Science News reports that a team at the University of Glasgow has set up four single pixel detectors and used gear normal to a high school science lab to create 3D images, fully mapping the test object. Why is this important? Because unlike a 20 million pixel camera array, single pixel detectors can operate over a much greater bandwidth than visible and ultraviolet light, so you can also apply it to thing like x-rays and infrared energy. This is going to open up a range of applications not previously available, especially medical imaging and natural resources investigations.
I would have loved a copy of this game if it had only existed, but this very funny video was put together by the folks at Collage Humor. The site has a large number of highly skilled contributors with a range of different talents, so you can find all kinds of amusing content there.
Coming up on Thursday the 28th at the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction at Kansas University, Cory Doctorow will be doing a lecture entitled The Coming War on General Purpose Computing: Every single political issue will end up rehashing the stupid Internet copyright fight. I wish I was anywhere near there so I could attend and hear one of the most innovative and insightful thinkers of the last dozen years give this presentation. If you are nearby, don’t miss it; seating is free, but limited, so you want to get there early. If someone records it and puts in on TED or YouTube, I will post it here, which will at least be better than missing it entirely.
In the meantime, here is a very related presentation he gave back in 2011 that should give you an idea of the subject matter. The Copyright and Intellectual Property questions are very complex, because the solutions to protect one group’s rights would often wipe out every other group’s rights, and what we need is a system that will protect everyone’s rights at once. There is a solution to be found, but not without a lot of work to find common ground and implement a best practices list that actually works for all of us. I appreciate the fact that Doctorow looks at the problem from lots of angles and is not shy about expressing his opinions about all of the components involved with the process.
This stuff is important; it deserves your attention and understanding. Yeah, it may take a bit of time and effort to comprehend but the rewards of getting it right will be amazing for the entire human race. Don’t let the future be determined without taking a moment to find out about the arguments and making your voice heard in favor of the aspects you consider worth fighting for.
In 1945 Arthur C. Clarke lost a billion dollars by inventing geosynchronous communication satellites, because there was no technology capable of launching them into orbit until the late 1950s, and nothing that could reach geosynchronous orbit until the 1960s. Interestingly enough, in 1964, the same year the very first live TV news stories made it across the Atlantic on those satellites to become part of regular TV News programs, Clarke predicted how the new technology would change the world… and his description is spot on for the way we communicate today. Some people really do seem to be living in the future.
This sounds a lot more like a commercial than I would normally share here, but the concept is unique; using a small spherical robot as a real time marker for your 3D Augmented Reality character to manifest on. This gives you flexibility and mobility not previously available to interact with your environment. While the usage they are targeting is within a game, the potential applications range far beyond that.
For instance, this could be used as a personal tour guide in a museum, slaved to a GPS, a museum map, and an extensive database of facts on each exhibit, along with speech recognition processing. It would be able to answer your every question about any exhibit in great detail. Or linked to the camera and a library of geometry and trigonometry functions, you could use nearby buildings and moving vehicles to learn various math functions with literally real world examples, and again query the system to get a full understanding of what you were learning, with your virtual tutor traveling your city or town with you.
OK, for the outdoor applications you might want to carry a pocketful of the round robots with you, to replace the ones crushed under city bus tires or swept into storm drains by sudden showers as you go along. But those bots are extremely simple, and after another 6 months of producing them ought to become quite cheep as well, making their use in such environments quite cost effective. Thanks to Tech Crunch for the heads up on this one.
While this is a nice little astronomy video, it isn’t really about the stars at all. When you go to the 100,000 Stars web site the really interesting thing is the demonstration of WebGL. Currently WebGL is implemented by default in the latest release of Chrome, and it is available in Safari, Firefox, and Opera, but you have to turn it on to use it (get activation instructions). I am sure no one is going to be shocked or surprised that WebGL also requires a fairly robust and recent graphics card, and even with that you may need to grab the latest drivers for it. While this should work on most tablets, smart phone implementation is still problematic.
