GENOMICON

This post is a loose collation of things that have turned up recently to do with the encroaching sensor-revolution.

Someone, somewhere else has pointed out that we’ve had successive waves of tech revolution, eg:

– the Computer Revolution brought about by cheap microprocessors
– the Communications Revolution brought about by cheap laser-switching.
– the Robotics Revolution brought about by cheap sensors

The last one is just beginning… the others have been going for a while, but are not anywhere near played out yet.

I think maybe there’s a bit of a misunderstanding about what robotics actually is – at this moment “robot” seems to include absolutely anything automated, and anything remotely controlled as well. Most washing machines are robots by the very loose definition that seems to pass in the blogosphere. In another corner is anything anthropomorphic, and in another, the more traditional “single-arm” robots that have been used in manufacturing for decades.

I think though that the dominant robotic form won’t resemble “droids” so much as “internet-leakage”… the much heralded “internet of things”. The internet is escaping… it’s getting out of the box… the boxes, and it’s ingesting and assimilating anything that uses electricity. We are right at the very very beginning of this… but it’s coming. I think that the robotics revolution is going to have a distinctly Web 2.0 flavour to it – and the dominant form is not going to be a droid or a manufacturing arm, but (like the internet itself) a human/machine hybrid.

Anyway, to that end:

1) Open Source Home Monitoring/Automation.

Home automation/monitoring is going to be huge. It’s going to be… defacto… default. I’ve gone on about this before, and (still) to the best of my knowledge, I don’t think it’s being done properly… and I think maybe it won’t every be… because it will always be evolving – so it needs to be a platform, much the same as the internet itself. The same way that there are huge numbers of web-developers, there should be huge numbers of home-app developers.

And this is where it starts. This is the physical compliment to Pachube.com

2) Siri has escaped – so that’s good news, I suppose – I don’t think Siri is a proper AI though. There are also alternatives to Siri… but I don’t think they are proper AIs either. By proper AI, I mean something that gets smarter… rather than something that is merely smart.

On the subject of Siri though – here it is being used to control a thermostat

Or to be more precise, a demo of the Siri proxy. This is not quite the same thing as the very pretty new “smart” thermostat, that learns from people’s behaviour…

This is what I mean about “getting it right”… the UI of this dial thing gets it right I think. The Semi-AI aspect of it is interesting – if it is linked to the brain-power of the web.

3) Little baby computerlet that can plug into anything

Looks like a thumb-drive, but has connectivity gear (wifi, bluetooth) built into it. Plug it into any screen, use a bluetooth keyboard and you’ve got a computer. It’s quad-core as well – so it’s got a bit of clout (for the moment). I think sometime soon the internet is going to eat broadcast television – ie: the box in the corner is going to get it’s info from the web, rather than broadcasters… this is going to make a huge different to the balance of power – which is probably no bad thing, because right now, the 4th Estate are not doing their jobs.

4) Body Monitoring… has a new poster-child,

Jawbone – a thing that measures… various things, coupled with software that measures various other things – which sounds like a bit of a chore to be honest, but if this can help people sleep better, then it’s going to sell by the truckload. I’d buy one.

This is another thing we’re going see a lot of – and god knows we (victims of first-world problems) need it.

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I have a feeling that the essence of the Monitor/Control is the feedback loop… and that feedback loops might deliver results greater than the sums of their parts. Just a suspicion. I think this is the essence of consciousness – the feedback loop. Just a suspicion.

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.

Interactive Puppet Prototype with Xbox Kinect from Theo Watson on Vimeo.

I think Kinect is a new game or something from Microsoft – something to do with retards – I don’t really understand it – but then I didn’t understand Wii either, or guitar-hero, or those video games that tiny Japanese people dance on. I understand Space-Invaders. Space Invaders understand me. And we hate each other.

Anyway the Kinect hacks absolutely fucking rock – what it’s being used for (as far as I can tell) is 3D edge-recognition…

(from)

Engaget have started compiling a list of them

This one where they’ve fused it onto a roomba is pretty neat – reminds me of the Swedish roomba hack from earlier this year, where the roomba cruised around the room indexing your stuff so you could google it later, when you can’t fucking find stuff because someone’s taken it and I don’t know why they keep doing that. It’s not in the Roomba. I’ve checked. Jesus.

It took the open-sorcerers 3 hours to release drivers for it – and it’s into the wild.

Being a clairvoyant, I’d expect to see some sort of smart-phone, kinect hybrid at some point – probably as a phone accessory – unless the phones start getting bi-focal abilities… which is probably on the cards, assuming it’s not all tied down with future-damaging patents, which it probably is.

Speaking of which… here’s a video of a microcopter

MikroKopter – Version 0.80 from Holger Buss on Vimeo.

with a couple of fairly vital enhancements in the shape of “free-style-mode” and the camera stabilising thing… which is used here,

Hive Swimwear – Aerobot.com.au from Simon Jardine on Vimeo.

taking videos of bikini-wearing models, who are doing what bikini-wearing models do best, which is hang out at the beach.

In addition to that is a 3D printed quadracopter.

Mostly consisting of vitamin parts, granted, but there is this growing tendency for hardware problems to become software problems – and software is an vibrant and insane pscycho-ecosystem of evolution. It’s like the amazon on weird fast drugs – all the drugs that probably grow in the amazon that it deliberately takes to make it weirder and faster than it already was. Software is the only ecosystem I know of that is consciously speeding itself up.

Anyway, I was talking to Josh the other day (or at him. He didn’t reply), and had this minor vision of an internet where devices could communicate via anything that vibrations could travel through – like tapping on pipes. They could lip-read Hal-like across the room. They could flash LEDs at each other, or ping each other with radio-waves etc etc… for international speed, obviously the fastest way would still be centrally owned (and controlled by scarcity-head) pipelines… but the internet of things could well be a massive, ever-adapting mesh network that absolutely no one could censor or control – which is vital I think, the work-ethic of evil being what it is. The internet is too important for it to be controlled by anything inherently disposed towards dishonesty as governments or corporations.

And further to that… really cheap wifi-routing robots – probably microcopters, that charge up in the sun, the fly off to the point of minimum coverage, while still being part of a link… avoiding each other like electrons, or strangers sitting next to each other on the bus.

This kinect thing possibly takes that idea further – robots that can do what google-street-view does but in real-time. Would we want that? Christ no. We could do it though – that thing I was on about earlier about some Australian security firm making a real-time 3D model of a dock or something – that you could virtually fly-through, just got a whole lot closer. War and tourism. And games. War and tourism becoming even more gamelike than they already are.

It would be fantastic for autonomous bio-monitoring (which actually is a good idea). A while back someone at TED talked about doing this with cellphones – but spacially aware cheapo-copters might do it better – and if they were mesh-networked, it would be like The Universal mind acquiring a sensory organ not a million miles away from a skin – a planet-wide sense of touch.

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Next Week: Robot on Robot predation. It started with the greed-heads trying to control the mesh, but wound up biting their arses all the way back to the Pleistocene.

Creeping through the empty cells.

Machine intelligence.

Ok, this post is about a couple of my fav subjects – and right now I’m so fucked that I’ve no idea what direction it will go in. I’m fucked because for weeks now… for years, I’ve been staying awake until I literally pass out, hooked into the machine. My name is Nick Taylor and I am an Infoholic.

The fav subjects are:

1) Machine intelligence that can “inhabit” and learn how to control any hardware.

2) The human machine symbiote

And this is a scattering of stuff to do with that.

1)

A dorkbot fires arrows at a target.

They’ve dressed it up like one of the Village People and I bet it runs like a girl… however… it is using AI, and it learned how to hit the target in 8 goes… which it will (unless I’m much mistook) do perfectly from now on. It’s a machine learning to use its hardware… growing into a new configuration, learning new skills.

2) “Why the Stuxnet worm is like nothing seen before”

“Stuxnet is the first worm of its type capable of attacking critical infrastructure like power stations and electricity grids: those in the know have been expecting it for years.”

“The Stuxnet worm is different. It is the first piece of malware so far able to break into the types of computer that control machinery at the heart of industry, allowing an attacker to assume control of critical systems like pumps, motors, alarms and valves in an industrial plant. In the worst case scenarios, safety systems could be switched off at a nuclear power plant; fresh water contaminated with effluent at a sewage treatment plant, or the valves in an oil pipeline opened, contaminating the land or sea.”

This is causing a fuss because it’s been attacking Iranian nuke program for the last couple of weeks.

The way this worm is working isn’t raw machine intelligence – it’s guided by (or working alongside) human intelligence.

3.a) The internet in New Zealand is a fucking disgrace.

It’s so slow I can hardly believe it – it has capped data usage. At my brother’s place, if you go over a certain number (like 2) gigabytes, it “eases you back” to a fucking sub-dial-up speed… “easing you back” being what it says in the company literature – which makes me want to go round to see the CEOs of that company and smash them in the face with a fucking machete. I’ve got one you know. I’ve got a machete. Don’t push your luck.

And NZ is slow in general… think of all those millions of wasted hours of kiwi time. Lifetimes. It’s genocidal. It’s a genocidal waste of time.

We need more. Faster. I don’t see an end to it.

3.b) The Empire Strikes Back.

This has been an Empire Strikes year. All over the planet governements (colluding with psychopathically greedy corporations) are trying to impose censorship… “controls” on the internet. Sorry, we don’t need fucking controls, you do. In the last 10 years we’ve had an uncontrolled internet and it’s been great – there have been no “terrible scary disasters” caused by a totally uncontrolled internet – and the disasters that have happened have all been caused by governments colluding with psychopathically greedy corporations.

We don’t need to be controlled, you do.

But… this has been an Empire Strikes Back year, and if one thing has become quite clear, we can’t trust governments colluding with psychopathically greedy corporations to provide our information infrastructure. We need to take the web away from the telcoes and do it ourselves.

The internet absolutely HAS to be gatekeeper-free.

3.c) And I’ll tell you another thing – the radio here is rubbish as well. I imagine it’s pretty rubbish everwhere, but here it’s worse. I only listen to it in my car, where I’m cut off from the internet, and I get so bored I feel like I’m going to die. So I turn on the radio – there are only about 4 channels – and one of them seems to only play American anti-evolution tapes. Maybe my radio is fucked… but it would have to be very very very very fucked indeed to play American anti-evolution tapes. It would have to have devolved.

So.

Apparently wifi is junk spectrum. Apparently TV and radio have hogged all the proper spectrum, and wifi grows in the cracks. Bruce Sterling (who is a god) mentions it here..

Recently though… the FCC in the US have opened up empty broadcast spectrum for “super-wifi”.

WTF? It should ALL be opened up for super-wifi. Have you seen broadcast TV? Fucking game shows and infomercials and whatnot? It’s drek. It doesn’t deserve to live. It’s a fucking rubbish-tip… a wall so covered in fly-posters that they’re the only thing holding it up, and they’re starting to fall away revealing rotten timber and long dead spider-webs underneath. This is what broadcast TV looks like

Except that it’s wearing a tiarra that it’s found in a dumpster somewhere and it still thinks its queen. It’s not. It’s finished. The only people who care are sub-literates, and the rest of us looking on in a sort of kitch, post-ironic horror.

The broadcast era is so stupid I can hardly believe it.

So anyway, I was thinking about this as I was driving around the other day, listening to the almost-beyond-satire moronitude that was on the radio (have you heard them? DJs?) and I kindof got this vision of an internet that used any and every conduit for communication that it could… it could knock on pipes if it needed to. Send vibrations down electrical wires, over airwaves, down fibre-optics… wherever there’s a vibration, a signal could be piggy backed onto it.

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The machine is learning to use whatever hardware happens to be at hand… and “the machine” is actually a human-machine symbiote. It’s already happening. This is the future. This is now. A massive symbiotic intelligence that inhabits whatever hardware (or wetware) that it finds… grows into it.

We’ve always done this… with books and farms and so on… but now we’re starting to get really good at it. Like water; like light. Into every cell.

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postscript

You know how people (even Clay Shirkey (who is a god)) bewail the fact that we’re creating document formats that will be in accessible in the future. Do you still have any Word 2.0 documents lying about? I used to work for this law firm in London… and I KNOW they do. Remember windows 3.1? There were a couple of years before Windows 95 where… what Wordproccessor were people using… Wordstar? Supercalc?

There are theoretically oceans of information that will become in accessible because they’re locked into proprietary formats.

I don’t think this will be a problem… I think this is seriously underestimating the power of the human-machine symbiote… opening old documents will simply be a matter of getting the relevant Open-Office/Firefox plugin. It will only be a problem if anally retentive lawyers working for psychopathically greedy corporations try to make it illegal to reverse-engineer their codecs. Proprietary software is the problem… you really get a feel for this when you start using linux on the desktop. You get that programmer’s sense, that everything you have been doing has been based on a serious legacy error… an architectural error. Proprietary software is an architectural error. “Intellectual Property” is an architectural error – which is being swept away by a tsunami of… us.

So in case you’re wondering, the human-machine symbiote is open-source. It just is.

I now no longer know how many digital cameras I have.

I think it’s 9: 2 phones, 3 laptops, one aux, DSLR, point-and-click, cheapy-tiny.

I’m thinking about buying one of those sanyo underwater ones, and another EOS 550. I’m making a film about someone making a film. That means you need more than one camera. Simple maths. Simple maths.

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So the war of eyes continues apace. The Love Police guys actually did get arrested (twice) in Canada during the Renta-Police-State that was the G20

The spirit of the age – police telling you that they’re allowed to film things, and you’re not.

So what does the Universal Panopticon need next.

Um…. 360 degree lenses that publish straight to the web?

Cool. Reminds me of The Eye of HAL – though appropriately enough it’s a beautiful blue. And has skiers in it. You can sort out the image in software and make it horizontal.

The quality is a bit el-cheapo because it’s a little hand-held thing… which Sony have called a “Bloggie”…

… which is not what I would have called it. I would have called it a “frabble” or a “strogshite” or a “grimplet” something like that… because every single word has been baggsed by people wanting to make new products… so we’re forced to stagger about the place making ridiculous noises like psychedelic cavemen. I was looking for wireframing apps earlier… “Gliffy”, “Omnigraffle”, “Cacoo”, “Lumzy”. I shit you not. Forget about peak-oil, we’ve hit peak-syllable-combinations. Everyone’s talking shit.

Still – 360 degree lenses… a way to go perhaps. There are various offerings from Olympus etc, and I think I was going on about a home-made variant earlier. Or maybe not. Whatever… maybe these are stuck permanently in novelty land… although, although… the clueless gadget-bot-bloggers do claim that the lens can be used in reverse – and can project onto all the walls and ceiling of a room at once… which would be cool because you could make movie tents – and sit right inside whatever scene you were supposedly looking at… like a womb with violence projected onto the walls.

That’s the world we’re making for ourselves.

Publishing straight to the web… eye-fi cards. and Qik. Easy.

This is how camera lenses are made btw.

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Still, never mind about that – the evil empire needs to have a go as well… article here about a town in Mexico that has set up eye-scanners everywhere – that can retinal scan one person a second without them having to slow down or even know about it.

I don’t get these people – how could you invent something like that and not imagine in your wildest dreams that it wouldn’t be used for something evil? What’s the matter with these fucking people. The guard-economy is a disease.

But never mind about that either

Some mental art… that reminds me a bit of universal panoptica

from Justine Khamara who is from Australia, and who’s name sounds a bit like Camera, so that’s brought us full circle then.

As you were.

This is fairly phenomenal

It’s this guy who appears to have single-handedly created about 1400 educational videos – university level. Check out the list on that page… that’s utterly incredible. He’s quite good at teaching as well by the look of it – they’re understandable. If I had ten divisions of such men our troubles here would be over very quickly.

I’ve been thinking about sky libraries quite a lot recently – because that (among other things) is what the web is. It’s a Giant Library In The Sky.

And you know what the thing about libraries is? They’re a basic human right. They’re a cornerstone of civilisation… all information available to all people all of the time, is a basic human right. If you are a publisher, you don’t get to choose what goes into a library. Please… fuck off. That is not your decision – the ethos/sanctity of libraries is more important than the business/$$$ of publishers. Sorry, you’ll just have to find some other way to make money – like the rest of us have had to.

Which leaves us with some fairly tangly questions to answer – to do with where privacy starts, and libararyhood… takes over. Every human on earth has a god-given right to be able to access all information as soon as it is published. Just like they would if it was a bricks-and-mortar library. Once information is in the wild, it no longer belongs to anyone… not logically or morally. The law is retarded, and retarding – and held in utter contempt by everyone under the age of 25, and a fair few over. You (Douglas Rushkoff) may think you have a right to “own” what you publish… rather than (as you say) just “giving” it to the hive-mind… nice try, but that is not the environment you live in. Those are not the environmental conditions – and you can’t fight it without pouring a ton of money and energy into the guard-economy. You can’t fight it without making the web equivalent of the fascism that we saw at the G20 in Toronto this last few weeks

Information is inherently unownable – if you don’t like it, don’t create it… there are a couple of billion people more than happy to take your place. We are witnessing the biggest explosion in expressive-capability in human history, and legacy industries are a hindrance, rather than the sine qua non of creativity. We are here.

So… I think the library frame is a more useful starting point for the morality of information… than that of “theft” – because that clearly doesn’t work.

And when you see what Salman Khan has done – what he’s gifted to the world… how much this information / teaching would mean to someone… who doesn’t have access to education. It goes beyond (the symptom of a chronically broken system that is) philanthropy and is looking a whole lot more… Gandhi-like is too strong… I mean all he has done has given everything he knows to the rest of humanity. He hasn’t broken the British Empire… but still… …If I had ten divisions of such men our troubles here would be over very quickly.

I’m not sure if I’m going to write this actually, because I’m always wrong about software. I always think things are going to be “next big things” and they never are.

So anyway, there’s been a load of fuss about a new startup (I hate startups) called Diaspora, who are a direct pot-shot at Facebook.

Now a load of people have all written about this and said “the interesting thing about it this/that” and “oooh… it’s cursed” and so on, they’re all wrong.

A couple of things about it…

a) it’s an attempt to be an open (in terms of licensing/software), but closed (in terms of privacy) alternative to Facebook

b) instead of it being VC funded, they went via Kickstarter and have raised about 20 times their target… which was 10k. They reckon they can do this in 3 months.

Maybe they can. A Facebook killer WILL have to be that simple. Facebook isn’t going to be sidelined by anything with more features. That said, 3 months work is something I could do in one month. Anything that simple will (inevitably) be based upon an idea that will be easily replicable – and maybe that’s good… because they’re open-sourcing it, and it’s something that needs to happen… it just makes me a bit suspish that it’s taken a bunch of kids to think of this mysterious idea rather than the collected neurochemical biomass of the internet.

I think this is interesting because:

a) it claims (somewhere, somewhere) to automatically detect if someone is on Diaspora – if so it will use that, otherwise it will default to FB.

This is really important – this gets around the critical-mass problem… and the critical-mass problem is a hard problem.

b) the amount and source of the money collected is… The Universal Mind funding it’s own evolution

The Internet was originally built by the military to use networks to create resilience.
The Internet was originally built by the military to use networks to create resilience.
The Internet was originally built by the military to use networks to create resilience.

Which it has done incredibly well, but weirdly/ironically, it’s also created among the biggest centralisations of power in human history. We all zone off into silos – Facebook, Youtube, Flickr etc etc. This is pretty dangerous – and it’s the opposite of what the Internet was originally set up to do.

So… there’s this need for federation. A while back Google launched Wave… which had the potential for you to run it on your own servers – so it could be like a cross between gmail and twitter and who knows what else… but without a single company being in control. Google aren’t about control, they’re about sampling the fire-hose. To push it into the realms of evil, Google aren’t about control, they’re about surveillance. I think this is kindof OK.

But Wave didn’t take off – or hasn’t yet. I thought it would I thought it would change everything. It didn’t.

Opera have had a shot at de-siloing our data… but everything needs to go through their servers. Control again.

Apple? Apple have become the White Knights of Evil. “Freedom from Porn?” Please.

So anyway – what Diaspora is, is a “tick-all-the-boxes” attempt at an alternative to Facebook. I’d like to see it work – although I’d prefer it was run by Scandinavians with massive beards etc than a load of dorky American college kids – people like this guy

rather than these:

I mean I guess those guys are ok – in a funny sort of way they’re “my people” – but they look like a fucking boy-band.

They’re wrong about control as well – this idea that “once you give it to facebook, you’ve lost control… but if you host it yourself, you retain it”. Not true. Once you publish, you’ve lost it. Stop even trying.

This is worth doing though – if it is what I think it is. The one misgiving I have is whether or not you host the only copy of your information. This is bad… irresiliant. Information needs to be “I’m Spartacused”. Otherwise you’re just swapping one big monolyth with your own little personal one.

I think enough time has gone by now to say that the Iranian Twitter revolution didn’t really work… and that’s working on the pretty hefty assumption that it had anything terribly much to do with twitter in the first place… rather than being a couple of days of excitable memospherics from Western commentators with no skin in the game… and a handful of people within Iran using it as a way of getting news out? Maybe?

Still… never mind… we tried to take on a state and we lost. I think it’s fair enough to say that.

We don’t lose them all though – today a legal firm representing polluting oil-traders tried to impose a ban on reporting on parliamentary proceedings… attempting to roll back over 300 years of constitutional law.

And I’d like to make a quick aside… How dare they? I mean seriously… how fucking dare they?

My patience and tolerance for the corporate interference with democracy is really starting to wear thin – and I’m gradually coming around to the 18th Century French POV – which is… we kill them.

Still, maybe no need… the Internet responded, as it’s wont to do over matters of censorship, and in less than a day this issue became the meme-du-jour on Twitter et al, and sensing a fuck-up-that-has-already-happened, they law firm in question backed down. You can see the scale of the fuckup from this word-map from the really rather cool Trendsmap

Yesterday all parties concerned were safely anonymous. Today they’re famous… for trying to fuck over democracy in attempt to remain anonymous. Nice shooting Tex.

I think this one (like the New Zealand black Square thing) can be chalked up as a genuine twitter victory. The Blue Spaghetti Monster flexing its muscly tentacles… because if there’s one thing The Universal Mind really hates, and is really good at fighting, that’s censorship. The Information Must Flow.

I think this is pretty cool:

It’s a camera… or more accurately, a bunch of synchronised cameras, that someone has put together for around $300… and they take 360 degree photos in 8 second bursts… a bit like google street-view… but you can wear it as a hat!

Although you would look like a bit of a twazzock if you did. Still… I really like the idea of fully immersive video… particularly for tourism… instead of actually going to the National Gallery in London, you hire a robot that you control over the web… and with the right kind of headset, it feels a bit like actually being there.

I keep getting this vision of The Internet… The Universal Mind, having so many cameras and sensors going at once, that they cover the entire world (well, big cities at least) in this kind of lucid soup of perception. There are so many cameras at London railway stations right now that it’s practically already there… but anyway, there’s this soup of perception, that with the right software stitching together all the input from the different cameras, you can move through… and see pretty much whatever you’d see if you were walking (or flying) through the place yourself.

I can vaguely remember seeing some comedy or something decades ago (Steve Martin?) where some super-human being or robot from the future or something is handed a book, and asked “have you read it?”

He rifles the pages for a second or two and says “I have now”.

Well it’s here:

The same people that made the scarily fast baseball robots have made a proof-of-concept machine that films a book being rifled at 1000 frames a second, using range-finding and a spot of trig, to rejig the scans so they’re flat.

I tell yer… these machines are going to be bigger, faster, better than we are long before anyone figures out how to make them look human.