Ad-Block Plus.

Since when did you need an application to help you see a fucking McDonalds sign? There’s nowhere in the world you can go to get away from the fucking things.

So… Augmented reality. That talk by Bruce Sterling was all inspiring and all, but I’ve yet to see anything that goes anything beyond eye-candy and advertising… and believe me, we do not need more advertising… particularly not for global blandishment brands.

Early days I guess.

(boing boing)

As far as I can gather it’s an augmented reality game that you play with your phone. You wander around with an eyeball on your arm (a bit like the thing Molari had on Babylon 5) and it spots invisible monsters… that you too can see if you look at them through your phone. That’s the augmented bit. Then you shake the phone and they go away.

If you gave the eyeball wheels of it’s own, and the ability to carry and shake a phone, you could dispense with your own body completely. I see dead people etc. They don’t know they’re dead… and they only see what they want to see.

It is quite weird though, how easy it is to make something seem alive. All it needs is an eye, and the ability to direct attention.