December 31, 2008
Wearable Computing @ 25C3
Via Hackaday, the 25th Chaos Communication Congress's Wearable Computing and Solar Power presentations roused me from blog hibernation to say Happy Holidays and please don't text and drive. For abstracts, lecture notes, slides, and links, you too can veer off; About Cyborgs and Gargoyles:State of the Art in Wearable Computing, and Solar-powering your Geek Gear: Alternative and mobile power for all your little toys.
New Year's greetings from under a rock. No, I haven't been in the desert lately, but I have been in other realms. I've been getting into some high voltage shenanigans, the splendid forums at Cyberpunk Review, back into microcontrollers with the Seeeduino, interfacing it with Pure Data, and touring exhibition and interactive design. 2009 is looking to be hacktastic, but more on that next year.
June 24, 2008
Disney Distributing Cyberpunk?
The irony of Disney distributing a major motion picture whose secondary plot involves massive unilateral corporate control, propaganda, and monopolized consumerism is too juicy to ignore! The corporation's name, BNL, stands for Buy N' Large, and the consumers buy and get large.
I was inspired to write about Pixar's Wall-E by the fantastic blog, wiki, and forums at http://www.cyberpunkreview.com. Therefore, this synopsis focuses on the Cyberpunk themes of Wall-E's secondary plot, which is the story of humanity. The primary plot of Wall-E is an animated romantic comedy between robots, who have the ability to learn and have emotions. The secondary plot has computers and robots with a similar suggestion of machine intelligence that is very reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In Wall-E, humanity has moved off a heavily polluted Earth, which travels in a space colony aboard a starship. The ship's captain receives all his information from the corporate-programmed computer, who then relays news to the society while reading a teleprompter. Like the talking heads of his passengers' video chats, these broadcasts are Orwellian in their framing and ubiquity. He is also controlled by information provided by a combination of a computer, recordings from a mashup of a Coprorate CEO/US President, and a HAL 9000-esque computer; replete with the same red, glowing eye. This cyclops is the ship's autopilot, provides spaceship status reports, and acts as First Mate. It mutinies against its human captain similar to HAL 9000 in 2001 and V.I.K.I. in I,Robot.
The BNL corporation that literally provides life support systems and educates humanity's youth. Their only semblance of face-to-face communication is screen-based, like a two-person holographic video chat. This Heads-Up Display mediated communication is used even by physically adjacent people. They don't touch or see beyond their screens. They don't see what is around them. They are seated and sated by convenience and the holograms, which reminds me of THX-1138 and The Matrix. Everyone is overweight because their only physical movements involve consumption; drinking meal shakes or buying into the latest trends, which are also broadcast from a central computer. The computer intervenes in the physical world through robots, and once triggered, secret automation routines are very difficult to override- even by the figurehead human captain, who is a corporate puppet. He discovers a secret recorded message that is also similar to 2001. Like I,Robot, Wall-E posits that rogue intelligent robots are not only prone to revolution against humans, but against themselves as well.
My original thoughts and members' comments are here:
http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=982
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.
