Off Course-On Target

Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens: IEEE Spectrum WITII

Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens

A new generation of contact lenses built with very small circuits and LEDs promises bionic eyesight

Image: Raygun Studio

BY Babak A. Parviz // September 2009

The human eye is a perceptual powerhouse. It can see millions of colors, adjust easily to shifting light conditions, and transmit information to the brain at a rate exceeding that of a high-speed Internet connection.

But why stop there?

 

via IEEE Spectrum

Here is today's addition to the WITII list (What if the Impossible Isn't?)  I've been writing more about AR lately (who hasn't) and expect to continue as both research such as this and infant applications increasingly merge into the mainstream.  Glasses and goggles make sense too and may be possible sooner.  Implants have additional benefits and applications.

This is a longish article, at least by today's online reading standards, but it is well worth the read to get a glimpse at what is currently possible and what is about to be. 

School of What if the Impossible Isn't?

Singularity University

Ted Greenwald is Tweeting from SU (http://twitter.com/tedgreenwald) using the hashtag #singularityu. Photos courtesy of Singularity University.

via www.wired.com

See this article for a great set of things to add to my "What if the Impossible Isn't?" list. You may also enjoy, as I did, reading more about the recently started Singularity University and this blogging account by one recent attendee.

Synchtube: Watch Synchronized YouTube Videos With Your Friends

Synchtube: Watch Synchronized YouTube Videos With Your Friends

Written by Frederic Lardinois / December 31, 2009 9:25 AM / 0 Comments

« Prior Post Next Post »

Chances are that you are getting at least a few emails and IMs with links to YouTube videos every day. While watching these alone can be fun, Synchtube turns this into a far more social experience. Synchtube allows you to share and discuss a video in real time with up to four of your friends. The first person to enter the room controls the playback and also has the ability to change videos.

Features

To get started, just head over to Synchtube.com and copy and paste a link to a YouTube video into the box in the lower right corner. Then send out the link to the room to your friends and start the video once they have arrived.

via www.readwriteweb.com

The latest addition to my list of "What if the Impossible Isn't?" Simple and useful, always a great combination.

The synchronization of video and chat enables true and interactive conversation and by using YouTube this enables pretty much any video source to be used.  Opens some interesting options for learning and sharing and worth trying and keeping an eye on this as it develops.

A Day in the Internet

via www.onlineeducation.net

Goof visualization and fun way to look at what we often take for granted. It is good to continuously remind ourselves what some of these numbers are and to continue to be amazed at the world we live in.

Given the exponential rate of change, ideally this needs to be a fed with live data such that the numbers can show both the value at any one time as well as the rate of change.

And best of all perhaps, there is lots more where this came from, the OnlineEducation site and the OlineEducation blog.  Well worth your time but be forewarned that you likely won't be able to look at just one of their great graphics.  And that's the good news!

Metadata from and for the Masses? A Common Nomenclature for Lego Families by Giles Turnbull - The Morning News

A Common Nomenclature for Lego Families

Thousands of different Lego exist, yet when your seven-year-old asks for “a clippy bit,” you know exactly what to hand him. GILES TURNBULL surveys a caucus of children.

A selection of various Lego bricks

via www.themorningnews.org

Likely to resonate with many families I suspect and as much a great learning moment in metadata, semantics and language.

Why we can never rest: a year in the life of Twitter - Times Online

Why we can never rest: a year in the life of Twitter

 

via business.timesonline.co.uk

Interesting perspective on Twitter, from Twitter, and a very tangible example of the emergence of the real time web or "real time information network" (which is much more than just Twitter).

Also worth continued wondering, for me at least, about the emerging new relationship between organizations, companies in particular here, employees, employers, constituents, customers or audience. In the case of Twitter this is but the latest example which I find fascinating as to how the relationship between the company and the community is evolving.

Worth reading and reflecting on this continued evolution in 2010.

Wayne

BigThink Indeed!

I can’t seem to get the embed code for the video to work so you can watch it directly here, but it is well worth the click and the time for you to watch this interview on BigThink.com with Nicholas Negroponte about the ongoing One Laptop Per Child or OLPC project AND perhaps most interesting of all, several other topics.  I found it to be very open and authentic as Negroponte answered the following questions:

• How did One Laptop Per Child get started?
• How did you design a laptop specially tailored to children’s needs?
• Do you worry about the laptops growing rapidly obsolete?
• What evidence is there that One Laptop Per Child is working?
• How can teachers and students make the most out of a new laptop?
• How do you respond to critics who say, “Students should read books, not play with computers?”
• What will be the equivalent of the “Negroponte switch” in the next 20 years?
• What are the most radical technologies forthcoming from the MIT Media Lab?
• Should people “unplug” more to avoid media oversaturation?
• Following the battle between newspapers and Google, will walls between media increase?
• Which of the projects in your career has been the most difficult?

In the interview Negroponte provides some very reasoned and fascinating (to me at least) commentary about how he judges success for OLPC with examples such as truancy rates dropping to zero in many places (from up to 30% previously) and stories of how kids with an OLPC are teaching their parents to read and write.  Also some very revealing comments and stories about the reactions and effects on teachers where the OLPC's are in place.  He also notes five consistent comments they get from the teachers involved:

1. discipline problems go down in the classroom.
2. they've never loved teaching so much.
3. they've never had parents so deeply involved with school
4. not just that truancy drops to zero, but that the energy level in the classroom is just undeniably different.
5. they just get swamped by emails with questions from the kids

This interview is well worth watching for much more than these perspectives on OLPC as Negroponte also discusses things like the “Negroponte Switch” where he predicted about 20 years ago

“that most of the information that you got through the ground, through wires and physically, would in fact come through the air, and most of the things we got through the air, like television, would come through the ground.”

and his more recent thoughts on how he believes that the next big change will be at the “space between biology and silicone”.  Negroponte also discusses some of the most recent work going on at MIT and his thoughts on “unplugging” and how he sees life now as more of an omelet!

The interview video runs almost 30 minutes but I strongly encourage you to watch more than just the beginning or read through the transcipt.  For me, much of the best was at the end where he talks very openly about the projects in his life which have been the most difficult.

I also liked the way BigThink.com put together this interview where the questions appear as just text on the screen for a few seconds and then all the rest of the video is simply a head and shoulders shot of Nicholas with an all white background.  And they nicely provided a full text version of the interview with one click which then scrolls down below the video.  Very handy for people like me with limited bandwidth and for being able to grab relevant grab bits of the interview.

See some of my other postings on OLPC such as the recent one on How the OLPC version 3 Predicts the Future of PCs and an older one on Opportunities in our Laps?

Both Nicholas and OLPC are worth watching in 2010.

Give it a Whrrl

Whrrl, Still Trying To Find Its Way In Location, Focuses On “Footstreams”

from TechCrunch by MG Siegler

Much of the web is based around clickstreams. The latest version of Whrrl, a location-based application by Pelago, wants to take that concept into the real world, with “footstreams.”

Up until this point, since the launch of version 2 of its iPhone app earlier this year, Whrrl’s focus has been on storytelling. That is, allowing users to tag places they’re at with stories and pictures. But the latest version shifts the focus towards creating a digital record of all the places you go in the real world, Pelago CEO Jeff Holden tells us. “It’s about places, not location,” he says.

While the distinction between the two may not be that obvious at first, it becomes more clear when Holden continues to talk about how the core idea of Whrrl is discovery. That is to say, it’s not about playing a game, or knowing where your friends are at any given time (which rivals Foursquare, Gowalla, and Loopt are all about), instead it’s about building up communities and location data surrounding places. And that leads to another major addition for the site, with “Societies.” Basically, this is a feature that looks at where you go in the real world and serves up other places you might like to “discover” based on other Whrrl users who are members of similar Societies as you.

via www.google.co.nz

As an avid traveler and being a journey type of person, this appealed to me. Much more important however is how this adds significant context and extends our ability to discover more relevant things or in this case places.
My primary premise and passion around The Snowflake Effect is the vision of getting things "just right" as in just the right stuff for just the right people at just the right time in just the right context and so on. In the case of whrrl and other location based applications they are addressing "just the right place" aspect of the equation AND augmenting our ability to discover places that we will be delighted with.
I've long cited music recommender technology such as Pandora, Last.fm, Slacker and Spotify as examples of how it is already possible to experience the power of such augmented discovery with their almost scary ability to find more and more songs that are truly just right, just for you, just then. Now we are beginning to see examples such as whrll which enable this same kind of just right discovery of places.
As has been my recommendation for these music discovery examples, the best way, really the only way, I know of to understand them and determine their value is to try them. I make the same recommendation here with whrrl and other geo location based systems, try them for 30 days and see what you think. And don't forget to share your experience with the rest of us so we can benefit from your unique discoveries.

Much of the web is based around clickstreams. The latest version of Whrrl, a location-based application by Pelago, wants to take that concept into the real world, with “footstreams.”

Up until this point, since the launch of version 2 of its iPhone app earlier this year, Whrrl’s focus has been on storytelling. That is, allowing users to tag places they’re at with stories and pictures. But the latest version shifts the focus towards creating a digital record of all the places you go in the real world, Pelago CEO Jeff Holden tells us. “It’s about places, not location,” he says.

While the distinction between the two may not be that obvious at first, it becomes more clear when Holden continues to talk about how the core idea of Whrrl is discovery. That is to say, it’s not about playing a game, or knowing where your friends are at any given time (which rivals Foursquare, Gowalla, and Loopt are all about), instead it’s about building up communities and location data surrounding places. And that leads to another major addition for the site, with “Societies.” Basically, this is a feature that looks at where you go in the real world and serves up other places you might like to “discover” based on other Whrrl users who are members of similar Societies as you.

First Functional Molecular Transistor Comes Alive | Gadget Lab | Wired.com

By Priya Ganapati     December 24, 2009  | 1:22 pm  | 

Nearly 62 years after researchers at Bell Labs demonstrated the first functional transistor, scientists say they have made another major breakthrough.

Researchers showed the first functional transistor made from a single molecule. The transistor, which has a benzene molecule attached to gold contacts, could behave just like a silicon transistor.

The molecule’s different energy states can be manipulated by varying the voltage applied to it through the contacts. And by manipulating the energy states, researchers were able to control the current passing through it.

The transistor, or semiconductor device that can amplify or switch electrical signals, was first developed to replace vacuum tubes. On Dec. 23, 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain (who’d built on research by colleague William Shockley) showed a working transistor that was the culmination of more than a decade’s worth of effort.

Vacuum tubes were bulky and unreliable, and they consumed too much power. Silicon transistors addressed those problems and ushered in an era of compact, portable electronics.

Now molecular transistors could escalate the next step of developing nanomachines that would take just a few atoms to perform complex calculations, enabling massive parallel computers to be built.

via www.wired.com

Latest entry on the What if the Impossible Isn't? list is this research breakthrough that takes transistors down to the molecular level. Still many years away from any commercial scale or production, but these kinds of examples are what enable things like Moore's Law to continue long after many "experts" predict it has to come to an end. 

For example I recall back in the early days of modems when the "experts" said that 9600 baud was the physical upper limit of speed. It was simply physically impossible to go any faster. Then we/they figured out compression techniques, then new transmissions, then optical and so on such that we now can't even imagine how slow 9600 baud is. 

Well I can actually because I still run at such speeds, sometimes even less, when I'm on my satellite phone data modem, which helps me remember succh times, but you get my point.  Even when we are so sure, when it is "just a fact", and there seems to be consensus amongst experts, scientists, etc. as to what is and is not possible, we humans have a wonderful history of discovering or inventing a new way of doing things which eliminates or obviates such barriers.  This remains more true than ever and is happening at an exponentially increasing rate, which is the real difference to pay attention to.

Think about it; What if the Impossible Isn't?

The 12 Graphs of Christmas

5. Love Vs. Hate

---

In the epic battle of love vs. hate, there is a clear winner on Twitter this holiday season.

via mashable.com

Whatever your beliefs and holidays, I thought this "12 Graphs of Christmas" was fun and somewhat revealing.  The one above is my favorite (Love vs Hate) as it matches my observations that the more I travel this world the more I see SO much more good than evil.