'Imaginary' Interface Could Replace Screens and Keyboards

TechNewsDaily has a recent post discussing how researchers are experimenting with a new interface system for mobile devices that could replace the screen and even the keyboard with gestures supported by our visual memory:

Called Imaginary Interfaces, the German project uses a small, chest-mounted computer and camera to detect hand movements. Unlike Tony Stark in Iron Man, who manipulates holographic elements in his lab with his hands, users conjure up their own imaginary set of graphical interfaces. For example, people can manually draw shapes and select points in space that have programmed functions, such as a power switch or a "send" key, for example.

This interface could allow people to use gestures during phone calls, much as they do in face-to-face conversations, while eliminating traditional hardware elements.

"We definitely envision a system like this replacing all input for mobile devices," said Sean Gustafson, a research student at the Hasso Plattner Institute at Potsdam University in Germany and lead author of an upcoming study on the Imaginary Interfaces concept.

Read more at ''Imaginary' Interface Could Replace Screens and Keyboards'

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Post-PC era is nigh

CNet News has a post on a D8 conference where Steve Jobs was talking about the post-PC era:

Jobs said the day is coming when only one out of every few people will need a traditional computer. He noted that advances in chips and software will allow tablet devices like the iPad to do tasks that today are really only suited for a traditional computer, things like video editing and graphic arts work. The move, Jobs said, will make many PC veterans uneasy, "because the PC has taken us a long ways." "We like to talk about the post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen, it's uncomfortable," he said.

Read original post - 'Post-PC era is nigh'

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The Coming Data Explosion

The New York Times has an interesting post on the emerging 'Internet of Things' and the ever-increasing number of real-world objects connected/interfaced with the digital world:

One of the key aspects of the emerging Internet of Things - where real-world objects are connected to the Internet - is the massive amount of new data on the Web that will result. As more and more "things" in the world are connected to the Internet, it follows that more data will be uploaded to and downloaded from the cloud. And this is in addition to the burgeoning amount of user-generated content - which has increased 15-fold over the past few years, according to a presentation that Google VP Marissa Mayer made last August at Xerox PARC. Mayer said during her presentation that this "data explosion is bigger than Moore's law."

Read more at 'The Coming Data Explosion'

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Sony Shows Rollable OLED Display

Has the Sony company pulled off another hit? A colour display that can even wrap around a pen...uummm

Sony has developed a flexible color display that's sturdy enough to be wrapped around a pencil while still showing video images. The screen will be detailed on Thursday at the Society for Information Display conference in Seattle and ahead of that Sony released a video of it in operation.

Read more at - 'Sony Shows Rollable OLED Display'

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Wikitude Drive Beta – Test Drivers Wanted

Is this the future for satellite navigation, one wonders? Live video stream of the road you are driving on...road testers required - sign up!

Wikitude Drive, the first mobile Augmented Reality (AR) satellite navigation system with global coverage, launches for test drivers. 


Salzburg, May 20, 2010. Wikitude Drive, the Grand Prize Winner of the Global Navteq LBS Challenge 2010 at Mobile World Congress last February in Barcelona, transforms your Android smartphone into a mobile navigation system looking a bit like something out of a science fiction movie…
Driving directions not only appear on screen, they are overlaid on the live video stream of the very street you are driving on. As a result, you are seeing the real world and real road in front of you, while being directed by a digital route on top of it.

Read more at - 'Wikitude Drive Beta – Test Drivers Wanted'

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YeZ concept car sucks in C02, exhales oxygen

Now this does look cool... conceptual... but way smart..

Here is a vehicle that behaves like a plant, photosynthesizing carbon dioxide from the air and exchanging oxygen back into the atmosphere. Meet the YeZ, a concept two-seater that makes other eco cars blush when it comes to zero and even negative emissions. Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation is behind this clever little creation in partnership with General Motors and Volkswagen. YeZ, pronounced yea-zi, which means "leaf" in Mandarin, works its magic of photoelectric conversion with the help of state-of-the-art solar panels on the roof, wind power conversion via small wind turbines in the wheels, and carbon dioxide absorption and conversion through the bodywork. This last bit is made of a metal-organic framework that can apparently absorb carbon dioxide and water molecules from the air. Through the series of chemical reactions, energy is generated, and it's then stored in the car's lithium ion batteries.

Read move over at 'YeZ concept car sucks in C02, exhales oxygen'

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Tweet for Traitors

Yet again Twitter hits the headlines as it becomes a tool for pro-Chavez supporters to whistleblow:

President Hugo Chavez has urged supporters to use Twitter to blow the whistle on currency speculators and announced that police raids on illegal traders would continue as Venezuela's government tries to defend the embattled bolivar. The socialist leader asked Venezuelans to send messages identifying illegal traders. He described them as "thieves" who must be punished for currency speculation, which he blames for rapidly rising inflation. "My Twitter account is open for you to denounce them," Chavez said during his weekly radio and television program. "We're going to launch several raids. We've already launched some raids, thanks to the complaints from the people."

Read more at - 'Chavez asks Venezuelans to tweet on speculators'

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Theory, Culture & Society - Special Issue on Changing Climates‏

I've recently been shifting through a few articles in the new  Theory, Culture & Society ( March/May 2010, Volume 27, No. 2-3) titled Special Issue on Changing Climates - Edited by Bronislaw Szerszynski and John Urry - see http://tcs.sagepub.com/current.dtl

Some great content here... see the following:
 
CONTENTS
 
Bronislaw Szerszynski and John Urry
    Changing Climates: Introduction
    Theory, Culture & Society 2010 27: 1-8. 

Bronislaw Szerszynski
    Reading and Writing the Weather: Climate Technics and the Moment of Responsibility
    Theory, Culture & Society 2010 27: 9-30. 

Nigel Clark
    Volatile Worlds, Vulnerable Bodies: Confronting Abrupt Climate Change
    Theory, Culture & Society 2010 27: 31-53. 

Myra J. Hird
    Indifferent Globality: Gaia, Symbiosis and ‘Other Worldliness’
    Theory, Culture & Society 2010 27: 54-72. 

Kathryn Yusoff
    Biopolitical Economies and the Political Aesthetics of Climate Change
    Theory, Culture & Society 2010 27: 73-99. 

Aaron M. McCright and Riley E. Dunlap
    Anti-reflexivity: The American Conservative Movement’s Success in Undermining Climate Science and Policy
    Theory, Culture & Society 2010 27: 100-133. 

Bradley C. Parks and J. Timmons Roberts
    Climate Change, Social Theory and Justice
    Theory, Culture & Society 2010 27: 134-166. 

Melinda Cooper
    Turbulent Worlds: Financial Markets and Environmental Crisis
    Theory, Culture & Society 2010 27: 167-190.
John Urry
    Consuming the Planet to Excess
    Theory, Culture & Society 2010 27: 191-212. 

Erik Swyngedouw
    Apocalypse Forever?: Post-political Populism and the Spectre of Climate Change
    Theory, Culture & Society 2010 27: 213-232. 

Sheila Jasanoff
    A New Climate for Society
    Theory, Culture & Society 2010 27: 233-253. 

Ulrich Beck
    Climate for Change, or How to Create a Green Modernity?
    Theory, Culture & Society 2010 27: 254-266. 

Mike Hulme
    Cosmopolitan Climates: Hybridity, Foresight and Meaning
    Theory, Culture & Society 2010 27: 267-276. 

Elizabeth Shov
    Social Theory and Climate Change: Questions Often, Sometimes and Not Yet Asked
    Theory, Culture & Society 2010 27: 277-288. 

Brian Wynne
    Strange Weather, Again: Climate Science as Political Art
    Theory, Culture & Society 2010 27: 289-305. 

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Google Invests in Firm that Tries to Predict the Future

Google's investment arm, Google Ventures, has sunk an undisclosed sum into Recorded Future, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup that "offers customers new ways to analyze the past, present and the predicted future.":

Recorded Future's own Web site doesn't list any products for sale, but the company appears to have developed a data analytics technology that could be used to try to predict future stock market events or even terrorist activity, according to blog posts and videos on its site. The technology looks at how frequently an entity or event is referred to in the news and around the Web over a period of time, then uses that data to project how it might behave in the future.

Read more here

Bristol psychologist seeking tweets about dreams

This has to be the new level in Tweet-related phenomena! A Bristol academic is to take part in a worldwide experiment to collect and analyse people's dreams using the social networking service Twitter:

Dr Jennifer Parker, of the University of the West of England, is asking people from around the world to tweet their dreams to her on Monday.

The 10 judged the best will be analysed by Dr Parker, who is a member of the Association for the Study of Dreams. The top 10 tweeted dreams will appear on www.twitter.com/dreamshrink.They will be posted on Friday 30 April.

Dr Parker, who is from the university's psychology department, said even the dreams that will not be analysed publicly will help her with her research.

Read more at 'Bristol psychologist seeking tweets about dreams'

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Cell phones to 'smell' biochem attack?

I remember coving this topic about 2 years ago...seems like it's been taking a while to move on this. Anyway, its implications are both 'reassuring' and yet 'worrying' - hopefully, you won't need to ask why!

If you ever get caught up in a chemical or biological weapons attack, your cellphone may save your life. Or at least that's the ambition of the Department of Homeland Security. The Department's science and technology team has begun talks with four cell-phone manufacturers on designing 'nextgen' phones that would be able to sense a wide variety of noxious chemical compounds in the air - and alert the user. The director of the "Cell-All" program at the DHS, Stephen Dennis, tells CNN that within a year, "We expect up to 80 prototype cell phones to be developed that can be then tested against various agents."

Read original post - 'Cell phones to 'smell' biochem attack?'

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Car Steered With Eyes

Following on from the previous post on the automated car being closer to reality, this is a slightly different take - using the power of 'giving the eye'!

The eyeDriver software is a prototype application for steering the research vehicle Spirit of Berlin using eye movements. The software was designed by computer scientists at Freie Universität Berlin in collaboration with the company, SMI (SensoMotoric Instruments). The eye movements of the driver are collected and converted into control signals for the steering wheel. The application uses a converted bicycle helmet equipped with two cameras and an infrared LED, as well as a laptop computer with special software. One of the cameras is pointed to the front in the same direction as the person wearing the helmet (scene camera), while the other camera films one eye of the wearer (eye camera)...

In the "free ride" mode the viewing positions are linked directly with the steering wheel motor. That means that the x-coordinates of the viewing position are used to calculate the desired position of the steering wheel. The further the driver looks to the left or right, the further the steering wheel is turned in that direction. The speed of the vehicle is set in advance and kept constant, as long as the position of the gaze is recognized. In case it is not possible to detect which direction the driver is looking in, for example, if the driver's eyes are closed, the vehicle brakes automatically.

Read more on 'Car Steered With Eyes'

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Car that drives itself gets closer to reality

It's getting a closer reality: cars that can stay in a motorway lane without the help of a human driver...read the latest developments:

Software developed by the researchers at North Carolina State University helps a computer keep a car within a lane on a highway while staying aware of other lanes and vehicles travelling alongside. It can even read road signs. The technology relies completely on computer vision programming, which allows a computer to understand what a video camera is looking at - whether it is a stop sign or a pedestrian. The program uses algorithms to sort visual data and make decisions related to finding the lanes of a road, detecting how those lanes change as a car is moving, and controlling the car to stay in the correct lane. It does this - while avoiding other vehicles and without becoming confused by multiple lanes.

Read original post - 'Car that drives itself gets closer to reality'

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Networked Networks Are Prone to Epic Failure

A recent post from Wired takes a complexity look at the fragility of networks which are inter-related and thus increase their fragility.... a useful post:

Networks that are resilient on their own become fragile and prone to catastrophic failure when connected, suggests a new study with troubling implications for tightly linked modern infrastructures. Electrical grids, water supplies, computer networks, roads, hospitals, financial systems - all are tied to each other in ways that could make them vulnerable. Most theoretical research on network properties has focused on single networks in isolation. In reality, many important networks are tied to each other. Anecdotal evidence hints at their fragility, but the underlying mathematics are largely unexplored.

Read original post - 'Networked Networks Are Prone to Epic Failure'

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Word War III: Google vs. Governments

More on Google.... (as if there isn't already enough!)... now that information protection and government requests are becoming more visible on the discussion forums.. it might be that,

In the end, Google will become a regulated quasi-utility. It's easy to suggest why this should happen, but profoundly difficult to imagine how. Yet where there's a will, the political elites will eventually find a way. The key challenge for Google involves slowing down the process. Arguably, this now matters more to shareholders than new product development. Regulated companies make smaller profits than you'd otherwise expect.

Read more at - 'Word War III: Google vs. Governments'

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Google and Library of Congress archive tweets

Tweeting or Twittering has become a much publicised phenomenon recently... what with the protests in Iran; Chavez daily Tweets; and Obama's not-so-nice threats.... well, now the whole message archive is getting the Google treatment:

Every single public tweet, dating back to the very first missive posted on March 21, 2006, will now be housed in the government's Library of Congress. Plus, Google is making the Twitter archive searchable. The Library of Congress -- which boasts millions of books, recordings, photographs, maps and manuscripts in its collections -- announced on Wednesday (via Twitter) that is has acquired all public tweets in the Twitter archive. "Expect to see an emphasis on the scholarly and research implications of the acquisition. I'm no Ph.D., but it boggles my mind to think what we might be able to learn about ourselves and the world around us from this wealth of data," wrote a Library of Congress representative in a Facebook note.

Read original post - 'Google and Library of Congress archive tweets'

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Mobile Lives

Hot off the press! A new book just published (May 14th, Routledge) called 'Mobile Lives' by Anthony Elliot and John Urry. It's description is ideal for this New Mobilities blog:

How should we understand the personal and social impacts of complex mobility systems? Can lifestyles based around intensive travel, transport and tourism be maintained in the 21^st century? What possibility post-carbon lifestyles?

In this provocative study of "life on the move", Anthony Elliott and John Urry explore how complex mobility systems are transforming everyday, ordinary lives. The authors develop their arguments through an analysis of various sectors of mobile lives: networks, new digital technologies, consumerism, the lifestyles of ‘globals’, and intimate relationships at-a-distance. Elliott and Urry introduce a range of new concepts – miniaturized mobilities, affect storage, network capital, meetingness, neighbourhood lives, portable personhood, ambient place, globals – to capture the specific ways in which mobility systems intersect with mobile lives.

Also - another new book has just hit the market which may be of interest to some readers of this blog. It is titled UNDERSTANDING TOURISM by Kevin Hannam and Dan Knox, Sage 2010 and contains a very interesting mobilities view of tourism with useful student-friendly text and exercises.

Just thought I would pass it on!

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First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality

More on the virtual theme..this time with a physical body element that gives a new depth to the avatar phenomenon:

European researchers have used immersive virtual reality in the first experiment to show that body ownership can be transferred to a virtual body. A first-person perspective of a life-sized virtual human female body that appears to substitute the male subjects' own bodies was sufficient to generate a body transfer illusion. The results support the notion that bottom-up perceptual mechanisms can temporarily override top down knowledge. resulting in a radical illusion of transfer of body ownership. The research also illustrates immersive virtual reality as a powerful tool in the study of body representation and experience, since it supports experimental manipulations that would otherwise be infeasible.  

See original post - 'First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality'

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The real world of Second Life

It's been a while since I last blogged about Second Life...and the avatar antics in that world... well, now there seems to be a more detailed look..at both 2nd and 1st Life!

What are we to make of an adult man who leads an online life in which his avatar is an 11-year-old girl?

Inhabitants of Second Life, the online virtual world where this man/girl hangs out, are not troubled by such questions. The ability to explore alternative identities is what attracts many people there in the first place.

For the rest of us, we can find some answers in Life 2.0, a carefully-produced documentary about the real physical lives of Second Lifers.

Filmmaker Jason Spingarn-Koff, who has a background in television science documentaries, either worked hard to track down the right subjects or got very lucky. Their stories are engrossing and, in one case, remarkable. The result is a calm and tender account of Second Life and its impact on three American families.

Aside from the adult who plays at being a child, Spingarn-Koff follows a working-class Detroit woman who makes her living selling clothes and buildings in Second Life. She was earning a six-figure income until another Second Life resident began cloning her products, prompting one of the first lawsuits aimed at protecting "property" in a virtual world.

The film's third strand is a portrait of a man and woman who meet in Second Life and eventually separate from their partners and move in together in the real world.

Second Life is genuinely strange, so it is easy to think that the extremophiles - such as the folks who take on animal avatars and seek out virtual sex with other virtual "furries" - define the place. But Spingarn-Koff's film succeeds because it ignores the oddness and focuses on the people behind the avatars, and what Second Life means to them. Somehow it makes Second Life seem both bizarre and rather ordinary.

Read original article at 'The real world of Second Life'

Hack attacks mounted on car control systems

Now this is interesting news: it seems that the computer systems used to control modern cars are 'very vulnerable to attack', according to new expert research:

An investigation by security researchers found the systems to be "fragile" and easily subverted.
The researchers showed how to kill a car engine remotely, turn off the brakes so the car would not stop and make instruments give false readings.Despite their success, the team said it would be hard for malicious attackers to reproduce their work.

The team of researchers, led by Professor Stefan Savage from the University of California-San Diego, and Tadayoshi Kohno from the University of Washington set out to see what resilience cars had to an attack on their control systems."Our findings suggest that, unfortunately, the answer is 'little,'" wrote the researchers from the Center for Automotive Embedded Systems Security.

The researchers concentrated their attacks on the electronic control units (ECUs)scattered throughout modern vehicles which oversee the workings of many car components. It is thought that modern vehicles have about 100 megabytes of binary code spread across up to 70 ECUs.

Read more on 'Hack attacks mounted on car control systems'