May 08, 2008
Geek Scooter
Researching this kind of thing for Adventure Touring the American Southwest, and Technomadism and Transhuman Hacks of Metavlogging Phrashion have been decorating my plate as of late. via Make:.
November 27, 2007
Animatronic Animal Masks with Sensory Enhancers
Lion Of The Sun's custom creations are literally fantastic! Some masks include color and infrared vision systems, articulated ears and jaws, and boosted hearing to simulate the senses and movements of the animals they model. It's also practical, since foam and faux fur materials tend to inhibit the wearers' senses already. From standalone ears and tails, to headpieces and full body suits, expression through play as real-life avatars is by design. Lionel's site has oodles of animals and plenty of pictures, so crawl around!
November 12, 2007
Mixed Reality Cartography Corset
A wearable device for Gordan Savicic's "Constraint City: The Pain of Everyday Life", includes: "A chest strap (corset) with high torque servo motors and a WIFI-enabled game-console are worn as fetish object. The higher the wireless signal strength of close encrypted networks, the tighter the corset becomes." Whether it is meant to be painful or pleasurable seems unclear.
I suggest exploring the link below to glean the project's conceptual background. I find its discourse reminiscent of Stelarc's. I do share the artist's interest in sensing the electromagentic waves permeating our environment; even to the extent of mapping it to haptic feedback. However, regarding the restriction of the public through normally undetectable information layers, I do not share his tenet that secure WiFi networks are as actively constrictive as this project asserts. Perhaps wireless security cameras and traffic lights are even more controling than secure WiFi, since private citizens should have the right to encrypt their networks from the public without suspicion of conspiracy.
October 12, 2007
Avian Geomagnetic Vision?
I am very interested in vision and hacking "The Mind's Eye" in reference to visual perception beyond the sense organs. It has been suggested that some birds migrate using the magnetic force lines of the Earth:
"Currently, theoretical, behavioral and physiological evidences support two magnetic sensing hypotheses: a magnetite-mediated magnetic sense [4]–[6] and/or a vision-mediated magnetic compass [7]." This quote comes from a recently published study of the latter possibility. The full article is really brainy.
[inspired by Street Tech ]
October 27, 2005
List of HMD & VR helmets
Christoph Bungert has made a list of HMD and VR helmets, which lists things like price, resolution, number of panels, and more. I think this is the kind of community resource that really helps people who are interested in working with mediated reality / augmented vision.
The only thing it's missing is editorials!
October 21, 2005
Visual Spam Blocker
Mediated reality product, "See-Free" promises a solution to all those pesky billboards that clutter the landscape by masking them out.
Steve Mann and his students originally broke ground in this area, which they call the Reality Window Manager (see below).
See the Reality Window Manager Video
On the other hand, "See-Free" only offers pictures on their website, which made me wonder how well, if at all, their product worked. Hell, I can photoshop a pretty good mask job, but it's completely another thing to engineer a solution to masking all billboards, all the time. I wrote them to find out more, but so far they've declined to comment.
Notice that with their example photos there are things in the
foreground of the billboard, which may be possible, but I kind of
doubt it.
October 11, 2004
Is Bush a Cyborg?
Some people think that this is a picture proving that Bush was 'wired' with a prompting with a device like this.
Personally, and much to my disapointment, Bush is a cyborg. Why would someone say things like "It will take time to restore chaos" if he wasn't a cyborg or robot bent on world domination/destrution? The monkey stuff is probably just a smokescreen to hide the truth.
Here's more damming evidence:
June 30, 2004
Mediated Roamality
Mediated Reality is one of those emerging technologies that is going to change our life, and to jump on it early is almost like being transformed into a superhero, or supervillan depending on your attitude. Mobileye has produced a computer chip for us high-tech roadwarriors which is just astounding, and makes me think that mediated reality is closer than I had thought. With a bit of graphics fu I'm sure this would be gorgeous, but in a way I love the terminator style green lines in all their videos. I watched them all.
EyeQ is pretty similar to the HUD fighter pilots use, so don't be surprised when you get covered by paintballs if you try to cut me off.
