Video: What Life in Augmented Reality Could Look Like
What would the world look like if we could seamlessly blend our physical and digital environments? In this video, designer Keiichi Matsuda overlays information over physical space in real time to show what augmented reality might be like in the future. His visualisation depicts how the technology would make it easier to connect with others but could also expose us to more advertising.
Matsuda’s vision is an extension of what’s possible with augmented reality today. Over the past few years, geolocation apps have made it possible to pin digital information to real places. Although smartphone apps are currently needed to make these displays visible, new devices could improve our experience of merged worlds. Google recently revealed plans to develop augmented-reality glasses and Apple has also hinted at investments in similar technology.
(via New Scientist TV: What life in augmented reality could look like)
Novelist Douglas Coupland Designs Lamppost/Parking Meter/Microcell/EV Charging station of the Future, for Vancouver
Streetlamps, cell phone towers and parking meters lend a certain urban charm, but these unnatural forms can also get a little clunky, especially as they grow in number.
To get rid of the clutter, the city of Vancouver is planning new all-purpose utility towers that will provide WiFi, cell phone service, parking, car charging and more — all wrapped up in a Candy Land-like stripey pole.
They’re called V-Poles, for Vancouver, and they’re the brainchild of Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland. He conceived the idea after he stumbled upon something called the lightRadio, developed by Bell Labs and Alcatel-Lucent, which compresses a cell phone tower’s circuit boards and cables into a tiny cube.
The devices can be stacked up inside a tower like Legos, according to Coupland. It can serve multiple frequencies and standards, i.e. 2G, 3G or LTE, and it can work anywhere there’s a power supply and a broadband connection. Just add other services, and you’ve got a complete information and energy ecosystem on one tree.
From bottom to top, it would include an inductive coil charging pad for electric vehicles; stacked telecom boxes for various providers; a WiFi transmitter; and an LED streetlamp The poles could even power a neighborhood bulletin board.
Coupland’s idea also includes a wide array of color schemes from which neighborhoods could choose, representing anything from a pileated woodpecker to the Vancouver Canucks.
Robotic Omni-Finger Infinitely More Dexterous Than Human Ones
While the prototype in this vid just has one Omni-Finger, the final concept will include three of them… This will enable robots to arbitrarily alter the orientation of objects that they’ve grasped without having to set the object down, manipulate it, and re-grasp it, making grasping tasks as a whole easier andmuch more efficient. The only problem remaining is to figure out how to keep the fingers in contact with an irregular object as the fingers move it around, but the researchers are working on some creative ideas involving surrounding the fingers with deformable sacks filled with some sort of viscous fluid.
(via Robot Finger Does What Your Finger Can’t - IEEE Spectrum)
Danish Amateurs Developing Sub-Orbital Capability Without Government Support
The amateur rocketeers at Copenhagen Suborbitals are getting closer and closer to orbit, testing a new bi-liquid fuel combination for a hand-built, donation-funded, non-profit rocket.
The group tested its alcohol- and liquid oxygen-powered TM65 rocket over the weekend, the largest amateur bi-liquid rocket in the world. The test fire lasted about 30 seconds, turning 700 liters of propellant into raging power.
Eventually, rockets like the TM65 will launch the Tycho Brahe capsule, seen at the top of the page, sending a single passenger to the boundary of space…The goal is to build a privately financed, amateur-designed space transport system, to prove you don’t need huge government funds to reach space.
(via Would You Ride This Pencil-Shaped Capsule To Space? | Popular Science)
Researchers Discover How to Protect Stem Cells from Aging
The researchers also demonstrated they could reverse this age-related loss of stem cells by increasing expression of Imp. “We turned the aging switch off,” says Jones.
This antidote to aging might be accomplished in a number of ways, such as by preventing let-7 from being elevated, blocking the destruction of Upd or increase the expression of Imp.
“This research opens new avenues for drug development aimed at stimulating a patient’s own stem cells to overcome the consequences of aging,” says Toledano.
Jones says the study uncovered a mechanism by which a niche can lose its supportive function and demonstrates this can be reversed. “In patients, this could include co-transplantation of components of the niche itself, or rejuvenation of the niche using drug therapy to support the transplanted stem cells,” says Jones.
Everyone is Working on Permanent Moon Bases Except NASA
“We’re not talking about repeating what mankind achieved 40 years ago,” Roscosmos… head Vladimir Popovkin said through a translator. “We’re talking about establishing permanent bases.”
Japanese space agency JAXA openly stated that it a manned moon mission is its next human spaceflight priority as well.
Rumblings of permanent moon bases and manned missions to Earth’s orbiting neighbor have been present for some time now in the international space community, but to hear the heads of agencies state so boldly their intentions marks something of a significant shift in the timbre of the dialogue.
NASA is setting a course for a manned asteroid landing sometime in the next decade, followed by a manned Mars mission in the decade following that. But it seems that in the meantime more than one spacefaring nation aims to establish a presence on the lunar surface.
Using a Tablet and a Glove to Manipulate 3D Virtual Objects in Real Space
Cool demo video of T(ether) from the MIT Media Lab Tangible Media Group
(via unexpectedtech)
DARPA Launches Program to Industrialize Genetic Engineering
DARPA has launched a program called called “Living Foundries,”designed to apply the conventions of manufacturing to living cells, Wired Danger Room reports.
DARPA has awarded seven research grants worth $15.5 million to six different companies and institutions, including the University of Texas at Austin, Cal Tech, and the J. Craig Venter Institute. “Living Foundries” aspires to streamline genetic engineering for “on-demand production” of whatever bio-product suits the military’s immediate needs, starting with a library of “modular genetic parts.”
The agency wants researchers to come up with a set of “parts, regulators, devices and circuits” that can reliably yield various genetic systems. After that, they’ll also need “test platforms” to quickly evaluate new bio-materials to “compress the biological design-build-test cycle by at least 10X in both time and cost,” while also “increasing the complexity of systems that can be designed and executed.”
What could possibly go wrong?
(via DARPA, Venter launch assembly line for genetic engineering | KurzweilAI)
Researchers Design Metamaterial that Stretches When Compressed, Expands When Pulled
Imagine cushions that lift up instead of sinking when you sit on them. Impossible? Not according to a blueprint for new materials with “negative compressibility”: the materials compress when they are pulled and expand when they are pushed.
…Zachary Nicolaou and Adilson Motter of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, have now designed a metamaterial that stretches when compressed, and vice versa, under any circumstances.
“What is interesting is that they study systems that are not responding to a vibration but to a steady applied force,” says John Pendry of Imperial College London. That should be impossible, as any material that behaves this way (stretching when compressed, and vice versa) would be inherently unstable and instantly collapse into a stable state without displaying such behaviour.
Nicolaou and Motter got around this by designing a material with an internal structure that does transition to a stable state, but a state that is more compressed or expanded than the original state.
Their theoretical design involves a row of four “particles” – each made of groups of molecules – that attract each other to varying degrees. The force attracting the two inner particles is weak, so that pulling on the material breaks that bond. “As soon as that happens, the outer particles attract each other more,” says Motter, so overall the material compresses.
If this material is squeezed, though, the two inner particles are brought close enough together to reform the weak bond – and the material can expand.
(via ‘Impossible’ material would stretch when compressed - physics-math - 22 May 2012 - New Scientist)
Study of MMORPG Confirms Conventional Wisdom on How Men and Women Manage Social Networks
Szell and Thurner say the data reveals clear and significant differences between men and women in Pardus.
For example, men and women interact with the opposite sex differently. “Males reciprocate friendship requests from females faster than vice versa and hesitate to reciprocate hostile actions of females,” say Szell and Thurner.
Women are also significantly more risk averse than men as measured by the amount of fighting they engage in and their likelihood of dying. They are also more likely to be friends with each other than men.
These results are more or less as expected. More surprising is the finding that women tend to be more wealthy than men, probably because they engage more in economic than destructive behaviour.
“These results confirm quantitatively that females and males manage their social networks drastically different,” say Szell and Thurner.
Of course, there are important questions over the extent these findings reflect gender differences in the real world. One obvious problem is that of gender swapping: men who play as women and vice versa. Szell and Thurner say that other studies have shown that around ten per cent of online gaming populations engage in gender swapping. They say there’s no reason to think this would be any different in Pardus and that it shouldn’t effect the results.
A more serious problem could be the well known phenomenon that women tend to receive better treatment in male-dominated online gaming communities. Indeed, Szell and Thurner say they can see evidence of this in their data. That’s something they’ll need to look into in more detail.
There s one group for whom this kind of study will be invaluable: advertisers and marketeers. That makes it potentially valuable form a commercial point of view.
(via How Men and Women Manage Their Social Networks Differently - Technology Review)
