Category: del.icio.us

" Implanet, a manufacturer of implantable medical devices hopes to keep my dad's knees intact by using IBM RFID solutions to alert him to recalls. According to a recent press release, the company will embed the tags into knee and hip replacements and use them to alert patients to any product-related concerns."

Ben Cervany's new initiative: "VURB is a European framework for policy and design research concerning urban computational systems. The VURB foundation, based in Amsterdam, provides direction and resources to a portfolio of projects investigating how our cultures might come to use networked digital resources to change the way we understand, build, and inhabit cities."

"Augmented Reality browser Layar announced an upgrade to its service today that adds social features to the act of looking at data on top of the world around you. If you're using Layar to look through your mobile phone's camera and see real estate listings for the buildings nearby, social network messages left by your friends in a particular place or Flickr photos from the area – you can now share that data set's layer with anyone else by sending them its URL."

"Suica stands for "Super Urban Intelligent Card." Like the Oyster card, the Suica card uses RFID technology. Also noteworthy is that the Suica isn't the only smart card option for Japan's rail system – the Pasmo card is another popular one. There is a Mobile Suica, enabling Osaifu Keitai mobile phone users to use Suica via their phone instead of a card."

"I would like to put forward a new era in Internet research, which no longer concerns itself with the divide between the real and the virtual. It concerns a shift in the kinds of questions put to the study of the Internet. The Internet is employed as a site of research for far more than just online culture. The issue no longer is how much of society and culture is online, but rather how to diagnose cultural change and societal conditions with the Internet." via Alex Pang

"Forecasting, never an activity companies felt particularly confident about, has now become nearly impossible. Processes that once resulted in mildly imperfect visions of the future now produce wildly imperfect ones. "The last 8 to 12 months have created a strong realization among many corporate leaders that whatever planning they may have been doing, they didn't factor in the possibility of the future being dramatically different from the past," says Andrew Blau, co-president of strategy consultancy Global Business Network."

"As we know from extensive science fiction research, one day we will be equipped with unobtrusive and tastefully designed technology that will project before our eyes a heads-up display of information related to whatever real-life scene we’re looking at. That level of augmented reality, however, is a ways down the road, and unfortunately that road is likely to be strewn with the broken bodies of early adopters."

"Forecasting, never an activity companies felt particularly confident about, has now become nearly impossible. Processes that once resulted in mildly imperfect visions of the future now produce wildly imperfect ones. "The last 8 to 12 months have created a strong realization among many corporate leaders that whatever planning they may have been doing, they didn't factor in the possibility of the future being dramatically different from the past," says Andrew Blau, co-president of strategy consultancy Global Business Network."

"As we know from extensive science fiction research, one day we will be equipped with unobtrusive and tastefully designed technology that will project before our eyes a heads-up display of information related to whatever real-life scene we’re looking at. That level of augmented reality, however, is a ways down the road, and unfortunately that road is likely to be strewn with the broken bodies of early adopters."

Weiser and Seely Brown's paper building on the PARC 'ubicomp' research programme outlining a 'coming age of calm technology'. The article reprdoces Weiser's ideas about historical 'waves' of progress in computing.

An early interview with Jaron Lanier, poster-boy for VR with some great material: "Virtual Reality is conceived of as an expansion of reality, the provision of alternate realities for people in mass in which to share experiences, and so the types of metaphors that come up are things like cars, travel, different countries, different cultures. For instance, you might very well have a virtual car that you ride around even though physically you're in one place. It would go through different territories in Virtual Reality so that you could get around them – or transporter booths, perhaps. So you could have geographical metaphors. There might very well evolve a new geography, let's say – a fictitious planet with new continents that you can dive into to find new realities."

Apple's 1988 'future shock' vision video.

A good collection of vision videos all on one page, not all link to the actual videos but a good repository.

On the up – "ARToolKit is the world’s most popular library for augmented reality application development. With a ten-year development pedigree, an active community edition with thousands of users, and ongoing development incorporating the latest results of augmented reality research…"

Does what it sez on the tin.

Medical AR vision video depicting the ability to see 'into' a body using AR overlays. Not unlike MS 'future vision of personal health'.

"Thingiverse is a place for you to share your digital designs with the world. We believe that just as computing shifted away from the mainframe into the personal computer that you use today, digital fabrication will share the same path. Infact, it is already happening: laser cutters, cnc machines, 3D printers, and even automated paper cutters are all getting cheaper by the day. These machines are useful for a huge variety of things, but you need to supply them with a digital design in order to get anything useful out of them. We're hoping that together we can create a community of people who create and share designs freely, so that all can benefit from them."

Sterling comments on applications for AR by governments – surely something that would go disastrously wrong!

An entertaining article about 40 things about computing technology that have become redundant or simply don't exist any more.

AR t-shirts using FLARToolkit

RWW write-up on AR, giving a commentary explaining the whys and wherefores. The author runs the Bay Area Augmented Reality Meetup Group, so its a bit evangelical. Some interesting links to example services. Also commentary on 'ambient intelligence': "Ambient intelligence is a human interface metaphor. It implies that the connected devices around us are all connected to some form of intelligence. We see this when we drive through an automated toll system like FasTrak on the Golden Gate Bridge. Using the RFID tag issued by the bridge authority, the bridge knows who we are and what to do. We don't have to actively submit intelligence of our own: the ambient intelligence takes care of the job."

Streamy is an uber-aggregation service that plugs into the APIs of everything else and allows users to share content across all of the platforms/services they alredy use.

More commentary on AR, usual suspects – Layar, nearest tube station etc.

"IBM is involved in some very interesting projects at the intersection of two big trends we've been tracking in 2009: The Real-time Web and Internet of Things. They have a website devoted to this topic, called A Smarter Planet. As the name implies, it focuses on environmental matters such as energy and food systems. Sensors, RFID tags and real-time messaging software are major parts of IBM's smarter planet strategy. The catchcry for the site – Instrumented, Interconnected, and Intelligent – is about outfitting the world with sensors and hooking them to the Internet to apply the 'smarts.'"

"As promised in early June at the
E3 event, 360 Live users will see Twitter, Facebook and streaming radio service Last.fm available to their community as downloadable apps. Additionally, the existing Netflix application is expected to be updated to allow users to browse through titles directly from Live. With the promise of on-demand games, streaming videos, music and a new social media component, the Xbox community is about to look a lot like open source media center Boxee."

"This study explores how cloud computing technologies will become a disruptive force in the mobile world, making mobile apps more sophisticated and allowing them to be offered to a much broader audience of mobile subscribers. It details the mobile applications that will lead the growth, the key technologies, players and initiatives involved, new business models that will be introduced, and the barriers that must be overcome. Forecasts include subscribers and revenue by region and application category using mobile cloud applications."

O'Reilly web-squared report, that is a lot like ubicomp, figured as internet of things plus crowd-sourcing and web2: "If we are going to solve the world’s most pressing problems, we must put the power of the Web to work – its technologies, its business models, and perhaps most importantly, its philosophies of openness, collective intelligence, and transparency. And to do that, we must take the Web to another level. We can’t afford incremental evolution anymore."

RWW comment on O'Reilly's 'Web-squared' report: "To say that sensor data can be both machine generated (e.g. by RFID chips) and human generated is perhaps trying too hard to force the web 2.0 world into the new emerging Internet of Things. But that's neither here nor there. Where the 'web squared' report is spot on, is its point that applying collective intelligence to sensor data will be a rich vein of opportunity in the coming years. Clearly the web 2.0 philosophy can and will merge with Internet of Things."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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?"

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]

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.