Sometimes the Internet shows you something that defies your tendency to think about things in terms of what’s familiar. I’m not talking about ESPN3.com.
In this case I’m talking about technology and art intersecting in new magic ways that involve you in a personalized experience via HTML5, unique to you. Choreographed windows, real-time compositing, etc., all the bells and bombshells of the latest open web technologies. I don’t even know where to start with this one.
Forget HTML5 vs Flash, load it in Chrome, sit down and don’t touch anything. Do you remember the address of the house where you grew up?
This is not about digital media, or programming tips, or the latest cool app, but I’m going to point to it anyway. From the Telegraph is this article on Thorium as an energy source. Just when you thought there was no magic bullet, you read that one kilo of Thorium will produce as much energy as 200 kilos of uranium. The downside is that it is clean and safe. Oh sorry, I meant ‘upside’!
Yeah it sounds too good to be true, just like fusion and other things that were gonna let me take a long drive without that sphincter-tightening feeling that I’m eating significantly into the down payment for my first house. But there’s a lot of solid science behind this, and the resistance so far seems to be from the ‘entrenched interests’-remember them?- who really would prefer that we didn’t look into Thorium because of all the money they have spent on potentially grossly inferior methods of producing energy. Shit the money to just determine if this is viable is nada. Maybe Google and Apple should form a joint venture.
Hey: in the spirit of the butterfly who flaps his wings and changes things on the other side of the world (I mean YOU, not me) go read the article, write your congressman, march in the streets, use “Thorium” in your next graffiti masterpiece, or promote it on Reddit because it appears to be hitting a nerve on some level, fast.
With all this media, has the strength of ideas dissolved?
This is cool: imagine using a mouse that is not physically present. It’s another step on the path to making input devices more transparent, or in this case, actually invisible.
Kevin Kelly was one of the founders of Wired magazine way back in the early 1990’s, and he is always reliably thought-provoking. He found this list from 1997, of quotes from the first five years of the magazine, and there’s poetry and prophecy. Worth checking out. Here are just a few:
We as a culture are deeply, hopelessly, insanely in love with gadgetry. And you can’t fight love and win.
Jaron Lanier, Wired 1.02, May/June 1993, p. 80
It’s hard to predict this stuff. Say you’d been around in 1980, trying to predict the PC revolution. You never would’ve come and seen me.
Bill Gates, Wired 2.12, Dec 1994, p. 166
The future won’t be 500 channels — it will be one channel, your channel.
Scott Sassa, Wired 3.03, Mar 1995, p. 113
Need to look out a window at a nice view for a little perspective? Got no window? Got a building blocking your view? Winscape is the best view simulation for a dynamic window that I have seen. Winscape software, two plasma screen TVs and ’scenery movies’ form the basis for this system, which you can build yourself. The kicker is the view tracking that you can build into your setup using a Wii remote and an IR-emitting necklace-the view changes as you move around the room.
Admit it: you always wanted to go to sleep in San Francisco and wake up in Earth orbit, and now you can.
Until now, electronic devices have never seriously challenged physical books when it comes to content delivery. But with Kindle, iPhone and others, and now iPad, make no mistake: here comes the sea-change in the way that we take in the written word. We are talking about consuming content in a way that’s different from how we’ve done it for centuries.
How will this change publishing? What will determine what will be published as a book and what won’ be? Will any books at all be published, anymore? Craig Mod takes a stab at all these questions, in a ‘State of Publishing, 2010′ post. Absolutely worth a read. Very nice looking site btw, which reinforces one of Mod’s points, namely that some content (‘Definite Content’) that really makes use of the form of the printed page, will probably now be able to make the transition to digital reading devices.
The exciting thing that Mod touches on is that the formats that digital devices allow has only just begun to be explored. What do you do if your canvas is no longer pages that you turn? There is an infinite horizon upon which even people who make ‘formless content’ with text only will explore. Soon the idea that we had to mimic page-turning metaphor for e-books to be–what? Accessible?–will be seen as laughable…
Actually, worth the price of admission alone is comment #1:
“I find it difficult to fully engage any text unless I have the option of throwing it across the room.”
Have you heard of Chatroulette yet? Dreamed up by a 17-year-old Russian, it allows you to bounce as quickly as you want in a totally random way between other Chatroulette users in the world. The site is really just two windows, one showing you and the other showing your chat partner. If you want to interact with the person you see, there is audio and IM built in also. If not, one button takes you to the next odd random encounter. It’s a privacy invasion that remains anonymous. No registration required, just click and go. Interesting mashup of existing technologies. Something about the ease in moving to the next chat makes it strangely addictive…
Do you want to see something that makes Google Earth look like stone etchings?
Check out this talk from Ted2010, of the 3-D functionality in Bing Maps from Bing Maps’ Blaise Aguera y Arcas. This is far, far from using 3-D maps with the intent of simply finding your way around. It is closer than anything I have seen of a full 3-D representation of reality, and Aguera y Arcas emphasizes repeatedly that the overall purpose is geared towards weaving all available data about a location, from any available source, into the “picture”.
Bing Maps will incorporate metadata into potentially every aspect of what you see using cameras mounted on cars and back packs, but also user-generated content like images/video/blog posts/etc., etc. There’s “time travel” using photo archives, and accurate representations of celestial bodies. Augmented reality never seemed so…comprehensive.
It was similar to and every bit as elegant as Google Earth. Then they turned the real time video on.
The live video of Seattle’s Pike Place Market via 4G, on a moving screen within the view, floored me. It blew away lots of people watching the talk judging by the Ted audience response and naturally had me thinking of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. (Then I remembered that I first heard about that book at a bar within 40 feet of the fish tossers, all those years ago. Spooky! Forgive the digression.) Still, Snow Crash didn’t predict the way (potentially all) knowledge from totally decentralized info sources (ie potentially everyone with a camera, or any way to add content of any kind) would be integrated into these comprehensive windows onto the world.
One has to ask if Microsoft will find a way to let people without Internet Explorer use 3-D Bing Maps…
Steven Frank leads us on a speculative-but-insightful journey on the future of computing as illuminated by (you guessed it) iPad. Frank sees a “New World” in front of us, which began in 2007 with the introduction of iPhone or possibly a few years earlier with the arrival of Web 2.0 applications. The gist of his argument is that computer usage (broadly speaking) will be less of a tinkerers’ paradise where computer users needed some under-the-hood knowledge to keep versatile all-purpose machines running. We’ll have less freedom in how we can customize our machines, but hey will be much easier for most people to use, as well as less prone to breaking down. Specifically, in tech terms:
The bet is roughly that the future of computing:
1. has a UI model based on direct manipulation of data objects
2. completely hides the filesystem from the user
3. favors ease of use and reduction of complexity over absolute flexibility
4. favors benefit to the end-user rather than the developer or other vendors
5. lives atop built-to-specific-purpose native applications and universally available web apps
Even Frank, as an ‘Old-Worlder’, admits that he’s not entirely comfortable with the idea. But that may not be the point. The unwashed masses have got computers they can use easily now, they are happy as hell and will be catered-to commercially. As much as anything, this might dictate the direction we’re going. What do you think: are the days of hacking drawing to a close?
So smartphones are everywhere, the mobile internet is taken for granted, yet using credit cards is still often a problem for one reason or another, whether on the buyer’s side or the seller’s. Can you say 2010?
Innovation is sometimes the combination of existing elements into exhilarating synergy, and I don’t just mean peanut butter on a banana. With technology today, so many ‘existing elements’ are out there to be combined that one senses pregnant possibilities before they actually happen. You knew that there had to be better ways of doing things like paying people on the spot with large amounts of cash, or using Paypal on a mobile device, didn’t you?
But let’s review: mobile device+software+connectivity has basically dissolved the concept of dedicated devices, or at least that of producing dedicated devices as a profit-making venture, which is the same thing. I know that some people will still be using a GPS device that does nothing but navigation in five years, although the prospect looks a lot less interesting now that I have Maps Navigation from Google. You tell me something that platforms-in-your-pocket can’t do today and I’ll toss you a calendar. Time, Moore’s Law and the profit motive will transform these little gadgets into what used to be known as supercomputers soon enough, but in the meantime a whole lot of mundane little daily hiccups will be exorcised from your life. It will be less about sheer computing power than the power of the new model, comprised of the three things I mentioned at the start of this paragraph.
Swiping my credit card usually works, except when it doesn’t because the vintage 1980’s card-swipe behemoth is dying a slow death behind the counter. Also it becomes more and more of a pain in the neck to actually have to sign something and be handed a paper receipt after a transaction, in places where I’m still asked to do so. And between typing and captchas and data entry, trying to use credit cards for online transactions becomes an unholy tedium circus. I can only imagine the frustration of merchants who lose sales for reasons totally unrelated to their customers’ ability to pay. Well what if there was a way to add something that you can carry on a key chain to the process? A little square thing that would greatly simplify the process of taking payments if you’re a merchant, and would help you square with your buddy without going to an ATM. Just a little link between existing tech that changes everything and shows a few dinosaurs the door. Om Malik did a great review of Square (launched by Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame) and its disruptive potential.
