October 7, 2009 by sean.

Mobilizy, the company from Salzburg, that brought us one of the world’s first Augmented Reality browsers, Wikitude, just released a major upgrade which crosses that significant line between technology and its effects in the ‘real’ world. Their idea was to build a virtual memorial in remembrance of the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. and the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City. The result will be the ability to point their Android and iPhone application at the place where the World Trade Center once stood and witness a 3D rendering of the Twin Towers, once more. [via TechCrunch]

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September 24, 2009 by sean.

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September 5, 2009 by sean.

Augmented Reality layers data on physical space to enhance our ability to see richness that is there but often hidden. Applications for marketing, gaming, education and entertainment are obvious. But can AR help us improve the planet as well? [via Mariamz]:

We move faster and faster in our cyber age, all knowing, ever-connected, always-on. Augmented reality beckons: the devices in our pockets become more powerful and our ability to connect digitally everywhere excites and exhilarates whilst pushing the odd few over the edge into internet rehab. Yet something else is happening scarily fast, something only the most obstinate dare deny.

Posted in innovation, science, pervasive computing, augmented cognition, mobile computing | 1 Comment »

August 29, 2009 by sean.

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August 18, 2009 by sean.

A virtual hand to guide you to your next purchase…

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July 20, 2009 by sean.

Website of Media Destruction has an excellent article on how new media is changing the role of government with reference to William Gibson’s 2003 op-ed for the NYT:

Orwell’s projections come from the era of information broadcasting, and are not applicable to our own. Had Orwell been able to equip Big Brother with all the tools of artificial intelligence, he would still have been writing from an older paradigm, and the result could never have described our situation today, nor suggested where we might be heading.

That our own biggish brothers, in the name of national security, draw from ever wider and increasingly transparent fields of data may disturb us, but this is something that corporations, nongovernmental organizations and individuals do as well, with greater and greater frequency. The collection and management of information, at every level, is exponentially empowered by the global nature of the system itself, a system unfettered by national boundaries or, increasingly, government control.

It is becoming unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret.

In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner. This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did. (Emphasis mine)

Posted in psychology, social media, scifi, mobile computing | No Comments »

April 1, 2009 by sean.

Posted in fun, mobile computing | No Comments »

February 5, 2009 by sean.

One word: wow! [via wired]:

Pattie Maes of the MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces group demonstrated a wearable computing system that turns any surface into a display screen, becoming a kind of “sixth sense” for the user. The prototype involves an ordinary web cam and battery-powered 3M projector with an attached mirror that are all connected to an internet-enabled mobile phone. The set-up, which costs less than $350, allows the user to project information from the phone onto any surface — walls, the body of another person or even your hand.

Maes showed a video of her student Pranav Mistry who she describes as the genius behind the project. Mistry wore the device on a lanyard around his neck, along with colored Magic Marker caps on four fingers, each one red, blue, green or yellow to allow the camera to distinguish the four fingers. The caps help the camera recognize his hand gestures with software that Mistry created. The gestures can be something as simple as using his fingers and thumbs to create a picture frame that tells the camera to snap a photo, which is saved to his mobile phone. When he gets back to an office, he projects the images onto a wall and begins to size them.

When he encounters someone at a party, the system calls up information about him and projects a cloud of words on the person’s body to help him remember the person or provide more information about him, such as his blog URL, the name of his company, his likes and interests. “This is a more controversial [feature],” Maes said over the audience’s laughter.

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November 27, 2008 by sean.

Voice navigation takes a step forward with the new Google iPhone app:

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November 25, 2008 by sean.

The Bionic Brain slides from the DevLearn 2008 conference are now available on patternhunter.com.

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November 2, 2008 by sean.

David Spark catalogs some great “Twitter moments” that demonstrate some unique advantages of microblogging [via mashable]:

Being a Twitter user (@dspark) for some time now, I like many others have become evangelical about the micro-blogging tool.

I believe what makes Twitter so valuable are these moments of connectivity that simply aren’t possible through any other communications tool. I’ve had these “Twitter moments” and I set out to discover “Twitter moments” from others as well. What all the following stories have in common is a Twitter user had a question or a concern, and someone (or many people) responded. Twitter was the connective tissue that made that moment happen in a time of need.

Speaking of Twitter trends, Bruno Peeters created the following graph…

based on the twitterers I found from Belgium (over 200), my home country. Each Belgian twitterer is indicated as an ellipse, all other twitterers (over 500) are represented as a dot.

There are twitterers from Belgium using their mother tongue (Dutch or French). Others however prefer to use English. These twitterers are far more often connected to other twitterers from all over the world. Interesting enough, there are quite a few twitterers who are not connected at all to other persons on the Twitter platform. If a graph is based on friends, these persons will be missed.

Posted in software, collective intelligence, mobile computing, social networks | No Comments »

October 30, 2008 by sean.

Steven Levy explores Augmented Reality and the Mirror World [via wired]:

[T]he iPhone’s multitouch interface shows the way to harness the Web’s annotations to our physical reality — information about every nail salon, every cul-de-sac, and every person has piled up in what computer scientist David Gelernter calls a “mirror world.” Apple cracked the code that previously made it difficult for mobile users to access this data-rich alternate stratum. (Microsoft hopes to match Apple on this front as its own Surface multitouch technology spreads across tables, plasma screens, and mobile devices.)

We once talked about cyberspace as a distant cosmos, a digital outland that left the physical world behind. An iconic representation of it appeared in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, in which a pizza-delivery guy was the hero of an artificial world known as the Metaverse. This year, breakthroughs like the Wii, Guitar Hero, and the iPhone showed that 21st-century reality is a blend of the digital and physical, with a borderline so blurred it’s not really a line at all.

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October 29, 2008 by sean.

I admit, I HATE [lugging, troubleshooting, paying money for] laptops! Apparently, I am not alone [via the apple blog]:

One point which seems to have a great deal of validity is the idea that travelers are now ditching their desktops in favor of laptops, and using their smartphone to achieve what was previously done on a laptop. While this doesn’t hold true for everyone, it is a trend which seems to be slowly emerging.

With the iPhone, Apple has taken an authoritative position in this new market — a notion backed up with statistics:

In a survey of 460 iPhone users from March by Rubicon Consulting Inc., more than 28% of respondents strongly agreed and 29% mildly agreed when asked whether the iPhone was replacing their use of laptops.

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October 14, 2008 by sean.

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September 29, 2008 by sean.

Via the Cult of Mac:

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September 13, 2008 by sean.

“It just got a bit harder for law enforcement agencies to turn your cell phone into a personal homing beacon: A federal court has slapped down the Justice Department’s appeal of a February ruling that required investigators to seek a probable cause warrant before acquiring historical records of a cell phone users physical movements.” [via arstechnica]

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August 9, 2008 by sean.

HP, Yahoo and Intel are collaborating on a vareity projects that promise to expand the scope of cloud computing[via Technology Review]:

Last week, Intel, Yahoo, HP, and an international trio of research institutions announced a joint cloud-computing research initiative. The ambitious six-site project is aimed at developing an Internet-based computer infrastructure stable enough to host companies’ most critical data-processing tasks. The project also holds an unusual promise for advances in fields as diverse as climate change modeling and molecular biology… (T)o test this infrastructure, academic researchers will also run real-world, data-intensive projects that, in their own right, could yield advances in fields as varied as data mining, context-sensitive Web search, and communication in virtual-reality environments.

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July 20, 2008 by sean.

I have finally gotten around to reading Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. It’s truly brilliant and here is a taste from the supporting blog [which unfortunately seemed to run out of steam in May]:

Most user-generated material is actually personal communication in a public forum. Because of this personal address , it makes no more sense to label this content than it would to call a phone call with your mother “family-generated content.” A good deal of user-generated content isn’t actually “content” at all, at least not in the sense of material designed for an audience. Instead, a lot of it is just part of a conversation. Mainstream media has often missed this, because they are used to thinking of any group of people as an audience.

Posted in collective intelligence, mobile computing, social networks | No Comments »

June 29, 2008 by sean.

Yet another sign that the bionic brain will be in the cloud [via 43 Folders]:

Using your location, OmniFocus can create a custom list of actions to complete nearby. Buying groceries? OmniFocus can show you the closest grocery store and create an instant shopping list.

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June 24, 2008 by sean.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee on the future of the web [via Technology Review]:
Director of the World Wide Web Consortium and inventor of the Web; Cambridge, MA

“I would like to see the Internet reach people in rural areas and help alleviate poverty. I would like to see more people reaching the Web from devices big and small, fixed and mobile. I look forward to more voice technology–in hands-busy scenarios such as driving, and also to increase accessibility (e.g., for people with low vision). The long tail of video on the Web is creating a new market of direct access to independent films and also has the potential to help with literacy issues. I hope for the proliferation of Linked Open Data: the Semantic Web ‘done right.’ I hope that governments will open their data stores to all citizens. A mashup sphere will feast on a wealth of Semantic Web data and herald the next wave of progress and creativity on the Web.”

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February 27, 2008 by sean.

I saw this a while ago and, until talking with a friend of mine over lunch, forgot how truly amazing it is…

Posted in pervasive computing, user-created content, work, learning theory, augmented cognition, mobile computing, collective intelligence, social networks | No Comments »

November 19, 2007 by sean.

Migatti, PARC’s artificial intelligence software for mobile devices, could soon be data-mining your life:

(R)esearchers at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)… have developed software that turns a phone into a thoughtful personal assistant, one that helps people find fun things to do. The software, called Magitti, uses a combination of cues–including the time of day, a person’s location, her past behaviors, and even her text messages–to infer her interests. It then shows a helpful list of suggestions, including concerts, movies, bookstores, and restaurants [via Technology Review]

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September 22, 2007 by sean.

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September 22, 2007 by sean.

Tom Fuller discusses Pervasive Computing, Ultra-Portable Devices and Location-Based Services:

NAVITIME runs on mobile phones, many of which include integrated GPS. A minority use case is in-car navigation. Many people outside Japan are familiar with in-car navigation systems, but in Japan, people are using NAVITIME mostly for personal navigation as they walk or take public transportation—particularly in Tokyo. This is yet another example of how Japan often leads the rest of the world when it comes to pervasive computing. NAVITIME provides comprehensive navigation information, including maps, timetables, prices, and even carbon footprints for various journey options. It’s an impressive large-scale system. [via blindside]

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