GENOMICON

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Chris Anderson who has a NASA hat, talking about UAVs that he makes.

This is almost exactly what I was on about before, when I said I wanted to be a bird. It’s creeping closer. One tiny step at a time, towards Bethlehem to be born.

I thought it was mildly amusing how he emphasised (and then emphasised again) the safety angles when we all know that what we really want to do is attach a chainsaw to the front and chase sheep or whatever.

These things were born to be weapons. They’ve got “weapon” written all over their faces – there’s no getting away from it. They’d also be really cool as entertainment, and really useful for umpteen dozen other entirely non-violent and legitimate reasons.

Everyone dreams of flying. Flying is part of the human condition, weirdly enough, because God did not in fact, give us wings.

“Made of glass, each has a spherical head 200 to 300 nanometres across and a corkscrew-shaped tail 1 to 2 micrometres long – less than one-tenth the length of a human sperm. To make their propellers, Ghosh and Fischer covered a silicon wafer with glass beads, before depositing a vapour of silicon dioxide onto them.” - New Scientist

I think one of the things that’s quite interesting about this is that they’re propelled (to a fairly fine degree of accuracy) using magnetic-fields… force-fields in other words. Just like the ones off The Death Star.

That’s one of the things that wasn’t immediately apparent from watching Star-Wars – Darth Vader was only a couple of nanometers high, and The Death Star was the size of a pea. It was a serious business though.

It’ll be interesting when we manage to shrink ICs/Optics down to microscopic level – and incorporate first-personism into nano-bots. We’ll be able to go on bacterial safaris. I think that’s one of the most interesting things about first-personism: the ability to shed size-constraints – and detach ourselves from the otherwise serious consequences of getting into a fight with an amoeba 100x our size.

This is pretty cool:

Not just because it has the coolest looking glasses the world has ever seen, but because it allows (potentially) you to control remote cameras without having to use a joystick, or by moving your whole head – makes first-personism in robots so much more intuitive.

Unimpressed Robot is unimpressed…

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Yea, so for some reason I can’t quite recall, I found myself on this site, looking at robots from Sweden.

That’s cool, thunk I. They make little ones. You could use them to… I don’t know, Ice cakes or something.

Then I looked at what it could actually (and potentially) do:

• Handling, loading and unloading
• Packaging and order picking
• Other handling operations
• Welding and soldering
• Arc welding
• Other welding processes
• Soldering
• Painting, surface treatment
• Metal casting machines, foundry plants
• Painting, enameling
• Application of adhesives and sealants
• Other coating operations
• Machining
• Other machining operations
• Assembly
• Fastening
• Plastics processing machines
• Inserting, mounting
• Service applications
• Other applications
• Cutting machine tools
• Handling for other machines
• Measuring, testing and inspection

It can solder? IT CAN SOLDER WITH ONE HAND?!!?!

Holy crap, I can solder but I need 4 hands. I wonder if this thing could reprap itself. To be honest, as far as the reprap thing goes, I have been slightly more enamoured by a multiple tool-weilding robot than a 3D printer… not that that isn’t impressive in itself etc, but with a glue-gun type set up you’re always going to hit the vitamin-part wall.

Speaking of 4 arms – I notice that the Da Vinci surgical robot has acquired 3D High-Definition optics



- which is a technology that I think has applications all over the place. The 1st Personism of machines etc… or anything really. If you could persuade your cat to wear glasses like these


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(and you know you could, you’re just not trying hard enough)… then you could go cruising through dustbins and catching mice and generally going out roister-doistering all night. That would rock.

These glasses are new… ish. Vuzix (who makes them) basically just stuck a camera onto a pair of screen glasses… which was actually my idea ages ago etc

first-personism | robots

Another one – Waving Arms About Interface:

Which is actually pretty neat in some respects, though I expect it will make you look even more of a dickhead than someone with one of those bluetooth headsets where they wander along talking to themselves.

This won’t be it though – augmented reality will either happen with sunglasses or contact lenses or… (don’t laugh) direct brain interfaces… we’re making our first steps in that direction.

And I don’t think that the driver for augmented reality will be as a shopping aid – it will be as a tourism aid, and it will probably push tourism into places where tourism possibly ought not go. If you can rig a system where someone’s sensory input is beamed up to the web (and to a limited degree, we can do that now) then you can have someone vicariously seeing through someone else’s eyes. It’s not entirely impossible that this will create an entirely new genre of sex (or violence) tourism.

Right now though… there are all these places in the world that I miss… and though I can now find photos on the web… sometimes web-cams, it would be so much better to have something like this

(from : via)

and actually feel the breeze and smell the… err… smells… etc.

I’m guessing that at some point you’ll be able to hire tour-guides who will show you round without you having to get out of your chair. They put on a pair of glasses, you put on a pair of glasses, you pay them via SMS and you get to be a kid in the slums of Rio for a day. You get to see your favourite band, you get to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel… you could have a 747 where everyone feels like they’re flying the plane.

You could swap glasses with your girlfriend. It could get well weird actually.

I read a story about this back in the 70s I think. About Movie Stars who people lived through vicariously – the audience literally saw through their eyes… The main character had a pair of Zeiss eyes if memory serves… and although my dad had a Zeiss camera back in the 60s, Zeiss are alive and well and still doing optical wizardry.

They’re not doing this yet though:

from www.eyeborgblog.com : (via dvice)

Which is what the book was about… actual cameras in your eyes. Something tells me this particular variant might not catch on though

And of course the other thing about the fact that the future is now moving too fast to make reasonable predictions about, is that some predictions have already happened before you get a chance to predict them…

… so when I went on about doctors using remote robot exoskeletons for surgery… well obviously someone’s already doing it.

(from www.spectrum.ieee.org)

Holy crap. Does it have to look so much like… “A Machine For Doing Things To People”? Less insectoid? It looks like a less finessed version of Darth Vader’s torture machine from Empire Strikes Back. A machine for inducing heart-attacks.

But anyway, there it is. My predictions are becoming too slow for reality. I’ll see if I can find one on Youtube.

Oh. Right. Only about a thousand of them.

You can do origami with them as well.

One day of course… maybe within the time that it takes for you to require the attentions of this machine, it will seem medieval and barbaric. If we live.

So obviously I’m interested in this partly because it’s made out of Lego and has machine guns that fire metal balls etc:

I mean who wouldn’t be?

The main reason I’m interested though is that it’s has First-Personalisation Capabilities… ie: you can see through its eyes.

This is something that Cati Vaucelle did as a research project at MIT Media Laboratory / Tangible Media Group.

An idea that has huge potential I think… I can see us getting to a stage where our robotics become good enough that a lot of people spend more time embodying a robot than being in their own skin, so to speak. Imagine a surgeon’s rig… instead of being next to a patient she operates through a machine – with 6 arms and microscope eyes.

She can perform keyhole surgery where she sees from the POV of a micro bot (also with 6 arms and microscope eyes) right inside someone’s body.

Meantime, she’s sitting in her living room, 12,000 miles away and later that day she’ll perform 3 more operations, all on different continents.

This could go in a million different directions. It’s one of the most exciting technologies that hasn’t quite happened yet that there is I think. Want to be a bird? Want to be a plane? Want to go on a safari hunting spiders 10 times bigger than you?

Meantime… it’s toys and weapons though. Until robotics technology catches up.

A Walk

This is cool though – even if it doesn’t quite go yet.

Combine with a hexapod router…

Oooooh…. it sends shivers down the spine.

Mind you, they are bastards to control those little RC helicopters – you’d be much better off putting legs and CNC fangs on one of these :

Sooner or later I’m going to get some glasses like these:

And I’m going to blu-tac a webcam to the front of them (yes, this one), and plug it into the glasses so they work just like real glasses except everything will be a bit pixelly.

That would be cool. I might look like a bit of a twonklet, but I look a bit of a twonklet anyway… and I wouldn’t care because I’d use the technique in this tutorial here to basically edit out all the idiots in the world (also wearing these glasses).

Then I’ll wander about the place banging into people who aren’t really there etc.

Actually, there used to be this poster or something entitled “How to make yourself invisible”, and the picture was of a homeless person… kindof a guilt-poster type effect, a kind of irony of which is that in certain respects, if you’re homeless, you want to become invisible, so you won’t get hassled. Which is why I found the following video quite sad, even though it’s a pretty neat thing to make.

from

I think a homeless person living in this would become an instant hassle-magnet – both from the police and the other vermin that you’re forced to deal with. When I lived in Camden in London in the 90s, the people begging in the doorways up Parkway were charged “rent” by stanley-knife carrying scum who would take a percentage of their money.

The biggest problems people face are generally other people, and the closer you get to the bottom, the worse they become.