Today reading in the train: "Beyond Blade runner: Urban control, the ecology of fear by Mike Davis. An excerpt I liked: Perhaps, as William Gibson suggests, 3-dimensional computer interfaces will soon allow post-modern flaneurs (or 'console cowboys') to stroll through the luminous geometry of this ...
Ambient Information Visualization thesis
If you're into information visualization, the Licentiate thesis of Tobias Skog (Future Applications Lab, Göteborg) is very appealing. It's called "Ambient Information Visualization" (1.7Mb pdf here) and it deals with various issues regarding informative art, everyday displays as well as their utili...
Self-Replication of a LEGO station by a robot
Self-replication robotics is a curious domain. Unlike, self-reconfigurable robotics, the idea is to utilize an original unit to actively assemble an exact copy of itself from passive components. Greg Chirikjian of John Hopkins University created a self-replicating robot capable of driving around a ...
Social functions of location in mobile telephony
Arminen, I. (2005): Social Functions of Location in Mobile Telephony. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. This article addresses a topic close to my PhD research: the importance of location awareness in (mobile) communication. Prior to studying the importance of location-based services (especially w...
Amazing railway velocipede
This afternoon I ran across stories about railway velocipedes and I think it made my day. For instance, this one is amazing at Catskillarchive.com. The railway velocipede shown in the accompanying illustration is an adaptation of the design of the safety bicycle to track service, the machine havin...
Surrealscania: digital video with GPS-tech
Surrealscania is a web-based art project from Sweden that combines digital video with GPS-tech carried out by by filmmaker and videoartist Anders Weberg and ethnologist and cultural analysist Robert Willim. The project examines space/place questions such as "How do different places become interesti...
A manifesto for networked objects - Why things matter
Julian finally released the manifesto about the future of artifacts and the Internet of Things. It's called A Manifesto for Networked Objects — Cohabiting with Pigeons, Arphids and Aibos in the Internet of Things. And of course the short title is "Why Things Matter" which nicely expressed the fact ...
In certain circumstances people do not even notice if a room grows to four times its size
A paper in Current Biology by Andrew Glennerster and colleagues shows that humans ignore the evidence of their own eyes to create a fictional stable world as described in the Oxford University News. The Virtual Reality Research Group in Oxford used the latest in virtual reality technology to create...
Some Xslab projects
At XSlabs they seem to do interesting things: soundSleeves is a project by Vincent Leclerc & Joey Berzowska: These sleeves are sensitive to physical contacts. When users flex or cross their arms, a sound is synthesized within the sleeves and output through miniature flat speakers. The idea is prett...
HP and its "misto" interactive table
CNET reports on that HP Labs celebrated its 40th anniversary this week with an open house in Palo Alto, Calif., in which several of its consumer-oriented projects were on display, including a coffee table that featured a touch-screen display that could be used for sharing pictures, playing board ga...