GENOMICON

Which is a little baby planelet that takes off by itself and lands (crashes) by itself. To get it to go, you shake it 3 times (I’d have used an “on” switch – although maybe that’s how you calibrate the gyros) and after it lands you can retrieve the photos that the onboard camera takes – you can program the route with a laptop.

Obviously the flight-case costs more than the machine itself. It looks like they make custom-sized ones.

Obviously it needs to be able to beam live video back to the mother-ship… and it would be better to use a little borg-attachment like this

Which is a little camera that you fit behind your ear. It’s called a “looxcie” because all the non-silly-noise names have been taken by domain-name-squatters, which should be banned.

Obviously this camera needs to pipe videos straight to the web so anyone who tries to censor you, gets to do it in front of a live audience, captured for posterity etc. Can eyefi do it? Yes I think it can – eyefi explore… though it would be better to be something connected to your phone so you don’t have to connect to local wifi routers. I think Verizon might be doing something along those lines.

So anyway, back to the swinglet… now that is cheap as chips isn’t it? It’s made out of that rubbery expanded foam stuff… little electric motor… various electronic bits, all of which look as though they’re cannibaliseable out of iPhones. I mean you could actually use your iPhone… if you didn’t mind your Swinglet fucking off with it and never coming back. It’s got a 2km data-link range, and a 20km flying range – once it gets past 2km it’s free. Flight-time 30 mins. Doesn’t say how long it takes to charge… but if you put solar-wafers all over the wings it could just sit in the sun for a couple of days… never come back. Use it’s eye-fi card to hack local routers. Brilliant. It could go off on a little robo-photography holiday on its own. Fuck you. You don’t own me.

(there’s a video at that link, but I don’t know what it is, because if you force me to watch an advertisement before I watch your video, then I don’t watch your video)

Looks like they sell the Swinglet witha a laptop with it as well – on account of needing (or at least using) specialised hardware, ie: a radio peripheral I should think. It looks to me like this is a desperate attempt to make something very valuable, but made out of really cheap stuff, very expensive… although they don’t actually say how much it is… preferring to weigh your soul / wallet with sensors under the “welcome” mat in the doorway.

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.