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Blog: September Archive
InfoWorld: 10 future shocks for the next 10 years
On its 30th anniversary, InfoWorld is not only looking back, but looking forward with this article. 10 future shocks for the next 10 years.
Sexed Robots
Sexed Robots is the title of a project by artist Paul Granjon. The robots are autonomous wheeled vehicles fitted with nylon male or female nylon genitalia. According to the project description:
They are programmed to explore their environment, occasionally entering a "in heat" mode, where they will try and locate a partner in the same state. If a partner is located, the robots will attempt to mate.
What's the point, you may ask? Well, other than art not needing a point--or at least a practical purpose--Granjon is interested in exploring the co-evolution of humans and machines.
If Granjon wants humans to interact with machines in this way, they are going to need to look a lot less like his robots, and a lot more like Summer Glau in the TV series: "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles":
Here is a link to the Make post on the project which I will include simply because of the title: "Bots wander around aimlessly and then mate." Don't we have enough things on the planet already wandering aimlessly and mating?
rk
Clean Web 2.0 Design
I recently ran across this Web 2.0 how-to design guide, which I found to be an excellent article on clean interface design. The guide is geared toward popular Web 2.0 website design aspects, but the principles are sound and generally evolved well before websites, 2.0 or otherwise.
The author Ben Hunt gives much credit to Apple for the current cutting edge of design goodness. I would have to agree given not only Apple's proven design track record in general, but also their website's design in particular, which employed advanced graphic design principles while others were still using <frame>s.
rk
Moving Into The Cloud
This post from Geoffrey Long talks about the continuing formation and use of the "Cloud" (as in Cloud Computing) but also gets the distinction between that and Ubiquitous Computing:
"...I conflated the terms 'cloud computing' and 'ubiquitous computing', but in retrospect I should pull the two terms apart somewhat...."
Geoffrey's discussion of his experiments to sync his information in the cloud to his local environment is worth a read and points out one of the many issues we will be wrestling with as cloud computing and ubicomp become more prevalent. Having just watched the movie "Live Free or Die Hard", where cyberterrorists threaten to hack and take down the information infrastructure of the U.S., I think the discussion of centralizing information is far from being done.
rk
Wifi Photo Frames
FrameChannel is a free web service that allows you to manage content on your wireless picture frame. From their website:
Once you set your frame up with FrameChannel and subscribe to channels of your choice, your frame will automatically update when changes to these feeds are made. For example, you will be able to see your new flickr pictures on your wireless frame as soon as they are updated on your flickr account!
Actually, you had me at wireless picture frame. I had been waiting for such a thing a while back and now it seems like a number of WiFi capable digital photo frames have emerged on the market. The company lists the variety of wireless and other picture frames their service can work with here.
The other thing that caught my eye is the statement:
Friends and family can contribute content directly to your frame, updating family photos in real time.
This feature is actually of great interest to me as it is an application I envisioned earlier this year when I was trying to help my father set up and use a digital photo frame. My father has always been mechanically gifted but has little desire to log onto a computer or the Internet. The prospect of getting him to further somehow transfer digital photos to his frame is just a non-starter. So the only option that left me with is occasionally sending an SD card of photos by snailmail. It would be nice, I thought, if I was somehow able to get his computer to transfer incoming photos to the digital frame automatically. It seemed like it would be easy enough to piece together the necessary software bits, but they would depend on having the necessary WiFi or Bluetooth wireless capability in the photo frame.
Fortunately, the emergence of WiFi photo frames from various vendors means I won't have to do this nontrivial hardware hack of a digital photo frame, and now thanks to FrameChannel I won't even have to write the software. I will definitely be shopping for a couple of these WiFi frames in the near future and giving FrameChannel's service a test drive.
Of course, the fact that FrameChannel has tackled the main applications for this just means that I am now free to consider less obvious Ubicomp applications of the technology.
rk