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Presented in Liberation, a highchool in South Korea, Seoul, will adopt a new kind of robot, the OFRO to check on kids at school. Communicating with school supervisors via a video camera and a microphone, it can detect any suspicious activity. Thank you Olivier for the link!
I now hope for a subversive robot, much cooler, with fancier behavior, created as a response to this very scaring surveillance attempt.
Interaction with microsoft surface
Microsoft Surface, a finger interactive table to organize digital media, will be available on the market in winter 2007.
Videos.
Microsfot surface table
This very neat idea of interactive surface is in the research market for a long time now: for instance with Diamondtouch, Ali Mazalek’s tangible viewpoints and James Patten’ sensetable from 2000-2001. It is exciting the process of this research being revisted by giant companies for mass production. I wish they would have kept the tangible quality of objects to control digital data. Maybe Pattenstudio will take care of that part!
Video of audiopad by James Patten and Ben Recht.
Aurelius introduced me to Cool Earth, a renewable energy startup. It has patented a way to make solar energy more efficient than coal. Impressive …
Three years ago our top scientists and Nobel Prize winners met in Washington in search of a solution to energy-related Global Warming. Four points came from the meeting:- there is no solution available
- yet we must implement one by 2050
- the only power source that presents a viable solution is solar
- but solar energy is currently far too expensive.
Cool Earth was formed to solve this problem. Now. With currently available technology. We are working to reduce the cost of solar electricity by a factor of 25, making it cheaper to produce than energy from coal or other non-renewable sources. By developing a solution from minimal, low-cost materials, we aim to make solar generation as profitable as today’s best investment options.
This extreme goal has led us to exactly one real and viable solution: a solar farming approach, based on concentrated photovoltaic collectors, constructed from inexpensive, widely-available plastic films.
Here’s how the system works:
Inflatable concentrators gather light and focus it onto photovoltaic cells, increasing the energy impacting the cells many times over. Our design costs 400 times less per collected area than conventional mirrors, can withstand 100 mph winds, and can protect the mirror surface and receiver from rain, insects, and dirt.
Series of concentrators are suspended on support and control cables stretched between poles. By suspending the concentrators, vast areas of land can be easily converted for solar energy production with limited environmental impact. The ground beneath the concentrators remains free for other uses, such as farming or ranching.
The timing is perfect. Our technology is in place. And we have a plan to reach “grid parity” in three years, not thirty.
Now, one can almost fully be a Super Hero Marvel with the Wii. Thank you Olivier! More pictures.
Burger time place setting
Chris Dimino redesigns the classic place setting: fork, knife, spoon, cup, and plate using unconventional materials solution: the burgertime place setting, using videogame controllers as ustensils and a TV screen plate that plays the classic nintendo game “burgertime”
Discovered on the Body Modifications’s web site, these garnments temporarily alter the structure of the wearer’s face. They are created by artist Paddy Hartley and Dr Ian Thompson.
Project facade’s web site
They cast molten Bioglass© “into shapes up to 5cm long which can then be carved to a required shape and implanted into the face of a patient in need of repair of the nose or eye socket to name but two.”
Today I met with Valerie Bugmann who works on the e-Skin project. She shared her ideas about the perception and simulation of touch for visually impaired persons.
I discovered her performance works and especially liked Secret under my skin. “With the Skin-to-skin communication the body stands as a medium between the technology and the world. In the performance, the participant exteriorizes inner thoughts by inputting them into the keyboard and interiorizes them into the body again with the use of Skin-to-skin communication for the purpose of transmitting them personally by touch to the performer.”
The performance takes place in the room of secrets where a skin-to-skin communication network is employed. Here, the performer and the space await the opportunity to become alive through the interaction with the participant who comes to intimately confess/convey a secret by touch. A lighted keyboard floating in the darkness invites the participant to type a secret into its glowing keys. Once typed out, by simply touching the keyboard the secret is reintroduced into the participant’s body in the form of its new physicality – an electric wave. The secret, now flowing from the keyboard into the participant’s body is ready to be further transmitted/confessed to the performer by touch. Once skin-to-skin contact is established with the performer, the participant will be able to see his/her secret revealed on a wearable display on the performer’s body; the participant is then confronted with a very intimate part of him/herself. Despite the secret being displayed on the performer, it remains unread by anyone expect the participant, or has the performer – this almost inert object of inscription, desire and redemption - actually become aware of the secret through the transmission?Skin-to-skin communication, as a suitable technology to express intimate thoughts, generates an intense effect as we recognize ourselves as part of the other through touch. Secret under my skin brings together different notions and implications of touch in this confession-like context, exploring new behaviors and novel parameters of social interaction that can develop out of this contact.
