User experience without interface
When I came to Munich I got to know the automatic escalators at the subway stations, which can go in both directions. They are a good example of machines which do not require the active participation of humans to do their job, even though humans are an integral part in what they are doing. To find out more, read the whole article.
Magnetic Universe in your hands
Magnetic Universe
The NeoCube is composed of 216 individual high-energy sphere magnets, which can be formed into BILLIONS of shapes and patterns. It is highly addictive!
Money doesn’t grow on trees but Plastic….
Massachusetts-based Metabolix Inc. has created a variety of switchgrass that produces plastic in their leaf tissues.
Metabolix recently completed greenhouse trials showing that not only they can produce plastic out of plants,
but they can also use the biomass remains to produce biofuels.
Produced by Aspasia Daskalopoulou of Boston University’s Center for Science and Medical Journalism.
Shit Interaction Designers Say…
!!! Nerd Alarm !!! at the Interaction 12 in Dublin
Augmented Reality Sandbox
Video of a sandbox equipped with a Kinect 3D camera and a projector to project a real-time colored topographic map with contour lines onto the sand surface. The sandbox lets virtual water flow over the surface using a GPU-based simulation of the Saint-Venant set of shallow water equations.
Smart Parking Solutions for Big Cities
Find parking faster. Pay more easily. Avoid tickets. SFMTA’s SFpark project is a two-year federally funded pilot of new parking management technologies and approaches. Less circling and fewer double-parked cars give us cleaner air and safer streets for bicyclists and pedestrians. With less traffic, public transit and emergency vehicles move more easily.
Descriptive Camera
Really nice concept to utilize Amazons MechTurk and a glimpse of light at the tunnel of the private picture chaos.
The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a regular camera—point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text description of the scene.
The technology at the core of the Descriptive Camera is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk API. It allows a developer to submit Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) for workers on the internet to complete. The developer sets the guidelines for each task and designs the interface for the worker to submit their results. The developer also sets the price they’re willing to pay for the successful completion of each task. An approval and reputation system ensures that workers are incented to deliver acceptable results. For faster and cheaper results, the camera can also be put into “accomplice mode,” where it will send an instant message to any other person. That IM will contain a link to the picture and a form where they can input the description of the image.
Visions
2010 - Ray Kurzweil predicts the future of technology 25 years
1974 - Arthur C. Clarke predicts the future of technology 25 years