Where some MIT people have sortof made or sortof not made this thing where these little microcopters arrange themselves in a grid which can then be controlled like pixels in a 3D holographic display
with a curiously 1970s design aesthetic.
I’m not sure about this one – the little helicopters look cool but any video that starts with the word “Imagine” just makes me feel used and manipulated. Unclean etc. Like I should go out and mow the lawns to get my sense of self back. I am not a Mac.
So there’s a solution looking for a problem if ever I saw one. Cool thing to do though. They’re like self-motile throwies – inevitable in some ways. It’s utterly fucking inevitable that they get used in some uber-prat billion dollar “rock” concert – probably U2… and there’s a gust of wind which results in a massive micro-copter crash… and they go careening into the crowd and get tangled up in the back-combed hair of the hapless and sheep-like fans – who stampede – for the exits, for the fire-escapes, for the stage… in all directions at once. Carnage. Utter carnage… and 15 minutes later, all that’s left is the aftermath of a medieval battle-scene with torn limbs and broken bodies, still eerily illuminated by thousands of humming, hovering LEDs.
A convergence of my favourite solution looking for a problem, and the medium where sooner or later, everything worth reproducing, gets reproduced. Legoification is like a coming of age ritual.
Anyway here it is. I quite like this because it uses some sort of distance sensor rather than a giro… and if you can get a lego motor-sensor loop fast enough to keep an unbalanceable thing balanced, then you can probably use something similar on a reprap to get around having to to have ultra-high-tolerance engineering on every part. The machine can just sort of “feel its way”.
Or something. On that note, here’s another solution looking for a problem (another favourite of mine) a hexapod… doing what hexapods always do, which is pushups, then a spot of very slow walking… but this one’s different because it’s used genetic algorithms to teach itself to walk… and the good thing about that, is that you can use the same software on different hardware configurations.
And finally… I saw recently that the 2nd Life guy’s new thing is to create a… “a sentient artificial intelligence which only exists in a virtual world, capable of thinking and dreaming.”
LOL – no chance.
Ok – I’ll refine that… there’s no chance of telling the difference between the real thing and a simulacra…
… but a difference that makes no difference is not a difference* right?
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* that’s a classical allusion – 10 points to any sci-fi fan who can tell me where it’s from.
In case I haven’t mentioned it, “Search and Rescue” is a sub-category of “Solutions Looking for Problems“… I mean sure, sometimes people do get lost, or get into dangerous situations, but it’s pretty rare – and certainly not as big a problem as car-crashes or landmines or people just being piss-wits generally.
So we’re hell-bent on building this giant, planet-scale monster… a human machine symbiote… and we don’t know why, or even what exactly it is that we’re building… but we wants it… we wants it…
So we keep making these things, and when we don’t know what they’re for… some little voice (like an angel on the shoulder) pipes up “search and rescue?”.
So anyway:
1) Fly eyes
an excuse to have a really cool photo of a fly-eye… although they don’t look so cool when you get them in perspective do they? No. They’re bastards.
Anyway, the attached article is about using some uber-simplified algorithm for controlling robotic flight… means you can get away with using a much smaller, lighter brain to fly something than we currently do… though it is quite remarkable that a fly is clever enough to work this out, because they’re not generally regarded as being the sharpest tools in the box. I’ve got a feeling that some species of AI is the only sane way of getting computers to control really complex robots… and it has the potential for using the same bit of software to control any device. Mind you, the learning curve could be a bit scary.
So um… don’t get me wrong – what this article is talking about is actually an extremely clever and quite remarkable development. But um… what’s it for? well…. it could be useful for search and rescue. Obviously.
Ok – this one pushing the dial of the daftometer well into the red zone – people doing Shakespeare with robots (and I suspect that by “robots” we actually mean remote-controlled toys).
Now I’ve got nothing against Shakespeare. I’ve heard that some of the stuff he wrote was actually quite good, for the time etc. A bit talky maybe, but he did apparently have a certain literary flair… unfortunately his work does seem to have this… thing… where people use it to lend credibility to daft experiments.
The gist of the article though is that (and this should come as no surprise to anyone) people do seem to be pre-disposed to anthropomorphising these things… and this could be useful for… err… well, search and rescue.
They even invoke the Godwin’s Law variant ‘9/11′ – which has long since stopped being whatever it should have been… and instead has become this cynical touch-stone for every dubious-(and generally authoritarian)-cause-championing wanker in the entire universe. To be fair though, the person name-checked in the article did have robots at the World Trade Center… so um… maybe there is merit in getting them to do a bit of Shakespeare etc. Can’t hurt can it? Never did me any harm.
What is it with these people? How much did they spend developing that? Hadn’t they noticed that Segways haven’t exactly taken off? Just because you get pretty girls to demo the things doesn’t mean you won’t feel like a total prannet trundling down the street on your $5000 (or whatever it is) “walking aid”. It’s like wearing a hat with a great big arrow pointing downward and a sign saying “Look at me everyone. I want attention”
I used to know this guy who would visit the big art galleries in London… pretend to be disabled, so he could trundle about in one of the wheelchairs they provided. Now that’s a good idea… and less embarrassing than tootling about the place on a mobile-shooting-stick that causes people to forget about the paintings and look at you instead.
Tell you what Honda: give me a couple of million dollars and I will develop a machine for you that will change the world, and that loads of people will actually buy.
Because we all know that the first thing… THE very first thing, that anyone is going to do when they invent an antigravity device, is they’ll solve that problem that has weighed so heavy upon the human soul for so very, very long… they’ll solve the problem of getting up and going to the fucking kitchen to get a glass of water.
Although to be fair… if you’re the sort of person who’s so lazy they’ll actually go out and buy a flying tennis ball (or better still, get a flying basket ball to go out and buy one for you) so you don’t have to get up off the sofa to get a drink of water… well you’re probably not that into “water” are you? No, you prefer to drink coca-cola with an extra couple of table-spoons of sugar in it, or pure lard, straight from the mini-vat etc.
Still. Never mind. It’s the Electrolux Designlab Competition for inventing inventions that will never in a million years actually get invented. Oooh shiney etc. Products.
That said, I quite like this:
It’s a little robot made out of an upturned coke bottle, that carries a plant around until it finds a suitable spot, and then (presumably) it plants it. I’m rather enamoured of the concept that in the future, every tree will have its own gardener… and this goes some way towards that… or at least it would, if it weren’t just a cartoony drawing. Maybe I should make one myself. I’ve got an upturned coke bottle somewhere. The walky bit with the massive eye could be tricky, but what the hey. You’ve got to start somewhere.
So um… don’t get me wrong. I’m all for designers dreaming dreams etc… what really gets up my goat though is the way this stuff is replicated across the web as though it’s actually real. It’s link-bait… let me see…
… let me see… let me see if my favourite eco-bullshit-artist site has anything on it… www.ecofriend.org, the spiritual home of “made up stuff that might be a bit green”…
… oh yes, there it is… momentarily dipping its toe into the waters of uncertainty with “[designer] has tried to make”… (italics mine) but from then on in, it’s all present-tense as though this thing actually exists, and as though the energy required to make a ball fly around collecting raindrops is somehow less eco-angry than simply leaving a fucking cup out in the rain.
A quater-sphere projector screen for playing games in.
There’s a nice poetic juxtoposition between inventing a zorb who’s job it is to wander about… “watching” people in actual reality, and inventing another one who’s purpose is for people to sit inside their own little reality, and never see beyond the skin at all.
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edit : further to the rant at the top, check out this video from Microsoft
From Craftzine – lots of conducting wires sewn close together that behave in different ways according to how they’re touched.
One of the ways that living organisms differ from machines is that we’re covered by a sensor-layer. The things above don’t work by tweaking hairs (unless you count whiskers) and even if they do, it’s not due to bare electrical wires (which will have trouble with water), but this (I think) is a step in the direction of increasing robotic tactile sensory resolution. I think what we’ll eventually wind up with is some sort of web of piezo cells embedded in a gel.
Speaking of which, and going directly into NSFW-Land, check this out:
Solving problems you never knew you had. Their site has all manner of remarkable gadgetry, the bulk of which seems to be use-once, and about $20 US a go, so you wouldn’t want to bungle it etc. As you occasionally do.
None of which is really my cup of tea. Apart possibly for the table, though it seems to be going to quite extreme lengths to solve a problem I don’t actually have… or at least don’t really understand.
Which is so cool, I can hardly stand it, even though it is from 2006. Was designed by an Australian apparently – there’s a PDF (which is the document format of the devil) of the construction etc on his site.
From Opera etc, who are one of my browsers of choice. They’re the Ferrari of browsers.
Face gestures are a variant on the WAAI (waving arms around interface) as popularised by Minority Report, with Tom Cruise in it, who is a bit of a ferret-face.
I wonder if you could use this for some sort of sex thing. I wonder what would happen if you sneezed. I expect it would have a conniption. So many things could go wrong. What if you yawned etc? Would your entire computer go into hibernation mode? Our faces are (on occasion) a bit ungovernable. I know mine is. I wonder what it would make of the cat.
And the notion, that no matter how crazy an idea is, someone, somewhere will have a perspective on it that makes it incredibly useful.
So. Spherical robots – and I must admit, there’s a bit of a fixation for them out there in the world-of-unreality-fighting-towards-the-surface… and I don’t know why, because there’s a major problem with robots that don’t have arms: they can’t solder. Hopeless. Still, there does seem to be this fixation – I think basically because we like the shape – there’s something about a sphere that just seems “right”, or complete, even though it’s not, because it can’t solder or tie shoelaces etc. Still never mind.
Spybots – Amphibious spybots – not disimilar in intent to Rover off The Prisoner – which was basically a massive floppy balloon that chased people and then caused them to black out.
Or those tiny exploding balls off Aeon Flux
But never mind about that – back to the inflatable ones (and anything inflatable is basically a good idea waiting to happen)… Balloon Windmills!
