Modern Long Distance Romance

We’ve been hearing the moans and groans of the music industry for a while about its demise due to lack of interest in the physical music product. And some of us still love that physical experience of putting on a record–the scent of it, delicately …

In this fifth post in our series, Dogs on Design, Raleigh Pop blogger Sarah F. Cox sat down with designer Michael Surtees, an interaction designer at Behavior. They talked about how humans behave on the web and how dogs behave in the park.

I’m tryi…

Chris Rivest and SunPrint, a low-cost fabrication method for producing solar cells.

Today, MIT’s Technology Review magazine reveals their 2010 list of the world’s top innovators under the age of 35. They were chosen because their work—spanning medicine, computing, communications, nanotechnology, and more— was chosen for the immense change they are affecting in the world.

Chris Rivest, 28, was chosen for SunPrint, a technology that lowers the cost of solar cell production from $2 per watt to under $.50 per watt, absolutely necessary if solar power will ever fully displace coal and natural gas. The process, originally developed by Xerox for ink-jets, is called acoustic printing— a sound wave is focused onto a pool of ink, which causes droplets to spatter onto the surface of the print media. This (mystical) process is extremely precise, which reduces the need for expensive tools and materials or further processing. Read more.

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Privacy is a hot topic. It wasn’t long ago that Facebook was being dragged through the papers as Zuckerberg and Co. scrambled to bring their policies up to scratch. Now it seems that Google are getting, surprisingly willingly, in on the act with Eric Schmidt’s prophetic comments last week, forewarning us all of the murky, digital identity dystopia to which we are undoubtedly, irrevocably, and in no small part thanks to his company, heading. It appears that this debate is in no way confined to sunny California, however. We dropped in on “21_21 Design Sight” museum in Tokyo this week to check out their current exhibition on this very theme.

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Now it’s becoming a little more apparent what can be done, from a manufacturing perspective, with the Liquidmetal material that Apple has recently licensed. And we couldn’t be more excited.

Back in May we posted on Oskar Zieta’s blow-molded steel furniture pieces, which are bulky objects rendered using brute industrial force. While I applauded the experimentation, I wasn’t a huge fan of the aesthetic (see photo below).

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The Shenzhen Hashi Future Parking Equipment Co. of China has a proposal situated somewhere between Superstudio and Plug-In City: An elevated megabus/subway hybrid that slides over the traffic instead of going around it, or creating congestion itself. From the looks of the video though, this excludes trucks—they’ll have to go around, as if they don’t have it hard enough already.

via treehugger

Thanks, David!

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Here’s a nice little tidbit from Frog Design, outlining a talk Jan Chipchase delivered to the US State Department about mobile money. The talk is part of a series of discussions entitled Tech@State, part of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s “21st Century Statecraft” initative.

Here’s an excerpt:

While cultural notions of privacy vary considerably, most people assume that transactions related to money — the details of a purchase; the balance on an account, that a bill has been paid-should be kept private. And while it’s certainly true for some transactions, there is a tendency to assume that privacy is necessary for *all* transactions. More research needs to be done in this space, but I’d argue that only a few key transactions need to remain truly private, and the others could flow through less private channels.

Read the full talk, slides included, here.

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Guest post by Paul Fraser.

The computer graphics gods (i.e., geeks) of the world have descended upon the Los Angeles Convention Center for the SIGGRAPH 2010 International Conference and Exhibition. Now in its 37th year, SIGGRAPH draws together tech-minded people interested in graphics research, art, animation, gaming, interactivity, science, education and the Internet for a week-long mashup.

Yesterday, we walked the aisles of the expo and found a number of products jumping on the 3D bandwagon. Whether you think 3D video / film / television is the future or that it’s a passing fad, no one can argue that the amount of 3D eye candy presented this year is enough to make any 3D-hater drool. You can’t walk 10 feet without finding an exhibit that uses the technology in new and fascinating ways.

When it comes to displaying 3D imagery, there are generally two types of technology: displays that must be viewed with 3D glasses (stereoscopic displays), and displays that do not require 3D glasses (autostereoscopic displays). Each technology has its advantages and disadvantages; however, it seems that autostereoscopic technology, though still in its infancy, is the future of 3D technology. If advertisers were to create a 3D video display for a store, for example, they would need the glasses-less technology for passersby to view it. Besides, having to wear glasses to view 3D imagery is becoming too cumbersome. Are you really going to carry around a pair of 3D specs in your pocket?

Sony is at the forefront of autostereoscopic 3D technology. During the Emerging Technologies portion of SIGGRAPH 2010, the company showcased the 360-degree autostereoscopic display prototype we’ve been anticipating trying out since we caught wind of it last week: the RayModeler. The device—which looks like it could have been taken from the set of a Star Wars film—is a compact version of a 3D display enclosed in a cylinder. At first glance, it looks like a high-tech coffee-bean grinder or a blender, but after taking another look, one can view the display from all directions and see a bright, color 3D image. According to Sony, the system is the first display of its kind, featuring special LED light sources that show 360 unique, 24-bit color images in all directions. The user can even control the orientation of the display’s content by using hand motions in proximity to the display (see video above).

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Decades ago Apple pioneered mass-uptake of the mouse, and now they’re out to break new ground with a new type of input device: The Magic Trackpad, announced this morning.

The sleek little rectangle works just like the trackpad on a MacBook(and is made from the same opaque glass), but it’s way bigger, giving you more room to maneuver your mitt; as you can see in the photo below, it’s about the same size front-to-back as Apple’s Bluetooth keyboard. And yes, the surface is both clickable and double-clickable.

The device should appeal strongly to minimalists: There’s no wires as it works via Bluetooth, and the sleek, futuristic form is about as pared down as you can get.

I use Expose a lot, and I find even the tiny act of having to move my hand from the mouse to my MacBook’s trackpad is enough to break my workflow. The Magic Trackpad will preclude this, as Expose can be invoked directly from the device.

On top of that, something about touch makes manipulating a mouse across a surface seem anachronistic, like pushing a Tonka truck around as a child. Your correspondent, for one, will be ditching his dust-catching mousepad to dive into full-time touch fingers-first.

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Used to be there was the subject, the camera, and the subject appearing on-camera, like this:

Then we got rid of the camera, replaced it with motion capture, and got this:

And finally we added the camera back in and combined it with motion capture to achieve this:

Once Andy Serkis played Gollum and Zoe Saldana played a blue alien, it didn’t take people long to figure out actors could play other humans, too, and avoid anachronistic makeup or prosthetic sessions. The most interesting manifestation of this is in the new Tron movie, where Jeff Bridges will play the same character (Clu) he played in the 25-year-old original. The twist is that modern-day Jeff Bridges’ actions will be digitized into younger Jeff Bridges on-screen!

“Now you can play yourself at different ages, whether it’s a younger version of yourself or an older version of yourself, digitally,” said Bridges in this Times piece explaining the concept.

This is kind of mind-blowing if you think about it. With this technology, inter-quels (i.e. movies between sequels) become possible: Bruce Willis could go back and do Die Hard 1.5 with his 1989 physique and hair, for instance.

It’s also disturbingly possible that Hollywood could use archival footage to digitize, say, Cary Grant’s face, body and voice, and have George Clooney play Cary Grant playing a movie character. Which is to say, George Clooney in the studio does a take, and the audience sees and hears Cary Grant doing the same take on-screen. Thus you could have long-dead film stars more or less “starring” in completely new movies.

What ramifications might this have for the rest of us outside the film industry? One application I can think of, as the technology trickles down and becomes affordable, is video chat. There’s been some debate as to whether or not people will want to “put their face on” for video chatting, but with self-modeled avatars that are always clean-shaven, or wearing makeup, or dressed nicely, perhaps it will become more palatable. It’s like a high-tech version of those tuxedo-print T-shirts.

While that’s harmless enough, I do hope they leave dead stars alone. Hollywood already tastelessly “resurrected” Humphrey Bogart, Louis Armstrong and Jimmy Cagney for a Diet Coke commercial back in 1991. If digitization and motion capture makes these deceased stars capable of feature-length projects, it will only serve to reinforce the notion that celebrities are immortal. And that’s ridiculous, because they aren’t.

Only Tron is.

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