This is a really fun application with huge potential | Somewhere between the harshness of reality and the fantasy of virtual reality lies the domain of Augmented Reality (AR). |
| The French company Total Immersion’s AR technology uses camera capture and 3D imaging techniques to blend surrounding and simulated environments in real-time. |
| ou’ve probably seen the videos floating around You Tube — people hold simple pieces of paper up to their web cameras and suddenly cool cars or a baseball player appear on the screen, seemingly right on top of the paper. The mash of real and virtual gives the illusion that both are occurring in the same space.Read more at singularityhub.com |
| AR videos have been making the rounds on the Internet recently in part due to their nearly seamless blending of the captured and constructed images. |
| In the short term, AR will primarily be seen in two venues: interactive marketing and extended-content media. |
Interesting article about architecture, design and the brain.
The neuroscience of design is still in its infancy, but it has its own organization, The Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture in San Diego, and some architecture schools now include some basic neuroscience in their curriculum. Are we on the verge of a new field of emotionally intelligent design? Here are few early findings:
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| A study by neuroscientists at Harvard Medical School found that faced with photographs of everyday objects–sofas, watches, etc.–subjects instinctively preferred items with rounded edges over those with sharp angles. |
| A study published earlier this year in the journal Science found that we remember words and other details better when surrounded by red, and that we’re more creative and imaginative in the presence of blue. |
| High-ceilinged rooms encourage you to think more freely and abstractly, she reported, and low-ceilinged rooms leads to more attention to detail. |
| clutter increases the “memorability” of a room and establishes a reassuring sense of place. |
The mysterious story of R. C. Christian and the absence of information about the true meaning of the Guidestones was bound to become an irresistible draw for conspiracy theorists and “investigators”of all kinds. Not surprisingly, three decades later there is no shortage of observers rushing to fill the void with all sorts of explanations.
Indeed strange… | The strangest monument in America looms over a barren knoll in northeastern Georgia. Five massive slabs of polished granite rise out of the earth in a star pattern. |
| Called the Georgia Guidestones, the monument is a mystery—nobody knows exactly who commissioned it or why. |
| the “guides” themselves, directives carved into the rocks. These instructions appear in eight languages ranging from English to Swahili and reflect a peculiar New Age ideology.Read more at www.wired.com |
| many who read what was written on the stones were unsettled. |
| Guide number one was, of course, the real stopper: maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature. |
| guide reproduction wisely—improving fitness and diversity. |
| rule passion—faith—tradition—and all things with tempered reason |
| No humans were sacrificed on the altar of the stones, but there are rumors that several chickens were beheaded. |
| Imagine that you could rewind the clock 20 years. It’s 1989. Madonna is topping the pop charts, and TV sets are tuned to “Cheers” and “Murphy Brown.” Widespread Internet use is just a pipe dream, and Sugar Ray Leonard and Joe Montana are on recent covers of Sports Illustrated. |
But most important, you’re 20 years younger. How do you feel? Well, if you’re at all like the subjects in a provocative experiment by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, you actually feel as if your body clock has been turned back two decades. Langer did a study like this with a group of elderly men some years ago, retrofitting an isolated old New England hotel so that every visible sign said it was 20 years earlier. The men—in their late 70s and early 80s—were told not to reminisce about the past, but to actually act as if they had traveled back in time. The idea was to see if changing the men’s mindset about their own age might lead to actual changes in health and fitness. Read more at www.newsweek.com |
We are entering a new age of robotics. there is no doubt about that, at least in Japan. Robots integrated into everyday life is not only a technological feat but also a conceptual and social adaptation. In Japanese world view it is much easier to relate to robots as endowed with souls. This is fascinating, since it seems that we create our future technological world to reflect our beliefs and expectations.
“Robots have hearts,” said Kokoro planning department manager Yuko Yokota.
“They don’t look human unless we put souls in them.
“When manufacturing a robot, there comes a moment when light flickers in its eyes. That’s when we know our work is done.”
Public opinion in Japan may be more open to robots than in the West, where dark science fiction visions from movies such as “Bladerunner” and “Terminator” have conjured images of robo-soldiers taking over the world.
Thanks to such benign cartoon characters as Astro Boy, “Japanese people have a friendly image towards robots,” said Toshiba’s Yoshimi.
Asada said Japan’s indigenous animistic belief system may also have readied people to accept human-like robots with minds of their own. SUITA, Japan (AFP) — The creators of the Child-robot with Biomimetic Body, or CB2, say it’s slowly developing social skills by interacting with humans and watching their facial expressions, mimicking a mother-baby relationship. |
A bald, child-like creature dangles its legs from a chair as its shoulders rise and fall with rythmic breathing and its black eyes follow movements across the room. |
It’s not human — but it is paying attention. |
Below the soft silicon skin of one of Japan’s most sophisticated robots, processors record and evaluate information. The 130-cm (four-foot, four-inch) humanoid is designed to learn just like a human infant. |
The team is trying to teach the pint-sized android to think like a baby who evaluates its mother’s countless facial expressions and “clusters” them into basic categories, such as happiness and sadness. |
| The robot can record emotional expressions using eye-cameras, then memorise and match them with physical sensationsRead more at www.google.com |
A very interesting article A story has a beginning, a middle, and a cleanly wrapped-up ending. Whether told around a campfire, read from a book, or played on a DVD, a story goes from point A to B and then C. It follows a trajectory, a Freytag Pyramid—perhaps the line of a human life or the stages of the hero’s journey. A story is told by one person or by a creative team to an audience that is usually quiet, even receptive. Or at least that’s what a story used to be, and that’s how a story used to be told. Today, with digital networks and social media, this pattern is changing. Stories now are open-ended, branching, hyperlinked, cross-media, participatory, exploratory, and unpredictable. And they are told in new ways: Web 2.0 storytelling picks up these new types of stories and runs with them, accelerating the pace of creation and participation while revealing new directions for narratives to flow. Read more at connect.educause.edu |
Interesting visualization of scientific knowledge. The pursuit of human knowledge has a shape. |
By crunching data from more than a billion user interactions on scholarly databases, Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers produced a high-resolution map of the relationships between different fields of science. |
They're not the first to map science, though they insist that their map is best. Other topographers of knowledge, they say, aren't up to date on what modern scholars search for, and rely too much on natural science databases. |
| The Los Alamos team analyzed click streams from 23 databases — Thomson Scientific, Elsevier, Jstor, Ingenta and multiple campuses of the University of Texas and California State University — and mapped patterns of interest and cross-journal citations. |
| Mapmakers say that visualizations of knowledge help researchers frame discipline-hopping questions and identify neglected cooperative opportunities.Read more at blog.wired.com |
The long awaited movie about the Singularity is near  A new film, Transcendent Man, is about to be released on Ray Kurzweil, a leading futurist who is the author of The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. The documentary will be screened at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City in April. |
Kurzweil is co-founder of the new Singularity University, which will begin operations at NASA Ames this summer. The new university is a collaboration of NASA Ames, the International Space University, and Google. |
The compelling feature-length documentary film–a first for Director Barry Ptolemy–chronicles the life and controversial ideas of luminary Ray Kurzweil. For more than three decades, inventor, futurist, and NY Times best-selling author Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. |
| In TRANSCENDENT MAN, Ptolemy follows Kurzweil around the globe as he presents the daring arguments from his best-selling book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.Read more at www.parabolicarc.com |
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