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"The dazzling new trend of "augmented reality" mobile applications, software that puts layers of information on top of a mobile device's camera viewer, is something that's left iPhone owners feeling out of luck. Now one company developing such an app says Apple has said the technology required will be officially enabled in the next version of the iPhone OS – which is expected out in September."
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Reflecting on Mark Weiser’s legacy ten years on
The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.
-Mark Weiser, 1991 “The Computer for the 21st Century” Scientific American
The goal is to achieve the most effective kind of technology, that which is essentially invisible to the user”¦ I call this future world “Ubiquitous Computing” (Ubicomp).
-Mark Weiser, 1993 “Some Computer Science issues in Ubiquitous Computing” Communications of the ACM
2009 marks the tenth anniversary of the death of a man that many believe earned the title ‘visionary’, his name was Mark Weiser. As a Principal Scientist and subsequently Chief Technology Officer at Xerox PARC, Weiser is best known as the ‘godfather’ of ubiquitous computing. In the years since his demise many of the ideas that Weiser championed have come to greater prominence. As Yvonne Rogers points out this influence has been felt across industry, government and commercial research, from the EU’s ‘disappearing computer’ initiative to MIT’s ‘Oxygen’, HP’s ‘CoolTown’ and Phillips ‘Vision of the Future’. All of these projects aspired to Weiser’s tenet of the everyday environment and the objects within being embeded with computational capacities such that they might bend to our (human) will. Within the research community, as Bell and Dourish remark, ‘of the 108 papers comprising the Ubicomp conference proceedings between 2001 and 2004, fully 47% of the papers are oriented towards a proximate (and inevitable) technological future’ and ‘almost one quarter of all the papers published in the Ubicomp conference between 2001 and 2005 cite Weiser’s foundational articles’.
Continue reading “Reflecting on Mark Weiser’s legacy ten years on”
links for 2009-07-18
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"In multimedia computing and management, ambient/ubiquitous/pervasive media integration is attracting a lot of attention. In particular, we are seeing large quantities of media data generated from various sources and presented to users. New emerging applications, such as digital entertainment, gaming, and e-learning, often require multimedia data objects that can be of different modality yet semantically relevant to be integrated in order to meet various requirements and achieve user objectives. While human brains can "integrate" media data objects naturally by fusing and associating them quickly, existing multimedia computing and processing techniques, unfortunately, do not provide adequate support to facilitate ambient media data integration automatically and semi-automatically. This workshop aims at addressing the various issues and challenges in ambient media data integration."
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"Playmakers is a project looking to bring structures of participation, collaboration & so forth to a process of game design. We’re making a new game (which involves cumbersome and brighly-coloured camera tripods), which Ivo Gormley (social anthropologist and director of Us Now) is using to structure a documentary about the pervasive / social gaming scene. All the different project layers are being documented on our website. The basic version of the game (as it stands) is a peculiar hybrid of team sport, scavenger hunt, and television. The basic rules are online, along with a bunch of varients that we’ve playtested."
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WIRED article speculating about the rise of AR-type applications for mobiles, or LBS (depending on your perspective): "The whole reason the web revolutionized the world was that it rendered geography irrelevant. People connected worldwide based not on location but on their common interests: Model-train collectors and free-speech activists and Britney Spears fans could swarm onto the discussion boards and blogs, from Chicago to Tehran. By severing the link between location and geography, the internet turned everything upside down. Now mobile phones are inverting everything again, in the other direction – because your location becomes most important thing about you. So how is the return of geography going to change our lives?"
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Internet of Things: A 14-point Action Plan. Governance: The Commission will work on the definition of a set of principles underlying the governance of the IoT and the design of an architecture endowed with a sufficient level of decentralised management. Privacy and data protection: The Commission will observe carefully the application of data protection legislation to the IoT. Standardisation: The Commission will, if necessary, launch additional standardisation mandates related to the IoT. Research: The Commission will continue to finance collaborative research projects in the area of the Internet of Things through FP7. The Commission will launch pilot projects to promote the readiness of EU organisations to effectively deploy marketable, interoperable, secure and privacy-aware IoT apps. Environment: The Commission will assess the difficulties of recycling RFID tags as well as the benefits that the presence of these tags can have on the recycling of objects. [PDF]
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An AR 'browser' for android phones: "On top of the camera image (displaying reality) Layar adds content layers. Layers are the equivalent of webpages in normal browsers. Just like there are thousands of websites there will be thousands of layers. One can easily switch between layers by selecting another via the menu button, pressing the logobar or by swiping your finger across the screen." What content exists at the moment is questionable.
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links for 2009-07-17
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Nokia's plan for Symbian emerges: "Symbian, the operating system on nearly half the world's smartphones, is to become involved in the development of mobile applications, or apps. Symbian will be a one-stop location for app developers, standardising and testing software and then making it available to existing app storefronts."
links for 2009-07-16
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"Patent systems are often justified by an assumption that innovation will be spurred by the prospect of patent protection, leading to the accrual of greater societal benefits than would be possible under non-patent systems. However, little empirical evidence exists to support this assumption. One way to test the hypothesis that a patent system promotes innovation is experimentally to simulate the behavior of inventors and competitors under conditions approximating patent and non-patent systems. Initial data generated using The Patent Game suggest that a system combining patent and open source protection for inventions (that is, similar to modern patent systems) generates significantly lower rates of innovation, productivity, and societal utility than does a commons system. These data also indicate that there is no statistical difference in innovation, productivity, or societal utility between a pure patent system and a system combining patent and open source protection."
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Commentary and speculation about location based services, with some stats (most of the services mentioned were actually available in '08).
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RWR blog about a "new Twitter app in development called TwittARound, an augmented reality Twitter viewer for the iPhone 3GS. With the app, you can see live tweets around your location and you can even see how far away they are"… one might ask why you'd want to know any of these things.
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RWR blog that a "Swedish software and design company The Astonishing Tribe is developing an AU concept called Augmented ID that "sees" people and tells you who they are." This AR-type application is more a prototype than anything but signals a desire to create these types of application. This kind of application would ask fairly serious questions about privacy, personal security and the notion of 'identity'.
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MIT researchers feed data from physical places into Second Life locations as 'sensor portals' (not too sure how they're 'ubiquitous'). This links with research they have entitled as 'cross-reality' yet another 'reality' prefix to explore technical 'augmentation' or mediation of 'life'.
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BBC launches new programme called Digital Revolution: "We will take stock of two decades of profound change since the invention of the World Wide Web.
Right now we’re embarking on an experiment to see how you can help us shape both the TV and online projects. We want you to get involved.
Why? Because we want to make a series that is true to its subject – and welcomes the collaborative power of the Web." -
BBC's Click speculates about natural language processing in search engines and the semantic web: "Search engines have never really understood the precise meaning or true intent of questions or phrases – semantic search is a process trying to improve this. A new generation of web services is in development to offer results for words and picture searches, and attempt to understand users' questions. Kosmix is one of a new batch of search engines trying to incorporate human understanding into its complex mathematical computations."
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"In order to monitor how the pieces of rubbish move around the cities and beyond, the MIT team has developed a small mobile sensor that can be attached to individual pieces of waste. "It's like a miniature cell phone with limited functionality," said Carlo Ratti, a member of the project. … Ultimately, the team hopes that the technology can be miniaturised and made cheap enough that the tags could one day be attached to everything. "Think about a future where thanks to smart tags we will not have waste anymore," said Mr Ratti. "Everything will be traceable."
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Arthur speculates about the impact of AR-type 'camera phone as a lens' technologies such as the recent 'nearest tube station' application. An interesting comparison is drawn to the use of information graphics such as 'hawk eye' in the cricket and tennis and Arthur speculates about how such graphics could be available in near-realtime to spectators (and presumably players and umpires?!). A key point – accuracy and reliablity of the data upon which these services (might) operate.
Daguerreotype
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