GENOMICON

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Would be cool with 3D glasses, and projected onto the surface of a sphere that you stand in the centre of.

For navigating space.

Hadn’t seen one of those before – although there’s obviously about a million and one videos on youtube. I chose this one

because the voice in the background is… um… Slovenian? Something like that – and hearing languages I don’t understand makes me feel… calm.

Anyway, it’s high time you learned Slovene, admit it. Everyone in Europe is now multi-lingual, except The English, who can barely read or write.

Anyway, the reason I find this thing interesting is because it’s the opposite of a WAAI – a Waving Arms Around Interface – as popularised by various movies with Tom (ferret-face) Cruise in them, and which are a completely stupid idea. If you’re going to be pratting about on the internet all day and all night, you want an interface which requires the absolute minimum of movement. I mean people get RSI from mice FFS – so mice are obviously too much work.

Another attempt at “interface without having to actually move that much” is this blowing one:

Where you can control your cursor (or whatever) by blowing it around the screen. You might be able to suck it as well. I don’t know. This obviously goes off the scale of the daftometer… but for one small detail…

… the guy is using it in a bar. Can you use it as a breathaliser? An anti-social-networking-on-the-web-when-drunk breathaliser? Because if you can, then they should come as standard on all (my) laptops.

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It’s also occurred to me that the first one could also be done using an iPhone balanced on your knee, or the arm of your chair or whatever. I actually do think this is a problem looking for a solution (unlike WAAI) because at the moment, 3D navigation – particularly for RC planes, sucks. Ideally you need something that’s basically a little model of the plane that you hold onto, and manipulate like some sort of aeronautical voodoo doll… to do whatever it is that you want the real plane to do.

A bit like those iPhone apps where you stick little cardboard wings onto your phone and they make a noise like a Messerschmitt

That someone went “meh” about in the comments – so remember, every “meh” is pregnant with its opposite. It’s like Edward de Bono (who doesn’t know what he’s talking about) puzzles where someone gives you a paper clip and you have to think of as many uses for it as you possibly can.

Nothing is ever 100% stupid. Nothing.

Interesting use of RFID to control a stereo

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In which roteno.com creates the idea of Imperceptible Computing, in which all the smarts of a system are hidden within it – including circuits, interface etc etc.

Taking this a step (quite a big step) further… to an inevitable conclusion… an entire environment which is a meshed network of RFIDs (and/or Zigbys etc) and sensors that is aware of your presence and every movement etc, 24/7. A Guardian Angel of sorts – but best make sure it’s YOUR guardian angel.

In the meantime (and straying into areas untroubled by the angelic footfall) is a variant on one of my favourite concepts – iPhone as interface to everything:

In which shouty blowhards pretending (or is it real) to be in a 90s Jackass type tv program for Fire-Nerds, provide simple, straightforward instructions for how to make a remote controlled car-bomb of the kind that would normally have required someone (probably quite young and gullible) with a beard to commit suicide. Think of the lives it would save. Kindof.

Still, what do I know. The video’s been there for 5 days and has been viewed about 170,000 times. It has, as the saying goes, gone viral. They also provide a video for sound-triggered fireworks. What could possibly go wrong?

Now I hate interfaces where you have to wave your arms around as much as the next man. Apart from Tom Cruise (who is a wee bit odd if you ask me) but this is pretty cool

I know I said I was going to do these on Saturday, and it’s now Wednesday but in this, as with all else, I am an innovator, so you can stop your moaning etc.

1) Popup Lego Zen Buddhist Temple

2) Waving-Arms-Around-Interface actually doing something useful:

Cool. Maybe in the future someone will make one of these interfaces that allows you to see in real-time the damage that the interface itself is doing to your spinal column

3) More Winger Insanity

A game for people so disconnected with reality that they can no longer count the fingers they hold up in front of their own faces… fantasizing about defeating Obama in an imaginary coup.

Utterly unbelievable. I mean I know I keep going on about the reality-disconnect that goes hand in hand with weapons, but seriously… courtesy of the massive right-wing-propaganda-machine (this disease inspired by The Powell Memo), it’s looking very much to me like America is becoming too stupid to survive.

It has become impossible for rational public discourse… “Debate” doesn’t happen. What happens is Rationality permanently on the defensive against a well-funded, relentless barrage of well crafted sound-bites… which are more often than not, pathetically flimsy lies – but there’s so many of the fucking things that it seriously interferes with the possibility of a normal conversation happening.

It’s not freedom of speech, it’s conversational jerrymandering.

And it’s not the people – it’s the media (and some of the people)… witness the recent gay-pride rally in Washington, completely ignored by the media while a similar-sized right-wing nutter protest received blanket coverage. The corporate media are in love with this shit… well, I guess they would be. They help fund it.

I saw some video recently where Janeane Garofalo was going on about racism… and how the media are always nudging things towards violence (it was the one where she asked what would have happened if black people had turned up armed to a McCain rally)… tried to find the video again. Couldn’t… but have you seen the comments on Youtube whenever there’s a video of Janeane Garofalo? You people are fucked. Seriously. Get a divorce before you hurt someone.

This is the inevitable byproduct of the emotionally manipulative propaganda techniques that are being employed… using “values” and framing to bypass critical thinking and appeal straight to some sort of xenophobic sub-brain. This really, seriously needs to stop. It’s inciting violence… and over what? For what? Who’s benefiting?

Enough. I’m sick of it. We’re all sick of it.

4) Video of Nanosolar’s new European plant

You’ll need to click the image to go to the site with the video… because it’s indulging in that archetype of web-fuckwittery known as “autoplay” and danged if I can get it to stop

Cool. Mind you, I’ve worked in a lot of factories… and they always had people working in them – allowing said people to buy the things that the factory produced. If they wanted. I guess you could make your manufacturing process soooo efficient that people on unemployment benefit could afford to buy your stuff.

5) Cool DIY LED Fob watch

6) Cool collection of Stirling Engines

Only the owner of the videos appears to have deleted them… and put them back, but not updated his site.

This all came from the rather fab Steampunk collection on Wired

7) Myna – a new online Sound Editor from Aviary

Aviary being a bit of a power-house of creative online applications. One to watch I think… they’ve had some pretty good ideas in the past.

8 ) Treasure-hunting crow-trainer open-sourced

This turned up a while back on TED…and I probably went on about it before… but here it is again

This has got to be useful for something more useful than collecting lost change. How about getting plastic bags out of trees or finding your keys or something. Picking up the million-square miles of rubbish that is now floating in the Pacific Ocean.

9) Misc Robotery:

a) robot that feels
b) silent robot muscles
c) and two more robots that might be useful for “Search and Rescue”, which is what people say when they’ve made a cool toy but can’t think of anything to use it for… or don’t want to admit that the only thing it’s good for is helping the military suck money out of the economy, and taking it out into the desert and burning it by the bale.

Which isn’t to say it’s not a really cool toy, because it is.

But this obsession with search and rescue? What must the Martians think? “Oh yes, a technologically advanced civilisation… except that so much of their technology seems to be for finding themselves when they get lost. Yes they do have GPS. Whatever. Nice place to go on holiday, but I wouldn’t want to live there”.

10) A nice juxtaposition on how far we’ve evolved in terms of transport ideas

I don’t know what it with things where you sit inside the wheel itself. There seems to be a lot of them about, and I can’t think of any reason why they might be a good idea other than they look kindof cool. Kindof.

This is quite neat, even though I think WAAIs are a physiotherapists dream come true.

(from : via)

The interface is neat… but that’s largely a programming problem. The killer-app behind this is the hardware that’s used to control every electrical device in the room

(from altnytterfarlig.tumblr.com)

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“Iraqi Freedom Minute”?

Really? Is that really what you honestly believe?

Is it possible for an empire to stupid itself to death?

Unbefuckinglievable. Still, there it is. The touch-screen interface is much nicer and more together looking than the 1980s style version that the real “Iraqi Freedom Fighters” use, safe in their offices in Nevada.

It’d be like shooting thunderbolts out of your fingers. Everything’s a simulation. Nothing is real.

WAAI – Waving Arms About Interface, as popularized by Minority Report with Tom Cruise (who is a bit ferrety if you ask me) was taken to a whole new level before Minority Report even came out by this little gem from Disclosure, starring Michael Douglas (who’s also fairly annoying).

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Someone has <airquotes>imagineered</airquotes> the most hasslesome file-retrieval system in the (reasonable) universe – where you don’t only have to wave your arms around, you actually have to walk about, just like you’d have to do if computers weren’t actually invented and everything was still on bits of paper, and you were a filing clerk from the 70s.

There should be a word for this – Morphological-Mud-Stickery… where the design of a new system is based upon the design of the system it replaced… like designing a vacuum cleaner so it looks a bit like a broom… or a horseless carriage, so it looks like a horseless carriage.

WAAI will be good for games (in fact it already is). Wandering about inside a virtual environment will be great for games. Anything else? Forget it. Pain in the arse.

Brilliant

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.

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

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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.