While the vast majority of the European and Stateside augmented reality ideas I see galloping through my RSS feeds are stolid and practical apps with obvious commercial potential – mapping, navigation, informational – you can always rely on Japan to come up with something that little bit more alien. Pink Tentacle found this video of Miruko, a wearable eyeball-robot that:
… scans the surroundings in search of virtual monsters that are invisible to the naked human eye. When a virtual monster is spotted, the mechanical eyeball rolls around in its socket and fixes its gaze on the monster’s location. By following Miruko’s line of sight, the player is able to locate the virtual monster and “capture” it via his or her iPhone camera.
No details as to who Miruko’s creators are, unfortunately, but I expect we’ll be hearing more from them before too long. Probably around about the time they sell the idea to the Pokemon people…
No, it’s not the title of some best-forgotten B-movie, but some high-brow astrophysics that – in all honesty – I can’t say I fully understand. But it’s something to do with quantum physics, entropy and super-massive black holes:
“Although Hawking radiation implies that black holes contain all this disorder, scientists have been puzzled as to where it all comes from. The collapsing stars that turn into black holes do not start out with nearly enough. How does the matter become so scrambled?
Frampton’s team argues that the extra entropy is generated by the random nature of quantum physics. This should sometimes allow a collapsing ball of matter to spontaneously transform into something called a “monster” – an arrangement of matter that has maximum disorder, with particles travelling at high speed in random directions.”
These “monsters” could help explain our way to a quantum theory of gravity, apparently. It’s times like this I wish I’d stuck with science instead of engineering. [Image courtesy NASA]
[tags]space, black holes, monsters, physics[/tags]
Even though analyzing high-resolution satellite imagery (with the help of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) hasn’t turned up the missing adventurer Steve Fossett, it did discover several previously unknown small crashed planes, some dating back to the 1950s. So why not put it to even more productive use, asks columnist Benjamin Radford, and use it to find Bigfoot or one of the various lake monsters said to inhabit Scotland’s Loch Ness, Canada’s Lake Okanagan or the U.S.’s Lake Champlain, among others? [Via LiveScience.]
Success would convince the skeptics, while failure would do nothing to dissuade the True Believers. So it’s win-win all around! [Image: Wikimedia Commons.]
[tags]cryptozoology, satellite imagery, monsters[/tags]
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