GENOMICON

Two things today… which I know are connected, but I don’t know how.

1) Tank Hat

2) Emotional Recorder

Both of these are early steps towards things that are absolutely inevitable… I think what links them is that they’re movements towards remote exoskeletons. Like Sleep Dealer… or (taking it further) that one where Bruce Willis is all shiney… Surrogates. A brain in a jar controlling a landscape littered with toys.

The inevitability is enhanced (and made evident) by the fact that both of these are DIY projects – based on the new availability of EEG headsets, and whatever it is that has gone into that tank to get it to go – wifi (or whatever), sensors, motors etc etc. We’re not waiting for corporations to make these things for us – we want them so bad we’re making them ourselves.

I tell yer – there’s a relationship-made-in-heaven between hackers everywhere and the Chinese Shanzai geniuses. There’s a very distinct possibility of getting things to market before Western corporations have cottoned on – because the innovation doesn’t happen in corporations, it happens at the edges… the market-research isn’t done by corporations, it’s done by the blogosphere, and the Chinese can turn out copies of things at prices that are a tiny fraction of what are possible in the west. (eg: the other day my dad bought a fibre-optic lamp… it had 4 colours that you could switch between, and had it’s own rotating colour-change program. Retailing for $2(NZ). How the fuck do you make that for $2?)

Mind you – how the does the west make enough money to buy anything, if everything can be done cheaper elsewhere?

And the answer to that one I think… comes down to a serious re-think about what we actually need money for. Because we do need it – but… for all sorts of things now, we don’t… and maybe (just maybe) the primacy that we’ve given to fiat-currency, is a mistake. Maybe the whole model is a mistake. Maybe the way we’re managing scarce-resources is wrong. Well, it’s definitely wrong isn’t it? Half of us are fucking dying. That can’t be right.

There’s an interesting concept here – Basic Life Package (blip). If we can make multi-colour fibre-optic lamps for $2, we should be able to make BLiPs (covering the first level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs)

at a price that doesn’t… well, kill us.

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By the way, the reason the old order is being kicked on its side, is that people are fulfilling the higher levels of that pyramid by creating things themselves. There’s a lot of fuss about people distributing other people’s stuff for free… but actually people will more than happily create for free as well… only it’s not really “for free”… it’s just free of money. They’re paid in benefits described in the top 2 levels of that pyramid.

Calling it an “attention” economy, is kindof missing what it’s about – the “attention economy” is an attempt to turn “abundance economy” stuff into fiat currency… into an economy controlled by scarcity. It doesn’t really work – although I think the illusion of it working is what’s funding a lot of progress at the moment. But I think it’s a bubble. I think advertising is a bubble.

To be honest I’ve seen a whole swathe of proposed oil-slick cleaning things… but these look pretty cool… because the do that whole robotic swarming thing.

Only BP has used dispersants so the damage doesn’t “look” as bad, so now all the oil is… everywhere, instead of just on the surface… but still… nice try. Maybe they could be used to clear up the gazillion tons of plastic crap that’s now floating in the North Pacific. You could connect them up with the plastic-recycling things

which takes plastic and turns it into reprap food. That’s the idea anyway. I have a sneaking suspish that the solution to this one isn’t to eat it up, but to enzymatically break it down, using genetically engineered enzymes that go on to devour the entire planet.

Nice idea though. They could take all that dead plastic and turn it into millions of fucking nick-nacks or whatever. Little plastic ducks.

Some people in Bristol have made a robot that eats crap and craps crap.

To what end? I hear you timorously ask.

To what end indeed. No good will come of this. These people are mad. Quite quite mad. You can hear them going mad (just before they’re cut off) right at the very end of this

Elsewhere in the world… someone shoots down a plane (again) with a laser-beam

Someone uses their phone and a load of lego to make a robot to solve a 7x7x7 Rubiks cube

And a transvestite gets chased by a dog round the corner of a castle in England, and then he had sex with it.

We saw that Inception last night – which is about dreams within dreams etc – assuming your dreams look exactly like action movies.

The Robotic Invasion continueth, from small beginnings… it comes. From multiple angles it comes.

Do we know what it’s for yet? Do you know what it is yet? Nope. Not really. A weird revolution that seems to be driven not by necessity, but fantasy – and other people’s fantasies at that.

Dancebots – a little bit cute, a little bit spooky. Who said white guys can’t dance? Well… me basically. Still.

AT-AT day afternoon from Patrick Boivin on Vimeo.

A video of a star-wars walker thing, that’s been made to do all the things that make dogs so annoying.

DIY Drones have a new quadracopter, that looks to me like they’ve gone a bit mainstream – into the zone where the price nose-dives, and they turn up duty-free at Hong Kong Airport, costing next to nothing. Although right now, this one is $400.

Gaui 330X Quadcopter Aerial Video from PhotoShip One on Vimeo.

Self-folding Origami

Everyone is going on about this at the moment.

Security-bot for the extra-specially insecure.

I haven’t gone on about the relationship between toys and weapons for a while – there is a connection though, and it’s becoming more and more entangled. Fantasies of violence, the distancing of the warrior from his victim, the distancing of the public from the wars they fight. Toys, people, people, toys. Nothing is real.

Another thing from Julius Von Bismark, who is a god. Or at least he looks like a god. Or a Druid. A Germanic one.

He’s the one that invented the thing for projecting images into other people’s flash photographs, and made a giant average-emoticon in the sky over Berlin. Brilliant.

Anyway, he’s invented this scrolling doodlebot

(via)

which is pretty cool – because it can make pictures bigger than it is. Really really long ones in other words. The sky is the limit. We have nothing to lose but our imaginations.

The only way you could improve on that is have something that could draw and move about… a bit like a more nimble version of these:

Which would obviously escape from the lab and cover the entire world with graffiti, and you’d wake up with doodles all over your face, a bit like the way you wake up covered in snail-trails when you get drunk and go to sleep outside.

Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot (2006) – Garnet Hertz – High Resolution Video Overview from Garnet Hertz on Vimeo.

via

Is that good? I don’t know… is it? I think it might be the opposite of good? But who knows? It’s 4 years ago. Nothing bad happened did it?

It reminds me of those things off Dune – giant megalomaniacal warbots with human brains – essentially immortal, but not entirely mechanical.

This cockroach thing is basically taking a genius piece of engineering, that we’re probably not going to manage in our life-times – aka: a cocroach, and using it to power a clunky naff-bot. It’s like using an iPhone as a paperweight… but a much bigger paperweight.

Or maybe that’s the wrong way of looking at it – maybe the robot is an extension of the bug’s exoskeleton… I have sortof said it before I think… I think this is the way robotics is going to wind up – not with bug controlled machines, but machine controlled bugs. We can easily (for our intents and purposes) replicate the basic functioning of a cockroach’s software…. the hardware on the other hand… yer dreaming.

This one looks slightly less like it’s dying for a piss than its predecessor

(via)

And looks pretty impressive all things considered.

It does look evil though. A bit. A bit struggly and feebrile, like a scrabster – that slowly, tremblingly picks its way over the rubble to where you’re trapped under some fallen masonry so it can have sex with your leg.

It’s also nowhere near as good at walking as my cat. Still. Early days etc.

Told you so

Little robot that reacts to SMS emoticons… among other things.

Pretty cool – one day someone will figure out something that’s actually useful to do with this – absolutely inevitable… the fact that there’s a camera, microphone, speakers, sense-of-balance etc in these things gives it an incredible amount of scope. I would have thought. A detachable head, as I’ve pointed out before.

There’s a potentially interesting sci-fi angle in cellphones using genetic algorithms to “learn to walk”… not just with a purpose-built bit of hardware, but any bit of hard-ware. A cellphone could take over an electric toothbrush or an electric carving-knife and use it to scuttle across the floor.

There are a bunch of videos about using genetic algorithms to learn to walk… I’ll try to find the Ted one… hang on…

there you go.

I’m not sure if it’s because I’m a paranoid recluse paying for a shockingly drug and booze-addled youth, or that I’ve watched too much TV… but there’s something about robots these days which is filling me with an increasing sense of foreboding.

So here are a load more.

1) Gob Stopper

Which Boing Boing found via Robert Popper – which is a Good Thing, on account of Robert Popper being a genius.

And I know what you’re thinking: “OMG, I wonder if I could use it as some sort of sex toy?”.

In your dreams buddy, in your dreams… In your hellishly fucked up, freudian nightmares, filled with all manner of wackoid, tangential weird-shittery… which for some reason, you seem to actually enjoy.

2) Safari Cam Thing

AKA Beetle-cam. Like a little Wall-E type robot that roams the savanna, befriending the wild animals that EAT IT.

“After obtaining our first photographs of Elephants we were buoyed with optimism and decided to make our second subjects Lions. In hindsight this was a foolish idea; BeetleCam was promptly mauled, and carried off into the bush.”

I’m not sure why I find that funny, but I do.

There are other photies and vids here.

I’m quite keen on this as nano-scale idea though. Tiny Robot Safaris fighting spiders in your back yard etc. You’re never going to win. Not without firearms.

3) Big list of hexapods over here.

I think the one that unnerved me the most here was this wall-climbing one.

More of an “oh shit, what have we done” thing than the usual arachnophobia though. No good will come of this, mark my words. It’s a weapon. It’s a spying machine. That’s all it can do.

4) New Video from the Festo-Plex

For all your fruit-sorting needs. Festo produce loads of cool things – and they always seem to be beautifully designed as well… the sort of things that “the goodies” would be using… if you know what I mean.

Goodies fly planes that look like this:

rather than this:

I don’t know what happened to modern military design. Don’t these people watch movies?

It used to be all about “Our Boys”, flying spitfires or silver Mustangs – beautiful creatures that a population can get behind and support. Now they don’t care. It’s all about frightening people… they’ve dehumanised themselves.

5) Arduino Controlled Delta-bot

I’m of the opinion that this is what Repraps need to be based on – rather than the cartesian thing. Something self-calibrating… so the precision comes from self-checking 1000 times a second. Something that can choose its own tools etc.

6) R2 Going into Space

Although I do wonder if humanoid is the best design really. I mean we’ve evolved to fit a set of environmental conditions – a lot of which are social, so various characteristics are selected for sexually etc… and this set of conditions is almost certain pre-tool. Once we started making tools, we didn’t really need to adapt physically any more.

So to take an animal which is adapted to a simple hunter-gatherer existence, with certain conditions like availability of oxygen, food, water etc – and then transplant that into a heavily mechanised environment, in space… seems to me like an exercise in fulfilling some sort of misguided aesthetic longing. Again, it’s invention imitating sci-fi.

Ok – that’s probably enough for now.

I’ve been down in Wellington for a bit, and I’ve hurt my finger and decided to get into the movie business so um… here’s a load of robots that have turned up recently.

The definition of “robot” seems to have broadened a fair bit since the days of R2D2 – and even he was pushing it a bit… and he looked a bit like a Dalek. Daleks actually had little men inside them. R2D2 had another little R2D2. That’s why he was a robot, while strictly speaking, Daleks weren’t.

Anyway, lets start off with one of my favourite concepts – which is robots that don’t have any apparent use, to the people who made them imagine that maybe they might be useful for search and rescue.

1) Midgital fishbot

From Technovelgy.com

Cool – in a funny sort of way. Makes you appreciate real fish though dunnit. They go like the clappers real ones – and they know where they’re going, by and large.

2) Roombacam 2000

This absolutely had to happen – in fact people (hackers) were already doing this… in fact I can see an unholy (or holy) alliance developing between the Chinese Shanzai lot, and the Western (or global… but right now it feels kindof Western) Maker Community… where the Makers invent things – and do the test-marketing… if it creates a buzz, then the guys who are really good at mass-producing stuff on the uber-cheap, pick up the thread.

But anyway – this absolutely had to happen – because a Roomba isn’t actually FOR vacuuming floors is it. Not really. I don’t know what it is for… but using a Roomba to vacuum floors is like using a cellphone to make telephone calls.

3) Antique Walkybot 2001

I’m the sort of guy where if someone mentions a band, I say “yea, I used to be into their early stuff… they’ve gone a bit commercial now though”.

I was going on about this one last September – sans vid. Mind you, I got it from someone else, who was probably a proper reporter… and who could well have been the botjunkie person to start with. I’m an echo-chamber me.

Still, never mind about that. This ones with the spiderybot legs still give me the creeps. Cool though.

4) Carhacking

Not entirely about robots… but….

More than 100 drivers in Austin, Texas found their cars disabled or the horns wanking out of control, after an intruder ran amok in a web-based vehicle-immobilization system normally used to get the attention of consumers delinquent in their auto payments.

Which is interesting from a whole load of different angles – the least of which is that there are actually remote controlled vehicle-immobilization systems for cars. Eh? Are you taking the piss? DRM for cars? Unbefuckinglievable.

Great for kidnapping though innit… and it also raises the question – “at what point does your car become a type of robot?”, because let’s face it possums, if they’ve DRMed it, it’s not yours.

The other thing of course is that if this is doable to cars, at some point it will be doable to video-enabled Roombas… so while you’re doing whatever it is you do when no one’s watching, the entire internet will be sitting there, eating popcorn, watching you.

Still no worries eh. If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear. Yer fecking weirdo.

5) Natural Language Understanding Quadracopter

So long as you talk like a droid.

If you say something like “WTF are you doing? Arrgghhh… don’t do that!!! WTF!!! STOP!!! NO!!!! ARRRRGGHHHHH!!!” it probably won’t understand you. Or would pretend not to.

6) Fish Condo

You can stack them up and make apartment blocks etc.

Instead of fish, you could put little R2D2s in them. They’d go about their business etc, but would actually be watching your every move and telling the internet if you did anything weird. They’ve got little men inside them you know.

7) And The Artist said “Oh I saw, pretty much what I always see”

Also via Notcot.

8) Ok, it’s not really about robots anymore. Let’s stop pretending.

The Raw Feed was wondering, “What’s this dude doing? Does anyone know the story?”

Well I’d say it’s fairly obvious. He’s made his own sensory deprivation pod to do computer stuff in. Only his screen isn’t big enough to be properly emmersive. See – this is what people want. This is what the Shanzai guys should make – meanwhile Microsoft et al are making these W.A.A.I interfaces because they’re always turning up (for dramatic effect) in Sci Fi movies – and they figure that’s what people want.

It isn’t. Only idiots want computer interfaces where they have to run about the place flapping their arms. It’s a no-brainer. Mind you Wiis seem to be quite popular. I think the human race will devolve into two separate species – one that lives in pods like off The Matrix, but instead of being asleep, they’re lying there playing video games and swapping LOLcat pictures, and the other will be daft bird-like creatures who flap about the place with brains like ping-pong balls, eating millet.

Which will you be? Hmmm? Which will you be?

Because you’re probably already a bit like that now.

9) A robot looking at stuff

It actually looks quite a lot smarter than it is. Machine intelligence is so easy to fake – they just have to look attentive – instead of sitting at the back and yawning and doodling on the desk etc.