- Bank of England Complains About AR Bank Notes — After downloading the free Blippar app on iPhone or Android, customers were able to ‘blipp’ any ten-pound note in circulation by opening the app and holding their phone over the note. An animated Queen, and other members of the Royal Family, then appeared on the screen and voiced opinions on the latest football matters.
- Kittydar — open source computer vision library in Javascript for identifying cat faces. I am not making this up. (via Kyle McDonald
- Quantified Mind — battery of cognitive tests, so you can track performance over time and measure the effect of interventions (coffee, diet, exercise, whatever). (via Sara Winge)
- Jellyfish Made From Rat Cells (Nature) — an artificial jellyfish using silicone and muscle cells from a rat’s heart. The synthetic creature, dubbed a medusoid, looks like a flower with eight petals. When placed in an electric field, it pulses and swims exactly like its living counterpart. Very cool, but the bit that caught my eye was: the team built the medusoid as a way of understanding the “fundamental laws of muscular pumps”. It is an engineer’s approach to basic science: prove that you have identified the right principles by building something with them.
"augmented reality" entries
Four short links: 25 July 2012
No Augmenting Money, Cat CV, Quantified Mind, and Hackable Bio
Four short links: 29 May 2012
AR Theme Park, Digital Citizenship, Simulating Faces, and Reverse-Engineering Pixels
- South Korean Kinect+RFID Augmented Reality Theme Park — Sixty-five attractions over seven thematic stages contribute to the experience, which uses 3D video, holograms and augmented reality to immerse guests. As visitors and their avatars move through the park, they interact with the attractions using RFID wristbands, while Kinect sensors recognize their gestures, voices and faces. (via Seb Chan)
- Digital Citizenship — computers in schools should be about more than teaching more than just typing to kids, they should know how to intelligently surf, to assess the quality of their sources, to stay safe from scammers and bullies, to have all the training they need to be citizens in an age when life is increasingly lived online. (via Pia Waugh)
- Simulating Anatomically Accurate Facial Expressions (University of Auckland) — video of a talk demonstrating biomechanical models which permit anatomically accurate facial models.
- Depixelizing Pixel Art (Microsoft Research) — this is totally awesome: turning pixel images into vector drawings, which of course can be smoothly scaled. (via Bruce Sterling)
Four short links: 18 May 2012
Adoption Curves, Highschool Makerspaces, Google Glass, and OAuth Design Fiction
- Overlapping S-Curves of Various Products (PNG) — product adoption speed over time. (via Beta Knowledge)
- High School Makerspaces Q&A with Dale Dougherty (Radioshack) — Experimentation is one of the things we’re trying to promote. If you do experiments, a number of them fail and you learn from that failure and say, “Gee, I could have done that differently.” It’s metacognitive skills that we’re trying to develop—a way of thinking, a way of doing that increases your confidence in your own abilities and in your capacity to learn. I’d like students to believe that anybody can do these things, not that only a few people are good at math or only a few people are good at programming. The goal is to reduce the barrier to those subjects and show that anybody can be good at them. (via Tim O’Reilly)
- Google Glass Patent: Infrared Rings and Fingernails (The Verge) — The patent describes a wearable computing device whose interface can be controlled by infrared markers in the form of bracelets, rings, artificial fingernails, or effectively invisible temporary decals. A camera in the glasses would pick up radiation reflected from the marker, giving it a point of reference for user control. (via Chris Arkenberg)
- OAuth is Your Future (Flickr) — design fictions to provoke thought. DHS accessing your Foursquare history? Aie. (via Dan Hon)
Four short links: 6 July 2011
China Snaffling Facebook Stock, DNS Douchebaggery, Corporate Whores, and Comic Relief
- China Wants to Buy Facebook (Forbes) — Beijing approached a fund that buys stock from former Facebook employees to see if it could assemble a stake large enough “to matter.” This has implications for Facebook entering China. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg is reportedly “wary about the compromises Facebook would have to make to do business there.” If she loses her argument with Zuckerberg and Facebook enters China, the company will eventually be subject to demands to censor its sites, those both inside and outside China. That’s apparently why the Chinese want to own a big stake in Facebook. They are, in short, looking for control in the long run. No other explanation is consistent with the Party’s other media and “educational” initiatives. Again the world’s most desirable emerging market is fraught for those who would enter it.
- Cisco Helping China Build Surveillance (WSJ, subscription probably needed) — Western companies including Cisco Systems Inc. are poised to help build an ambitious new surveillance project in China—a citywide network of as many as 500,000 cameras that officials say will prevent crime but that human-rights advocates warn could target political dissent. Check out the mealy-mouthed weasel from HP: “We take them at their word as to the usage.” He added, “It’s not my job to really understand what they’re going to use it for. Our job is to respond to the bid that they’ve made.” (a) buyers don’t bid, vendors bid; (b) you’re a piss-poor vendor if you don’t understand what the client hopes to achieve; (c) really, maintaining plausible denial is the best way to preserve your brand’s integrity? Hewlett and Packard are turning in their graves, the heat given off from which could be detected by sensors, routed through Cisco boxes and displayed on HP terminals.
- US Claims .net and .com In Their Jurisdiction — The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) wants to take down web sites that use the .com and .net top level domains (TLD) regardless of whether their servers are based in the US. Not only do DNS interventions like this not stop the copying, they’re the thin end of the political wedge into yet another piece of critical Internet infrastructure. Who woke up this morning and thought, “I want a copyright rentacop to decide which websites I can see”? The generative power of the Internet is eroded with every misguided meddling such as this.
- SVK Launches — BERG London finally launch their excellent comic. “Comic?” you ask. Noted science future awesome Warren Ellis wrote it, and it features some clever augmented reality hardware. I have one, and I am happy. You can be too, for only ten pounds plus shipping.
Augmented reality and books, together at last?
Four vastly different projects marry augmented reality with publishing.
Here are four examples that illustrate how books and other publications are starting to use AR to power their pages.
Four short links: 16 May 2011
Minority Report, Embedded Strings, GNU Voice Software, and Nigerian Emotional Masters
- Entering the Minority Report Era — a survey of technology inspired by or reminiscent of Minority Report, which came out ten years ago. (via Hacker News)
- Sally — a tool for embedding strings in matrices, as used in machine learning. (via Matt Biddulph)
- GNU SIP Witch Released — can be used to deploy private secure calling networks, whether stand-alone or in conjunction with existing VoIP infrastructure, for private institutions and national governments. (via Hacker News)
- Chilling Story of Genius in a Land of Chronic Unemployment (TechCrunch) — fascinating story of Nigerian criminal tech entrepreneurs. He helps build them up; he listens to their problems. He makes them feel loved. He calls each an innocuous pet name, lest he accidentally type the wrong message into the wrong chat window. He asks for a little bit of money here and there, until men are sending him steady amounts from each paycheck. He says it takes exactly one month for a man to fall in love with him, and once he has a man’s heart, no woman can take it. I wonder what designers of social software can learn from these master emotional manipulators?
Softly buzzing phones could yield better augmented reality
Foursquare's Dennis Crowley on subtle forms of augmented reality.
Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare, says subtle interactions — like a buzzing phone — could lead to better augmented reality experiences than those provided through cameras and screens.
Four short links: 3 May 2011
Sentiment Analysis, Word Frequency, Design Process, and Plant Recognition
- SentiWordNet — WordNet with hints as to sentiment of particular terms, for use in sentiment analysis. (via Matt Biddulph)
- Word Frequency Lists and Dictionaries — also for text analysis. This site contains what we believe is the most accurate frequency data of English. It contains word frequency lists of the top 60,000 words (lemmas) in English, collocates lists (looking at nearby words to see word meaning and use), and n-grams (the frequency of all two and three-word sequences in the corpora).
- Crash Course in Web Design for Startups — When I was a wee pixel pusher I would overuse whatever graphic effect I had just learned. Text-shadow? Awesome, let’s put 5px 5px 5px #444. Border-radius? Knock that up to 15px. Gradients? How about from red to black? You can imagine how horrible everything looked. Now my rule of thumb in most cases is applying just enough to make it perceivable, no more. This usually means no blur on text-shadow and just a 1px offset, or only dealing with gradients moving between a very narrow color range. Almost everything in life is improved with this rule.
- Leafsnap — Columbia University, the University of Maryland and the Smithsonian Institution have pooled their expertise to create the world’s first plant identification mobile app using visual search—Leafsnap. This electronic field guide allows users to identify tree species simply by taking a photograph of the tree’s leaves. In addition to the species name, Leafsnap provides high-resolution photographs and information about the tree’s flowers, fruit, seeds and bark—giving the user a comprehensive understanding of the species. iPhone for now, Android and iPad to come. (via Fiona Romeo)
Four short links: 4 March 2011
Javascript AR, Android Patterns, Node.js Book, and SMS Platforms
- JSARToolKit — Javascript port of the Flash AR Toolkit. I’m intrigued because the iPad2 has rear-facing camera and gyroscopes up the wazoo, and (of course) no Flash. (via Mike Shaver on Twitter)
- Android Patterns — set of design patterns for Android apps. (via Josh Clark on Twitter)
- Preview of Up and Running with Node.js (O’Reilly) — Tom Hughes-Croucher’s new book in preview form. Just sorting out commenting now. (via Tom on Twitter)
- #Blue Opens for Business — a web app that gets your text messages. You can reply, and there’s an API to give other apps read/write access. Signs the text message is finally becoming a consumer platform.
Four short links: 23 December 2010
Illusion of Government, Sterling on Wikileaks, Useful AR, and Real World Programming
- There Is No Such Thing as the Government — absolutely spot on there is no spoon moment for government. And that matters. It matters because once you recognise that fact, you can start to do things differently. People do, of course, recognise it at the level of caricature I have described here and nobody will admit to believing that they can get things done simply by pulling the levers of power. But inactions speak louder than words and the myth of the lever is harder to eradicate than any of us like to admit.
- The Blast Shack (Webstock) — Bruce Sterling on Wikileaks. No hacker story is more common than this. The ingenuity poured into the machinery is meaningless. The personal connections are treacherous. Welcome to the real world. No army can permit this kind of behavior and remain a functional army; so Manning is in solitary confinement and he is going to be court-martialled. With more political awareness, he might have made himself a public martyr to his conscience; but he lacks political awareness. He only has only his black-hat hacker awareness, which is all about committing awesome voyeuristic acts of computer intrusion and imagining you can get away with that when it really matters to people.
- Word Lens — finally, useful AR: it replaces foreign language text with translations.
- Staging Servers, Source Control, Deploy Workflows, and Other Stuff Nobody Teaches You — this guy has a point: when you emerge from programming school, you’re unlikely to have touched this kind of real-world programming.