GENOMICON

Segway telepresence bots.

Which I find interesting for all sorts of different reasons… eg:

1) It’s telepresence… which as a platform has possibilities going off in a million different directions… eg, spider safaris. Or remote tourism. Or weird proxy wars. Whatever. Probably has some sort of porn-application as well… eg: a Gopro mounted on a miner’s hat. God, that would be weird. I bet some people would like it though. Perverts etc. Gopros are already wifi-capable.

2) It’s a Segway. No, actually, it IS a segway… which is one of those inventions that was ever a solution looking for a problem.

3) It’s running the Kickstarter Model (ie: pre-sales) without going via Kickstarter (which is the Facebook-of-crowdfunding) (and for this reason, I’m fairly suspicious of it)(and they still don’t have an RSS feed coming out of it, so I’m going to hack one together myself)(There’s a love/hate relationship for you)

I think running the Kickstarter model outside Kickstarter is a very good thing. The blogosphere kindof has this reputational-system (like ebay) built in… the quick-silver speed and efficacy of crowd-sourced sleuthing. This was what shot the Kickstarter DIY drone project down in a matter of days. Sure people will get ripped off, but they’re getting ripped off by various projects on Kickstarter anyway. Delivery is not guaranteed… but crowd-funding is where all the energy is. The (entirely feudal) VC model sucks. Distributed crowd-funding has a special sort of in-built intelligence that top-down-control simply cannot do.

Combine distributed crowd-funding with the abolition of (or at least total contempt for) copy-monopolies, then you’ve got a system with a really dynamic set of biases. Really dynamic innovation-drivers… not just of products, but of building blocks.

A good (early) example of this is the the Digispark thing

which has absolutely aced their target (~$90k from a target of $5k… with 20 days to go), and introduced (an emergent phenomena) Stretch-Goals, in which they’re offering a whole mass of additional PCB shields. Calling it a “deft bit of upselling’ doesn’t do it justice. It’s cross-pollination and community waiting-to-happen. I don’t know how pre-planned this technique was for them, but for a lot of projects going forward, it will be.

Speaking of going forward (or not)… I’ve now received the 2nd board from my first Kickstarter sponsorship… Romotive… and it doesn’t fecking work, and their support forums don’t offer any actual support… what is the opposite of telepresence?

Ok, so my involvement with The Wellington Makerspace has shifted phase in a fairly dramatic way, in that I’m now a share-holding customer of the business rather than a partner. Various reasons, mainly to do with the chemistry not working. Would I do it again? Yup – but never the way we just did it.

If you don’t know the terrain, you’ve got to start small. If your entire modus-operandi is based on successively biting off more than you can chew (either in terms of $ or knowledge), then you become a slave to external dependencies. You become an employee… and prone to the same biases and forces that prey on traditional/legacy, debt-based businesses. One way or another, you become an employee.

So I’ve changed phase.

A byproduct of the makerspace experience though, is a change in thinking about the blogosphere… because one thing we decided we were going to do early one (and which (like everything else we decided to do), we did not actually do) was to do projects that blogs would want to blog about… rather than paying for advertising. This was going to be part of the product-development cycle. Instead it turned out to be entirely about training/bespoke-jobs… but I’m still kindof stuck with inspiration of “creating content” rather than just commenting on what other people have done… and being a customer of The Makerspace, I now have the facilities, and possibly the network to do it.

I’ve been commenting on what other people have done rather than doing anything myself (on this blog) for years now. Time for a change in phase. I’ll still pull in various things I find interesting… that are building blocks in the future that we’re building – but over the last year, these had already tailed off to a couple a month – rather than the several-a-day, breathless repetition that used to suffice.

So there you go.

I didn’t actually mean to write that. I meant to write about this:

Which I’ve just backed, even though I find that kid quite annoying for reasons I can’t quite fathom (is he an actor? He’s like a cross between a young Michael J Fox and Kyle McLaughlin. We haven’t gone back to the 80s have we? I mean what’s up with David Helgason’s collar? He looks like a baddy from Wayne’s World. We’ve definitely gone back to the 80s). The preparedness and polish of this positively reeks of big money behind it before it’s even started. And lo – it’s pulled down over a million, straight off the bat, with a whole month to go… which means it’s hit the Kickstarter-Triple-Cherry-Jackpot, ie “How Much Money It’s Made” becomes a story in itself, which means it gets into the mainstream news.

That aside,

This is the future that’s been longing to happen for a long long time – it’s a 1980s dream… Lawnmower-man-tech. Would I buy one? Shit yea – I don’t even play games, and I’d definitely buy one.

The fact that they’re offering it to devs before it’s even a commercial product is a really good sign as well… although I’m seeing copy-monopoly symbols everywhere… and if they HAVE got big money behind it before it’s even started, then I bet there are all sorts of nasty IP surprises lying in wait… because as I said earlier on, if you bite off more than you can chew in terms of $, you fall prey to the biases of traditional/legacy business models.

Or maybe not. Whatever. I funded it. Partly.

It’s like an internal-reality version of kinnect… or better still Leap… absolutely made for each other… the ability to hold your own hand up in front of your face is a very very special type of “Hello World”.

Yea, so obviously everyone’s already gone on about this:

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.

K for cool.

That’s what I want… one of those… but I want a cylindrical one like a portaloo… or better still a geodesic dome, with 3D and less nerds.

Once there was this…

And now there’s this

Which is the same thing, possibly turned into something useful… ie: if you make your eyelids flicker, you can make your screen go 3D.

LOL etc.

This also reminds me of that Bismark thing… where the coolest looking geek in the world

With the coolest name, hacked a camera to detect flashes from other cameras – then project “messages” onto whatever’s been photographed.

What it makes me think of, is using censors to bypass the body’s stimulus-response circuits and make hard-coded reflexes. Like something out of an Iain Banks book – hyper-reflexes. It’d have to be fast to be faster than human reflexes… but machines are already faster than human reflexes. A LOT faster.

There’s been various ripples here and there about insects being grafted onto robots… and vice-versa… and really, the whole Internet is just that, done with humans… only there’s a kind of analogue-hole. The interface between machine and human is still voluntary… and hell of a woolly. I can see there being a lot of scope (probably entirely evil) of something involuntary. Something like Mechanical Turk for people who are asleep. Sleep-Dealer.

Maybe not. What do we actually need people for again?

–

ps: I’ve decided to get.the.fuck.away from social-media – or just become less enslaved to it – so from now on “even” days are social-media-free days. No facebook, no twitter. No checking in every fucking 2 minutes to see if I might have missed something.

Only I feel the need to tell someone about this… to tell… “the internet”. My entire social context… so I’ve blogged it. That doesn’t count as social media. It’s writing.

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Here’s a thing about Martin Luther King. Watch it. Watch it twice.

Sounds like an older sibling to R2D2, but is in fact this

which is a tiny 3d camera that’s designed to go in a cellphone or whatever – and they’re 720p, which is no mean feat. The future’s so bright, everyone’s going to have to wear shades.

Obviously the first thing you’re going to do is get some of those completely opaque swimming goggles and blu-tak these to the front, with tiny screens inside… so you don’t bang into things etc. Then you’ll be able to do really cool things like erase your friends – or superimpose their heads over the bodies of squirrels etc – which is what I do in my imagination with my friends anyway, which is probably why I don’t have any.

As a soothsayer, I’m kindof conflicted over this one. There are two opposing vectors:

1) Entertainment is becoming more emmersive – it’s an NLP thing; it’s an art thing; it’s a porn thing. The closer an artefact is to reality, the more likely it is to… “catch”… to pluck a string in your heart, or gut, or knob or whatever… but you still need to isolate and amplify those aspects that resonate with the human condition. It’s this interplay between reality and fantasy – you need enough reality to fool your reptile-level nervous system into going along with the fantasy that the borg part of your mind responds to.

2) who could be arsed wearing glasses?

I think I need glasses actually. I can no longer read my medication containers.

This is cool

Virtual cow-tipping etc.

It would kindof be better though if the screens were massive, around the other way, and you sat on the inside of it (not being hassled by massive cows). That’s what’s coming after 3D. 360-degree movies. You could be in space – where you belong etc. Out among the stars.

Or maybe not – movies are all about directing attention – 360 degree stuff is probably more useful for gaming etc. Still… nice idea.

Back to the first one – you could probably also use it for some creepy, weird and totally megalomaniacal sex toy as well – filled with tiny screaming porn-stars who you molest with your (suddenly, for the first time) massive todger. God you people are weird. I can’t believe that’s the first thing you thought of.

It’s not wonder the country’s going to the dogs.

This is quite a neat little 3D thing…

Reminds me of… some sort of Victorian toy. Or a doll’s house.

If you click on that, there’s a big picture – they gave this to a little baby queenlet once. It’s in Windsor Castle, so it’s kindof like a doll’s house with pet people in it, inside another dolls house with pet people.

I quite like mad amounts of detail for some reason.

(from)

That last one reminds me of that Czech guy who made a version of Alice in Wonderland that’s even more insane that the one that just came out, with Johhny Depp in it, who was also in the 9th Gate, that I also quite like.

This is a bit from The 9th Gate, which is (apparently) someone else’s fav scene

In the comments someone has written:

I have seen women with eye’s like that (they glow a gold color). This movie is about the bible and the true religion of God. He knows the truth. I got a brown book like that. I means something. I know the book of revelation, what it means. The “matrix” is in the bible. Those are not just movie. Matrix means “womb” in greek. You are an apostle. You can heal, curse, not be poisoned, etc.

Like most people, I can’t wait for smellovision to finally arrive, although even at its best I imagine it will be a profoundly unpleasant experience.

I like the idea though – of a sort of camera that not only records vision (bi-focally, 360 degrees) but also does sound, smell, movement… etc etc. An full-spectrum sensory recorder. A detachable head. Again.

So anyway, this thing turned up recently which isn’t a smellovision machine, but a very photogenic way of measuring smell components

And maybe if you can do that, it’s possible to push it back the other way and actually create the smells.

Ok. A long shot.

It reminds me of something though… can’t quite put my finger on it.

Something it’s not though… but could have been is the Damien Hirst thing that is now safe and sound on the surface of Mars

And is now definitely worth more than the cost of the sending it there in the first place – which was only a million quid or something.

It’s a bit of a shame that it didn’t phone home… but… its value probably always was going to be something other than scientific. It’s a story thing.

TED

I don’t buy it. Not any more – back in the days of Bush, when the air was clogged solid with stupidity it seemed like a breath of fresh air… but now…

I don’t buy it. I think the title on the video below says it all “1000 remarkable people gather in Monteray, California” (breathless crescendo / roll of drums)

Really? That’s not only a party to which I’m not invited, it’s also a party where I would feel like a total cunt even attending… to think of myself as a “remarkable person”. Oooh. Aren’t I special. If only I can persuade other special people I’m special then we can all hang about have self-satisfied, special conversations.

Fuck that. I’d rather hang out with people with interesting angles on self-hatred than puffed up tossers being intelligent.

Still… I am/was quite interested in what people had to say – so once got as far as the entry form to attend one of these events – but then found that they only wanted “remarkable” people to attend… and you had to detail why you were so remarkable. All of a sudden I wanted nothing to do with it.

So anyway, enough about that. I thought this was quite interesting

apart from the fact that it’s

a) TED – which to me seems like some sort of uber-touchy-feely-smug-fest where remarkable people can give standing ovations to other remarkable people and…

b) … they all go home, and a year later, fuck all has happened.

c) It’s Microsoft, and nobody cares about Microsoft

d) Because there seems to be this new genre of Science Fiction – now that bringing your product to market before the bugs are fixed is no longer competitive… it’s “Product Concept” which may or may not be a mockup, may or may not work… whatever… it doesn’t really matter, because the only thing that DOES matter, is the flash of INSPIRATIONAL attention in the eternal here and now. 2 weeks later everyone will have moved on to something else.

e) Still, thanks for the embed – I couldn’t find it on youtube etc.

f) and he seems like a nice bloke. I mean most people are etc..

No – I found this interesting because if you tried to do this in a shopping mall anywhere in the UK, the privately-owned police would immediately arrest you. They’re allowed to do that now. They can issue on the spot fines apparently.

It would be interesting though – all those millions of CCTV cameras… I mean a lot of them are paid for with our taxes… why should we have access to the feeds? It’s not like CCTV cameras actually reduce crime anyway – they’re a total waste of time and money, although I suppose they do give the police something to do. Keep them out of trouble etc. Keep them off the streets.

You could actually fly around in the system like the Australian CCTV Doom stitchup from a couple of weeks back. We could all be ghosts in the machine – swimming through Victoria Railway Station like lost sperm, all disconnected, alone, and… impotent. Omnipresent Impotence. God in is own image. Isn’t that what you wanted? To be? Not to be?

I’m also interested in this from the point of view of the increasingly immersive quality of entertainment… and this vacillation between reality and fantasy – in not just entertainment, but also war. And sex.

For some reason it makes me think of sleep-paralysis… floating around in this environment that is indistinguishable from reality but you can never get past the surface. And the slightly disturbing notion that reality itself is just a surface.

Look up from the screen now.

What you see out there is an insane blizzard of electrons and quarks… photons, photons, photons… forces and waves – and almost all of which is empty space, but your brain takes the sensory input, filters it and gives you a model that allows you to negotiate it.

But really, you’re seeing the model. You’re sitting there in a room inside your own head.