As a freelance journalist and editor for the emergent technology website Gizmag, I contributed over 100 articles throughout 2004, a small sample of which are represented here, along with other freelance feature articles.
TURN YOUR LIFE INTO A REAL TIME BLOG
Andy Warhol once said that in the future everybody will be famous for 15 minutes. Well move over Andy – the future has arrived with recent collaborations between communications giant Nokia and blogging innovator Six Apart which will create a powerful multimedia blogging experience for people who want to share their lives online – as they happen.
Mobile web logging is one of the most dynamic areas in content sharing today. Like a coral reef exuded by marine life, the digital landscape is being colonised by mobile phone owners using the expanded functionality of camera and video phones to capture the reality around them and upload it for a permanent, public digital record. Several trends are converging, making it not only possible but also easy to document your life and share it with others, from anywhere, said Barak Berkowitz, Six Apart’s CEO.
Use of camera phones is now widespread, and weblogging is being increasingly adopted by consumers. The ubiquity of Internet access makes it possible to remotely share your experiences with family and friends. By combining Six Apart’s TypePad and Nokia Lifeblog enhanced mobile capabilities, we’re making it easy for people to stay in touch no matter where they are.
Nokia Lifeblog is a mobile phone and PC application solution that keeps an organized multimedia diary of the items you collect with your mobile phone, but it is also further evolving into a indispensable tool for life sharing. Users will be able to upload multimedia like photos, videos, text messages, and multimedia messages to their TypePad account. TypePad’s enhanced set of media features have been designed by Six Apart and Nokia to enable blogging both with mobile phone and PC. TypePad’s award-winning personal publishing service provides a simple, elegant environment for people to communicate and share their life and the intuitive interface requires no installation or technical expertise. With these new enhanced mobile capabilities, users can more easily send photos and images directly from their mobile devices and digital camera phones and have them posted on the web in professionally created designs optimized for mixed media.
With the Nokia Lifeblog application and TypePad from Six Apart, we can help operators and other service providers to offer their customers the best possible mobile blogging experience, said Christian Lindholm, Director of Multimedia Applications, Nokia Ventures Organization. What happens once your life is permanently viewable online is then up to you!
Nokia Lifeblog can be used with the Nokia 7610 phone and later on with selected other Nokia Series 60 phones. Nokia Lifeblog 1.0 will be available during autumn 2004. The blogging capability of Nokia Lifeblog is based on the open ATOM standard, and will be available early 2005. For more information about Six Apart, TypePad and Movable Type, visit the Six Apart corporate weblog at www.sixapart.com.
MICRODISPLAYS LEAVE EYES WIDE OPEN
Wearable 3D Augmented Reality displays have just become all the more clearer thanks to Microvision Inc., a leader in light scanning technologies. A breakthrough 7.6 Million Pixel Microdisplay unit has been created using scanned-beam technology that can be incorporated into eyeglasses, goggles or helmets to create a stereoscopic, 3-D effect. These compact, high-resolution displays can further enhance the visual realism of the interactive experience to make the simulated environment more engaging.
Unlike Virtual Reality, where the user’s field of view is completely replaced with an artificial visual environment, Augmented Reality uses another technology known as “head tracking” in conjunction with augmented vision to overlay complimentary information on the user’s view. The imaging system knows where the user is looking and adjusts the displayed image accordingly. For example, when viewing a map, it may be beneficial to orient the map to the user’s field of view so that the user can identify landmarks in the real world by their proximity to landmarks on the map. Microvision’s new, scalable architecture for its microdisplays uses a single scanner to direct multiple beams simultaneously into separate zones of an image. The new architecture has the potential to deliver a bright, high resolution image over a very wide field of view creating an immersive “big-screen” effect that will ‘supersize’ applications such as personal theatre and gaming. Because the display utilizes conventional “surface emitting” LEDs as light sources, it holds the promise of achieving very low cost relative to display resolution and brightness.
“This is a major milestone in the development of color microdisplays for consumer products,” said Steve Willey, President of Microvision. “With our earlier single channel architecture, we were approaching a practical limit in field of view of around 25 degrees. Now we have the flexibility of increasing display performance by adding inexpensive LEDs and writing multiple zones. This architecture gives us the potential to achieve much wider fields of view and higher resolution necessary for the higher performance imaging and consumer products we are targeting.” Indeed, these new generation Microvision wearable displays will render a whole new world right before your eyes.
http://www.microvision.com/technology/displays_app.html
HAL and Artoo win a place in the Robot Hall of Fame
Carnegie Mellon has announced the 2004 inductees to the Robot Hall of Fame at the Carnegie Science Center. The robots honored in this first annual Hall of Fame event included NASA’s Mars Pathfinder Microrover Flight Experiment (MFEX), better known as “Sojourner”; Unimate, the first industrial robot; R2-D2, the unforgettable droid from the Star Wars movie trilogy; and the evil HAL-9000 computer, featured in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey,” created by science fiction writer and futurist Sir Arthur C. Clarke and director Stanley Kubrick.
The Robotics Institute, a division of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, was established in 1979 to conduct basic and applied research in robotics technologies and transfer them to industry to enhance productivity and product quality. Over time, its mission has broadened to include projects that benefit society at large like the Robot Hall of Fame.
Carnegie Mellon will be celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Robotics Institute on October 11-14, 2004. The second annual Robot Hall of Fame induction ceremony will kick off the weeklong celebration on October 11 at the Carnegie Science Center.
The Hall of Fame was created to honor noteworthy robots, both real and fictional, in recognition of the increasing benefits robots are bringing to society. Carnegie Mellon Provost Mark Kamlet and James H. Morris, former dean of the School of Computer Science, announced the creation of the Robot Hall of Fame on April 30, 2003. The first induction ceremony was held November 10, 2003.
“Our goal is to create a permanent, interactive exhibition involving robots that will educate and entertain a wide variety of audiences,” said Morris, who conceived the Hall of Fame concept. Anyone may suggest a robot for the Hall of Fame by accessing the Web site www.robothalloffame.org
To be eligible for the competition, the robots must be scientific or science fiction-oriented. Scientific robots must have served an actual or potentially useful function and demonstrated real skills in accomplishing the purpose for which they were created. Fictional robots should have achieved worldwide fame as fictional characters and helped to form our opinions about the function and value of all robots.
“It’s fitting that the Robot Hall of Fame is located here in Pittsburgh, the home of Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute,” said Robotics Institute Director Chuck Thorpe, who soon will be dean of Carnegie Mellon Qatar. “We have been doing research in many areas of robotics for nearly 25 years and have helped to focus attention on this field that has so much potential to help people.
Pac-Man augmented reality game hits the streets
November 26, 2004 The latest application of augmented reality has hit the streets of Singapore – a human version of the classic arcade game ‘Pac-Man’. Developed at the National University of Singapore’s Mixed Reality Lab, the Human Pac- Man” game recreates the popular arcade classic from 1980 with a new, augmented computing experience.
Unlike Virtual Reality, “Augmented Reality” means that, with the help of data glasses, a computer overlays digital information onto what the viewer physically sees. http://www.gizmag.com/go/3173/ Where the original 1980 arcade Pac-Man used a joystick to manoeuvre a small, yellow avatar through an energy grid, eating power points whilst being chased by “Ghosts”, Human Pac-Man is a real-world-physical, social, and wide area mobile entertainment system that is built upon the concepts of ubiquitous computing, tangible human-computer interaction, and wide-area entertainment networks.
Players interact with each other and the digitised, 3D ‘Pacworld’ environment overlaid on their field of vision through the use of wearble computers, a headset and goggles. One player acts as Pac-Man and the others roleplay the Ghosts, tracking each other down real-world streets or corridors with GPS receivers and motion technology linked to a central computer by a wireless LAN network. Extra helpers are linked to the system through the internet, making it possible for anyone in the world, not limited by her geographical location, to take part in the game and send players messages. Helpers can also”fly” into any part of the virtual world and advise the mobile players on the positions of all the cookies, treasures, and enemy mobile players in the game world.
Human Pac-Man has the same game rules as the original arcade game with the added bonus of real-virtual world interaction. While players see yellow, glowing 3D power points augmented on their goggles, physical objects like sugar jars are filled with Bluetooth radio receivers to collect and mirror the virtual challenge. When the “Ghosts” catch Pac-Man in the virtual overlay, the real-world players must physically touch the Pac-Man player to win.
Created by Dr Adrian David Cheok and a team of eight research staff and students at NSU’s Mixed Reality Lab, Human Pac-Man is a working prototype that, if commercialised, may just be the gateway application to real-world augmented gaming. The branding recognition of the classic 1980′s Pac-Man character is immense, and the wearable computing needed to play the augmented version is already trickling into modern arcade gaming, where games such as Dance Dance Revolution and ParaParaParadise require dancing as part of their digital interaction. Researchers at the University of South Australia (http://wearables.unisa.edu.au/projects/ARQuake/www/index.html) have also created a take on the popular 90s computer game Doom that overlays a players field of view.
‘Current games are restricted to static and monotonous interfaces where players stayed glued to their seats in front of a screen,’ says Dr Cheok… We felt a need to explore into the untapped frontier in human computer interaction where users are immersed physically in the game. We believe that Human Pacman …has the potential [to] create a new genre of gaming.”
Funding for the game prototype came from the military, who are also interested in the applications of augmented reality and participant networking for battlefield conditions.
http://www.microvision.com/nomadmilitary/index.html
Augmented reality is also currently being used for engineering (http://www.microvision.com/nomadexpert/index.html) for virtual schematics that overlay complex mechanical jobs and could be used in medicine for enhanced information for surgeons and telemedicine.
For more information see:
http://mixedreality.nus.edu.sg/research-HP-infor.htm
TXT MOB technology unites social networks
November 26, 2004 TXT MOB, an innovative social application for SMS services, is networking community groups for on-the-ground information sharing. TXT Mob lets you quickly and easily share text messages with friends and total strangers in a format similar to an email b-board system. Like email, you can sign up to send and receive messages from various groups, which are organized around a range of different topics.
Registration
TXT Mob begins when a user registers their mobile phone number and service provider. TXT MOB asks customers to provide an email address where a txt message can be sent containing a secret code that can be entered on the website for phone activation.
Groups
A group is a collection of TXT MOB members who share TXT messages via mobile phone. There are currently three types of groups: Public: a public group is one which any TXT MOB member may join. Private: membership in a private group is limited by the group’s administrators. Secret: secret groups are similar to private groups in that membership is restricted by the group’s administrators. However, membership in secret groups is by invitation only; secret groups do not appear in group directories and uninvited members are unable to sign up. In addition, groups can be “Moderated,” in which case messages may only be sent by the group’s administrators, and “TXT Mobbers” can only send to groups of which they are members.
Sending Messages
Messages are sent from the TXT MOB website and delivered to all members of a selected group, or alternatively, users may also send a message directly their phone by simply addressing a message to [GROUP_NAME]@txtmob.com. Users can also view all messages that have been sent to one of their groups.
TXT MOB is offered as a free online service but the creators warn that individual mobile phone service providers may charge to send and/or receive messages, and that all service agreements should be checked before texting.
TXT MOB was first developed by the Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA), an art and engineering collective that develops technologies for political dissent. Protest organisers used TXT MOB to provide activists with up-to-the minute information about police movements and direct actions during the recent Democratic National Convention in Boston and the Republican National Convention in New York. Medical and legal support groups also used TXT MOB to dispatch personnel and resources as the situation demanded.
The future of SMS networks
In the same way that social networking has exploded online with recent phenomenon like Friendster connecting people in searchable databases, TXT MOB now promises similar community connectivity with mobile phones whilst offline. Future applications could be enormous, with people able to utilise group text messaging in the real-world social environment.
Tad Hirsch, a researcher in MIT’s Computing Culture Group offers TXT MOB as a free service to the general public, and is currently coordinating a major software upgrade. If you wish to help with development or are interested in adapting the technology for your organisation or event, please contact him at info@txtmob.com
