Tag Archives: augmented-reality

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MIT researchers create cheap "sixth-sense" ubiquitous computing device

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800px-Augmented_reality_-_heads_up_display_concept The era of ubiquitous computing progresses apace (Via PhysOrg):

US university researchers have created a portable “sixth sense” device powered by commercial products that can seamlessly channel Internet information into daily routines.

The device created by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scientists can turn any surface into a touch-screen for computing, controlled by simple hand gestures.

The gadget can even take photographs if a user frames a scene with his or her hands, or project a watch face with the proper time on a wrist if the user makes a circle there with a finger.

The MIT wizards cobbled a Web camera, a battery-powered projector and a mobile telephone into a gizmo that can be worn like jewelry. Signals from the camera and projector are relayed to smart phones with Internet connections.

According to the researchers, the gadget (unveiled by MIT researcher Pattie Maes at the Technology, Entertainment, Design [TED] conference currently underway in Long Beach, California) uses about $300 U.S. worth of store-bought components, and can do things like recognize items on store shelves, retrieve and project information about products, look at an airplane ticket and let the user know whether the flight is on time, or recognize books in a book store, project reviews or author information from the Internet onto blank pages, and recognize articles in newspapers and retrieve the latest related stories or video from the Internet. You can interact with the data using any surface–even your hand if nothing else is available. “Maybe in ten years we will be here with the ultimate sixth-sense brain implant,” Maes said.

Forgot about trekking to the Wizard. Dorothy should have got the Strawman one of these.

(Image: Leonard Low, Concept for augmented reality mobile phone, via Wikimedia Commons.)

[tags]computers,augmented reality,technology,gadgets[/tags]

Fiction

NEW FICTION: ROOTS by Mark Ward

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Futurismic fiction hits the ground running for the new year with “Roots” by Mark Ward.

Super-enhanced transhuman troubleshooters; augmented and virtual realities; griefers and grifters and ex-girlfriends… when Chris East sent this one over from the slush pile, I took a look at the first few paragraphs and was sucked inexorably right through to the end before I knew what hit me. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did – be sure to let us know in the comments box at the bottom!

Roots

by Mark Ward

The first Hitler was seen by a jogger chasing the morning light through the remains of San Francisco. He stood in the grassy clearing once known as Ghirardelli Square declaiming to an invisible audience.

The runner hesitated when she saw him, sneakers tapping time on a strip of sidewalk missed by the robot reclamation teams. He looked crazy but she did not know if he was the pervert or harmless kind.

The countdown in the corner of her vision went pink so she pushed off the kerb and out across the springy turf. She relaxed when she saw its shadow pointed toward the sun. It was only a shade. Good work too. The uniform draped well and even the toothbrush moustache looked the right side of ridiculous. She shot some footage then wiggled her fingers to file it to the news channels. Another Hitler popped into view before she dipped under the tree line.

Hitlers were rampant by the time she was leaning on her thighs on Pier 39, sucking in lungfuls of air and fighting the urge to puke.

A thick drift of them, their jerking salutes as choreographed as a chorus line, had formed around the Fountain of Light in Montgomery Park. Continue reading NEW FICTION: ROOTS by Mark Ward →

Blog

Mixed-reality Manchester – Second Life meets real life

This should give your head a pretty good twisting for a Monday morning.

Mixed reality Manchester

I’ll let Wagner James Au explain it, because I can’t condense it any further and still get the story across:

“… last October in Manchester, a big screen display was set up in All Saints Gardens; the park was also recreated in Second Life.  Meanwhile, video cameras in the real park record people who are there, and that live footage is merged in a chroma mixer to video captured in the SL version of All Saints. 

The result is broadcast on the Manchester screen, so people there can watch themselves interact with avatars.  But that’s just the beginning: the mixed reality video is also broadcast into the virtual version of All Saints Gardens in Second Life, so avatars can watch themselves interact with people in the real park, too.”

As Au points out, there’s a whole lot of reality layering going on right there.

“Liberate Your Avatar” was a public art installation by Paul Sermon designed to “expose the identity paradox in Second Life” – you can read more about it at the project’s website (which is where the image above has been borrowed from).

[tags]metaverse, augmented reality, Second Life, identity[/tags]
Blog

Simulations – from guns to festivals

Via reBang, here’s an article on the ironically named Zen Technologies, an Indian company that specialises in training simulators that can teach everything from driving a truck to crack-shot sniping with an AK47. When you add this selection to other training devices like the virtual chainsaw, you realise we’re rapidly reaching a point where almost any high-risk activity can be experienced virtually.

But low-risk activities are catching up fast now the technology is more accessible; as soon as people get access to virtual worlds, they start recreating objects and events from the real world (even major festivals, like Burning Man’s SL incarnation), and fabbing technology means that objects that start their life as virtual can be made real and solid in meatspace … so how long before we need the equivalent of Customs and border controls between reality and everywhere else?