Tiny little cameras that fit inside pens and can shoot 1.5 hours of 1,280×960 at 30fps… for $65
!!!
What’s interesting about that, is not the spying part, but the hacking part. It’s that they’re small enough to hack onto flying robots etc – and cheap enough to lose… or use as bifocals.
Can’t find any example videos to see what the quality is like. It’s a nice little unit though.You could use them for rockets or kitty cams etc
Both of which make me feel dizzy and sick. Still… Nick Drake is cool.
There’s been a fair bit of this in the last couple of months… prosthetics controlled by thought etc. There was recently a load of excitement and fuss to do with brain-to-speech synthesis… which may or may not be tempered by the fact that it only did 3 vowel sounds, and required a bit of implanted hardware that neurons grew around. Oooh. Aaaah. etc.
Still that is a bit like saying “yea, my dog plays chess but he’s not that good”. A hello-world is a hello-world. The difference between 0 and 1 is MASSIVELY different to the difference between 1 and 2.
I went on about this sort of thing in Feb last year. There’s an Open-EEG community… or was… but here’s the thing: if you don’t have a blog, no one can tell if you’re alive. I guess I could join the mailing list, but I’m already overwhelmed with mailing lists, and I’m only on about 5.
Anyway… a couple of things turned up recently that are partly related.
Waking you up when you’re sleeping lightly thing for iPhone – although according to wikipedia, there is some dispute as to whether being woken when you’re sleeping lightly is the best way to be woken… personally, I’d tend to go for something like this
But anyway, I saw the waking up watch/iphone thing a while back and had a spot of bother finding it again… and found that there are actually loads of such devices out there – the sensory bit is called an Actigraph – which sounds a bit snake-oily to me… like any advert that contains the words “scientifically proven”. As far as I can gather, all it is is a piezo, which measures movement… often filtering out everything except the 2-3 hz range… which is about the speed of a normal, common, every-day case of DTs. How that correlates to sleep, I couldn’t say, but that is apparently what’s being measured.
I think though the real value of this isn’t being woken up when you’re sleeping lightly, but the fact that it forces you to pay attention to sleep over a long period – keeping a sleep diary etc… which will probably make you aware of just how much caffeine, alcohol, stress etc are messing you about.
It would be quite cool to have something like a system-monitor for your body/mind going all the time. So rather than being pulled this way and that by laziness, gluttony and random whims, you do actually get to run yourself like a well tuned machine. Do what works, rather than what feels good in the short term.
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Off at a tangent – or something that comes in at a different level, something that also turned up recently is this pedometer that has an LED flower on the side of it.
and if you don’t do loads of walking, it dies.
Utter genius – it’s a tamagotchi that makes you do something you want to do, but can’t be arsed with.
“Captology” – capitalising on people’s amazing powers of nurturing and anthropomorphism etc. This is kindof what I was on about in my open-source energy monitor idea – setting up the interface so it’s kindof pavlovian… but this is so much better.
There are so many applications of this – turn your iPhone into a Chumby-like creature that you have to look after. Like having a familiar… or one of those daemons off Golden Compass. iPhone as pet. Brilliant.
This has been around for a couple of days – just got around to looking at it:
It’s image-scanning using an ordinary webcam rather than some fancy thing with laser-beams. Pretty amazing. I wonder if it could be used with bi-focal cameras to map the objects in a room. Could be a good way of stopping your Roomba from eating your socks.
I can’t quite believe that someone’s used a Lego-Mindstorms brain to do OCR
from From Sweden apparently… but who? Who in Sweden? Who in Sweden would do such a thing?
I mean it’s basically cheating isn’t it. First the Pirate Bay, and now they cheat at Sudoku. Incredible. I think I might move there actually.
This leading to that…
A lego-bot painting the Mona Lisa… and it only takes 1.31 minutes. It took Leonardo (arguably the smartest human ever) several years to do the same thing. I think that says something.
That aside… I’d be quite interested to see what happens when iPhones (or the open-source variant thereof) manages to hook into some sort of modular constructor-kit type set up. I did originally think laser-cutting might be the way to go, but laser-cutting is the most expensive way of producing identical, replicated pieces… and part of the point of identical, replicated pieces is that you actually get to play with the actual physical things with your actual fingers and thumbs etc…
… and this counts for a lot. I’m doing a lot with laser cutting at the moment… and even though it looks like a simple design->execution, it’s not. What it actually is, is design->prototype->mess-about-with-fingers/thumbs->second-design->second-prototype
and it generally takes around 3 generations to get anything right… and the possibilities don’t generally spring to mind until your fingers and thumbs get involved. Thinkism is not enough.
I’ve been telling people that we’re in the midst of a materials revolution for a while now. And do they listen? No they don’t. They throw peanuts at me. The pull my hair. They swing me round by my schoolbag until I fall over etc.
But they’re wrong. A lot of the truly amazing stuff that is going on at the moment is happening in the materials arena. The picture above for example is concrete who’s pattern only shows up when it’s wet.
Anyway, transmaterial.net has a new website documenting The Materials Revolution as it happens – lots of stuff that doesn’t appear on the other tech-tracking sites – but which personally, I find a whole lot more interesting than loads of things that go bleep, or “concepts” that are basically just some design student going all Roger Dean – doing a CAD version of a never-ending guitar solo from the 70s… and dreaming up some sort of form-over-function-fetish (shiney shiney techboy jackdaw) which will never ever be built.
Something that’s turned up a couple of times recently, is using an iPhone as a brain for some sort of other, slightly bigger thing, that’s got absolutely nothing to do with telephones.
eg: this electric superbike… which uses one as a dashboard.
I can see this happening more and more – rather than having a computer with lots of “plug and play” devices, you have a lot of devices and one computer/smart-stick etc that plugs into them.
iPhones are a bit different though – because they have eyes, ears, a sense of balance, a sense of location… a screen, an input device, web-enabled, sms-capable etc etc etc. It’s not just an extension of a brain, it’s an extension of a load of different human senses as well… though not as good as the real ones. Yet.
I can see this coming from the other end, and being a competitor for arduino actually. The potential of it is massive. Seriously… but iPhones are tethered, and they’re not open-source… and the future is open-sourced. So um… Android it is.
Quite good really – that’s got to be incredibly useful for something. Other than rugs I mean. Reminds me a bit of this thing I saw the other day being developed by DARPA
I think maybe we just haven’t learned to walk yet.
We now have these things like laser-cutters, 3D printers (well, almost) and a rapidly advancing miscellany of tech wizardry, but we’ve been watching television for the last 40 years, and even if we hadn’t been – materials and techniques have their own traits that you don’t find out about until you play with the stuff. Materials have their own languages – and laser-cutting in a way, creates new types of materials. Acrylic that you cut with a laser is qualitatively different from acrylic you cut with a saw.
Although I like all of these things as well – I mainly like this thing because it details a quick easy way of making hinges using a carboard-plastic lasercut composite.
A new piece of DIY grammar in other words – a new little building block that other people can use elsewhere. I used to be paranoid about accidentally being transported back in time to the 13th century, and not being any… use… because although I’ve spent my life surrounded by all this technology, I don’t know how to make any of it. Well I think we’re moving into an era where we (kindof) know how to make things again. I have a feeling we may be moving into a state where we can do things for ourselves – because it takes less time to supply our own needs than it does to work in the old-economy, and our quality of life is better. Arduinos and Gardening.
We’re still not there yet with robotic micro-muscles… but hinges? That’s a little step forward I think. One tiny step for Man, one mighty leap for Antbotkind.
It’s still simple, but it’s more clever and complex than the bulk of the other laser-cut stuff, which is primarily ( to these jaundiced eyes) about making trendy shapes. I think there are more building blocks to come – that thing with the flying penguins for example, was an example of a set of simple techniques that could be applied elsewhere.
I think there are whole new languages that we need to learn for mass-fabrication to get underway. And when it does, it won’t be about making things we already have, it will be about making things we haven’t actually thought of yet… because we don’t learn the grammar until we play with the stuff.
3D printed joints that turn old pens into lego-esque constructor kits… there are all sorts – from ball and socket, to side-by-side wall building to geodesic dome building.
I think eventually these would be better mass-produced via some sort of injection moulding, but as a basic concept they’re spot on – especially as old pens are tubes, which offers scope for mechanisation, wiring etc.
This is not an entirely new idea – I had a set of connectors for drinking straws a bit like this when I was a kid – and Look and Learn Magazine had “build things out of old pens” competitions back in the 70s. This particular project takes this to a whole new level though… and as so many people are now making robot, it potentially has a much wider relevance.
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As an aside, the site that this comes from is also a classic case of a breach of Emergent Morality #3 – which is concerned with naming and addressing content. They’ve wrapped everything up in a flash file which means that the people who love the idea enough to evangelise about it (and work on their behalf for free) are effectively hobbled. I actually had to sit there and take screen grabs of the flash animation to create the image above. I couldn’t be bothered re-typing their text for them. This is still effectively neutered. You can’t search it, and it’s difficult to cite.
But the image above is a now a linkable resource. I’ve spent about 1/2 an hour working for them for free to increase the visibility of their project – and allow others who also think this is an inspiring project to propagate the idea.
This is illegal, and according to the old-economy morality, evil.
But the entire old-economy is itself evil, and I think this idea is brilliant, so I’m doing what I know is morally right. I’m sharing it.
