- windows_98.css — the compelling new look that’s sweeping the world all over again.
- BioGlass (MIT) — use Glass’s accelerometer, gyroscope, and camera to extract pulse and respiratory rates. (via MIT Tech Review)
- Building Blocks for Theoretical Computer Science — free online textbook covering what I lovingly think of as “the mathy bits of computing that are so damn hard”.
- The Platinum Searcher — code search tool similar to ack and ag. It supports multi platforms and multi encodings. Written in go, and is fast.
"google glass" entries
Four short links: 11 September 2014
Win98 Retro, Glass as Sensor, Theoretical CS, and Code Search
Four short links: 28 March 2014
Javascript on Glass, Smart Lights, Hardware Startups, MySQL at Scale
- WearScript — open source project putting Javascript on Glass. See story on it. (via Slashdot)
- Mining the World’s Data by Selling Street Lights and Farm Drones (Quartz) — Depending on what kinds of sensors the light’s owners choose to install, Sensity’s fixtures can track everything from how much power the lights themselves are consuming to movement under the post, ambient light, and temperature. More sophisticated sensors can measure pollution levels, radiation, and particulate matter (for air quality levels). The fixtures can also support sound or video recording. Bring these lights onto city streets and you could isolate the precise location of a gunshot within seconds.
- An Investor’s Guide to Hardware Startups — good to know if you’re thinking of joining one, too.
- WebScaleSQL — a MySQL downstream patchset built for “large scale” (aka Google, Facebook type loads).
Disrupting health care with Google Glass
The convergence of hardware and software, and innovation in wearable technology, provides opportunities for disruption.
Editor’s note: this article originally appeared on Advanced Health Information Exchange Resources; this lightly edited version is published here with permission.
I joined the Glass Explorer Program and have started using Google Glass with a focus on finding medical uses for this type of wearable computing technology. While I believe it’s the analytics capabilities that will allow us to realize the value of health information technology, the convergence of hardware and software — combined with an explosion of wearable sensor technology — is providing powerful opportunities for some disruptive innovation in the health care marketplace and the practice of medicine.
Charles Webster, M.D., got me really interested in the potential with his presentation Google Glass and Healthcare Information and Workflow at the 2014 Healthcare Systems Process Improvement Conference, held immediately before HIMSS 2014. Chuck has been posting about Google Glass for some time, and one of his posts on the HIMSS Future Care blog is well worth reading. Some of the insights from his post include:
“There’s lots of interest in Glass use by surgeons, EMTs, and nurses, for hands-free and real-time access to critical information. It’s justified. But there’s also been negative speculation about threats to patient privacy. What will patients think when they see their physician wearing Glass? In my opinion, it will become just another tool they associate with health care workers (less obtrusive than the head mirror that used to be a symbol of the medical profession). The bigger question should be, what will physicians and others think when they see a patient wearing Glass?”
I decided it was finally time to take the plunge and become a Glass Explorer and got my Google Glass just in time for the annual HIMSS conference to end. For those who have not yet seen Google Glass or don’t understand how the technology works, it is basically a computer strapped to your head in the form of a pair of glasses. It has a heads-up display, voice activation and a growing number of apps. Check out the Google Glass homepage to learn more. When you think about having all of the technology of a smartphone, and then some, incorporated into a pair of glasses, it boggles the mind as to the various use cases for health care. I want to outline just a few and then think about what other innovative possibilities this type of technology could bring to the industry. Read more…
Wearing the future
Current wearable computing technology is just scratching the surface — the really interesting tech has yet to be invented.
In an interview at SXSW, Google’s Sundar Pichai said something about wearables that I’ve been waiting to hear. Wearables aren’t about Google Glass; they aren’t about smart watches; they’re much, much more, and these technologies are only scratching the surface.
I’ve tweaked Apple a couple of times for their inability to deliver a watch, despite years of leaks and rumors. I suspect that products from competitors have forced them to pivot a few times, rethinking and delaying their product. But the bottom line is that I don’t care; I don’t wear a watch, haven’t for a long time, and I’m not about to start. Just not interested.
I’m more interested in Glass, but I’ve been amazed at how few people are listening to what Google has said about it: it’s an experiment. It’s not the endpoint, not the product. Given the excitement it has produced, Google would be foolish not to sell it. But really: it’s ugly, it’s a prototype, it’s a mockup. Five years from now, will we all be walking around with Google Glass hanging from designer frames? I doubt it. And I bet Pichai, Brin, and Page doubt it, too. It’s an experiment; it will show us what’s interesting, and point toward what to build next. It’s not the end result. Read more…
Four short links: 13 January 2014
S3 Consistency, Paper Drone, Face Substitution, and Wearable Options
- s3mper (Github) — Netflix’s library to add consistency checking to S3. (via Netflix tech blog)
- Powerup Smartphone-Controlled Paper Airplane — boggle. You know the future is here when you realise you’re on the Internet of Trivial Things.
- clmtrackr (Github) — real-time face recognition, deformation, and substitution in Javascript. Boggle.
- Nine Wearables (Quartz) — a roundup of Glass-inspired wearables, including projecting onto contact lenses which wins today’s “most squicky idea” award.
Four short links: 26 November 2013
Internet Cities, Defying Google Glass, Deep Learning Book, and Open Paleoanthropology
- The Death and Life of Great Internet Cities — “The sense that you were given some space on the Internet, and allowed to do anything you wanted to in that space, it’s completely gone from these new social sites,” said Scott. “Like prisoners, or livestock, or anybody locked in institution, I am sure the residents of these new places don’t even notice the walls anymore.”
- What You’re Not Supposed To Do With Google Glass (Esquire) — Maybe I can put these interruptions to good use. I once read that in ancient Rome, when a general came home victorious, they’d throw him a triumphal parade. But there was always a slave who walked behind the general, whispering in his ear to keep him humble. “You are mortal,” the slave would say. I’ve always wanted a modern nonslave version of this — a way to remind myself to keep perspective. And Glass seemed the first gadget that would allow me to do that. In the morning, I schedule a series of messages to e-mail myself throughout the day. “You are mortal.” “You are going to die someday.” “Stop being a selfish bastard and think about others.” (via BoingBoing)
- Neural Networks and Deep Learning — Chapter 1 up and free, and there’s an IndieGogo campaign to fund the rest.
- What We Know and Don’t Know — That highly controlled approach creates the misconception that fossils come out of the ground with labels attached. Or worse, that discovery comes from cloaked geniuses instead of open discussion. We’re hoping to combat these misconceptions by pursuing an open approach. This is today’s evolutionary science, not the science of fifty years ago We’re here sharing science. […] Science isn’t the answers, science is the process. Open science in paleoanthropology.
Four short links: 4 November 2013
Glass Games, Dopplr Design, Free Android, and Shameful Security
- A Game Designer’s Guide to Google Glass (Gamasutra) — nice insight that Glass is shovelware-resistant because input is so different and output so limited. (via Beta Knowledge)
- Be Polite, Pertinent, and Pretty (Slideshare) — design principles from Dopplr. (via Matt Jones’s memorial to Dopplr)
- Replicant — free software Android. (via Wired)
- Femme Fatale Dupes IT Guys at Government Agency (Sophos) — story of how a fake LinkedIn profile for a pretty woman reflects as poorly on security practice as on gender politics.
Podcast: expanding our experience of interfaces and interaction
A chat with Amanda Parkes, Ivan Poupyrev, and Hayes Raffle.
At our Sci Foo Camp this past summer, Jon Bruner, Jim Stogdill, Roger Magoulas, and I were joined by guests Amanda Parkes, a professor in the Department of Architecture at Columbia University, and CTO at algae biofuels company Bodega Algae and fashion technology company Skinteractive Studio; Ivan Poupyrev, principle research scientist at Disney Research, who leads an interaction research team; and Hayes Raffle, an interaction designer at Google [X] working on Project Glass. Our discussion covered a wide range of topics, from scalable sensors to tactile design to synthetic biology to haptic design to why technology isn’t a threat but rather is essential for human survival.
Here are some highlights from our discussion:
- The Botanicus Interacticus project from Disney research and the Touché sensor technology.
- Poupyrev explains the concept behind the Touché sensor is that we need to figure out how to make the entire world interactive, developing a single sensor that can be scalable to any situation — finding a universal solution that can adapt to multiple uses. That’s what Touché is, Poupyrev says: “a sensing technology that can dynamically adapt to multiple objects and can sense interaction with water, with everyday objects, with tables, with surfaces, the human body, plants, cats, birds, whatever you want.” (2:50 mark)
Four short links: 2 October 2013
Translation Glasses, Diagramming, Offline Gmail, and WTF Computation
- Instant Translator Glasses (ZDNet) — character recognition to do instant translating, and a UI that turns any flat surface into a touch-screen via a finger-ring sensor.
- draw.io — diagramming … In The Cloud!
- Airmail — Mac gmail client with offline mode that fails to suck.
- The Page-Fault Weird Machine: Lessons in Instruction-less Computation (Usenix) — video, audio, and text of a paper that’ll make your head hurt. We demonstrate a Turing-complete execution environment driven solely by the IA32 architecture’s interrupt handling and memory translation tables, in which the processor is trapped in a series of page faults and double faults, without ever successfully dispatching any instructions. LOLWUT?!
Four short links: 3 September 2013
Fanout Architectures, In-Browser Emulation, Paean to Programmability, and Social Hardware
- Achieving Rapid Response Times in Large Online Services (PDF) — slides from a talk by Jeff Dean on fanout architectures. (via Alex Dong)
- JS MESS — porting the stunning MESS ultimate emulator to Javascript. Interesting challenges like Chrome currently has a hardcoded limit of 32,767 variables, and Firefox has a point at which it hits the CTRL-FUCKIT button and drops the mic.
- Go Ahead, Mess with Texas Instruments (The Atlantic) — School typically assumes that answers fall neatly into categories of “right” and “wrong.” As a conventional tool for computing “right” answers, calculators often legitimize this idea; the calculator solves problems, gives answers. But once an endorsed, conventional calculator becomes a subversive, programmable computer it destabilizes this polarity. Programming undermines the distinction between “right” and “wrong” by emphasizing the fluidity between the two. In programming, there is no “right” answer. Sure, a program might not compile or run, but making it offers multiple pathways to success, many of which are only discovered through a series of generative failures. Programming does not reify “rightness;” instead, it orients the programmer toward intentional reading, debugging, and refining of language to ensure clarity.
- When A Spouse Puts On Google Glass (NY Times) — Google Glass made me realize how comparably social mobile phones are. […] People gather around phones to watch YouTube videos or look at a funny tweet together or jointly analyze a text from a friend. With Glass, there was no such sharing.