Category Archives: Blog

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Head-mounted augmented reality computers: the budget hack versus the bespoke device

One of the more interesting things about the hardware hacking scene is comparing the results of different methodologies. Some folk prefer to develop gadgets that are as close to production-grade products as possible, while others are more focussed on the low-budget proof-of-concept kludge… and this week has seen examples of both approaches as applied to augmented reality visor-computers.

First up, the craftsman approach. Pascal Brisset was frustrated with wearable computer cooncepts that relied on some sort of back- or belt-mounted processor unit to drive the headset, so he decided to build the whole system onto an off-the-shelf visor VDU [via Hack A Day]. As you can see, the results are pretty compact:

Pascal Brisset's wxhmd wearable computer

It runs on Linux, too, but that probably went without saying. Of course, it’s just a proof-of-concept rather than something that Brisset could start building for consumers. As he states in his documentation disclaimers:

The systems draws 1 A with no power optimizations. This is acceptable since nobody would want to spend more than a few minutes with two pulsed microwave RF transmitters, an overheating lithium battery and eye-straining optics strapped to their forehead anyway.

Quite.

Meanwhile, down at the other end of the brain-farm, Andrew Lim built himself a backyard VR helmet using nothing more than an HTC Magic handset and a few dollars worth of other gubbins [also via Hack A Day]. It’s quite obviously a much more lo-fi affair than Brisset’s contraption:

It does have a certain goofy charm, doesn’t it? But again, hardly the sort of thing you’d try selling for any practical purpose whatsoever – the point being proven here is that augmented reality (and other similar emerging technologies) are not necessarily the exclusive domain of big corporations or slick new start-ups; where there’s a will (and some ingenuity), there’s a way. Or, as I often end up saying here, Everything Can (And Will) Be Hacked.

Personally, I find that reassuring, because the battle for direct access to our retinas is just starting to heat up. The big tech corporations can see there’s money to be made with wearable tech in the very near future, and they’re preparing to roll out the hardware as soon as next year (if press releases are to be trusted, which they quite possibly aren’t)… and as Jan Chipchase pointed out, the way they’ll make the stuff affordable to you is by co-opting with companies who’re desperate for the direct pipeline to your brainmeat that said hardware will provide. They need to ride that augmented reality hype curve, after all – at least until it reaches the trough of disillusionment.

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The geek finds its own use for things: Google Wave RPGs

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Google Wave logoA few weeks back, all the major tech blogs were saying “well, Google Wave seems pretty neat, but we’re not really sure what it’s for”. Google themselves surely had a number of potential applications in mind, but whether using Wave as a platform for roleplaying games was one of them remains an unknown quantity. (It’s surely a cheaper option than that touchscreen table mod, though.)

The waves are persistent, accessible to anyone who’s added to them, and include the ability to track changes, so they ultimately work quite well as a medium for the non-tactical parts of an RPG. A newcomer can jump right in and get up-to-speed on past interactions, and a GM or industrious player can constantly maintain the official record of play by going back and fixing errors, formatting text, adding and deleting material, and reorganizing posts. Character generation seems to work quite well in Wave, since players can develop the shared character sheet at their own pace with periodic feedback from the GM.

Unfortunately for those of us who are more into the tactical side of RPGs, it isn’t yet well-suited to a game that involves either a lot of dice rolling or careful tracking of player and NPC positions. Right now, Wave bots are hard to get working reliably and widgets are scarce, which means that if you don’t want to use the standard dice bot that Wave debuted with (dice bots are an old IRC favorite) then there isn’t really another convenient option; rolls are either made with real dice and then posted on the honor system, or they’re posted in batches and a GM then uses them in sequence.

In truth, this probably isn’t all that big a surprise – from IRC and email onwards, pretty much every internet communications format has been bent to the whims of gamer geeks. But it highlights a fundamental difference in the way people approach a new technology: a journalist goes in thinking “what is this meant to do?”, but the true digital native goes in thinking “what can this do for me?”.

Both questions are valuable, of course, but I suspect that it’s the increased penetration of the latter mindset that ensures I get the bulk of my news and opinion journalism online. Whether the difference in underlying philosophies that those questions represent is a function of network architecture or a cause of it remains, naturally, an unanswerable (but greatly entertaining) point for debate… maybe we could start a Wave for that? 😉

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/10/google-wave-we-came-we-saw-we-played-dd.ars

Big up Matt Staggs, who i believe suggested this a few weeks back.

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Natural nuclear reactors

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My magical statistics monkeys tell me that last week’s post on dissociative fugues was surprisingly popular, so I thought I’d share another article I found fascinating. Yet another hat-tip to Geoff Manaugh at BLDGBLOG for this one; it’s a Scientific American report on naturally occuring nuclear reactors. Yes, you read that right – nuclear power plants that just happened by geological chance.

More than two tons of this plutonium isotope were generated within the Oklo deposit. Although almost all this material, which has a 24,000-year halflife, has since disappeared (primarily through natural radioactive decay), some of the plutonium itself underwent fission, as attested by the presence of its characteristic fission products. The abundance of those lighter elements allowed scientists to deduce that fission reactions must have gone on for hundreds of thousands of years. From the amount of uranium 235 consumed, they calculated the total energy released, 15,000 megawatt-years, and from this and other evidence were able to work out the average power output, which was probably less than 100 kilowatts—say, enough to run a few dozen toasters.

(Or a few dozen highly-efficient computers, perhaps?)

It is truly amazing that more than a dozen natural reactors spontaneously sprang into existence and that they managed to maintain a modest power output for perhaps a few hundred millennia. Why is it that these parts of the deposit did not explode and destroy themselves right after nuclear chain reactions began? What mechanism provided the necessary self-regulation? Did these reactors run steadily or in fits and starts?

Go read the whole thing; the science isn’t too heavy, and it’s a pretty wild idea. I’m pretty sure I’ve read about something similar in a Stephen Baxter novel (though I can’t for the life of me remember which one); at the time I assumed he was speculating in a vacuum, but I guess I should have known better. 🙂

Regarding the popularity of the dissociative fugues post, I’ve been wondering whether perhaps I should be spending more time linking to interesting stuff and less time waffling around on tangents? It’s you guys who read this stuff, so what would you like to see here – more random points of interest, more speculative ramblings, or a blend of the two?

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New nanoparticle self-assembly routes “more like nature”

Here’s the latest on new techniques in nanoparticle self-assembly as discovered by researchers from the US Department of Energy:

“We’ve demonstrated a simple yet versatile approach to precisely controlling the spatial distribution of readily available nanoparticles over multiple length scales, ranging from the nano to the macro,” says Ting Xu, a polymer scientist who led this project and who holds joint appointments with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and the University of California, Berkeley’s Departments of Materials Sciences and Engineering, and Chemistry. “Our technique can be used on a wide variety of nanoparticle and should open new routes to the fabrication of nanoparticle-based devices including highly efficient systems for the generation and storage of solar energy.”

Well, that’s the sales pitch out of the way. The thing that caught my eye about this particular piece, though, was this paragraph:

“Bring together the right basic components — nanoparticles, polymers and small molecules — stimulate the mix with a combination of heat, light or some other factors, and these components will assemble into sophisticated structures or patterns,” says Xu. “It is not dissimilar from how nature does it.“

Now, think back to that video of DNA and RNA synthesising proteins like tiny little machines… as we get closer and closer to mastering matter at an atomic level, will the line between “life” and “machines” become increasingly meaningless?

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Underground economics

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Gaza Strip smuggling tunnelHere’s some fresh food for thought via the perpetually reliable BLDGBLOG, in the form of a report (and photoessay) on the black economy of the Gaza strip, which hinges on the many tunnels that run beneath the border:

If Gaza runs off a tunnel economy, Rafah is its tunnel town. In Najma Square, in the center of Rafah, the fruits of tunnel labor meet their first customers. Encircling the square are tables of TV sets, fans, blenders and generators; stalls packed with refrigerators, washing machines and ovens — and this is just the electrical side of town. Moving west toward the border, you see more goods: boxes of cigarettes, giant sacks of potato chips and sacks of cement. Then you pass the warehouses that sell the tools used to physically shape the tunnel industry: shovels, rope, pulleys and electrical cords, plus pickaxes, hammers, nuts, bolts and screws in all sizes. The industry of making the tunnels is a booming business on its own.

It’s not an especially science fictional story, at least at first glance – what could be less futuristic than hand-dug tunnels in the desert soil, and their freight of minor luxuries? [Image by Richard Mosse, from Time magazine; all rights reserved]

But think again: the tunnels are a result of a community placed under extreme economic isolation, a combination of the entrepreneurial spirit and the drive for survival. The risks, as documented in the article, are great – the tunnels are not only illegal, but dangerous – but the presence of the border makes them essential, inevitable. Ingenuity and desperation can defeat a physical border; history makes that very plain.

But this is all taking place in a world where goods are physically instantiated before being transported to the end user. Flash forward a decade or two (maybe less) to a world where fabrication and rapid prototyping technologies are as widespread as computers are now. How will nation-states contain the flow of goods across borders when the goods are no longer physical, when complete designs for contraband items can be emailed into a restricted zone, encoded by steganography into some innocuous image macro or spam leaflet?

Networks nullify geography… OK, so you won’t be able to fabricate food, but you’ll be able to fabricate weapons to attack those who prevent food from getting to you, and once you’re hungry enough that’ll seem like the best idea you ever had. End result? Physical blockades of other nation-states will become self-defeating; the very technologies that have enabled your initial superiority will oblige you to concede certain freedoms to those you have suppressed, because it will be easier and safer (and, hopefully, more politically acceptable) than the alternative. You can’t pull the ladder of technology up behind you as you climb.