Making Concrete Interactive

Even the walls are talking... thanks PSFK

November 9, 2009

Tokihiko Fukao of the University of Tokyo has developed a new kind of light-sensitive concrete. The material is sensitive to ambient light levels, able to take note of the luminosity distribution across it’s surface. The incoming light level data is then routed to a computer. This turns the concrete into a kind of control surface where varying degrees of illumination can be used to direct different audio and visual outputs.

Transmaterial explains more:

Light-Sensitive Concrete consists of concrete, embedded optical fibers, photodiodes, and electrical circuitry. Optical fibers are distributed within a regular grid, and sensors are attached beneath them in the same arrangement. The interactive properties of the material are intentionally hidden within what appears to be conventional concrete—suggesting possibilities for other light-sensitive building materials and surfaces as part of a total ambient interactive system.

Transmaterial: “Light-Sensitive Concrete”

Cross Reality: When Sensors Meet Virtual Reality

Food for thought on where the world is heading. Thanks Mashable

Written by Richard MacManus / July 14, 2009 12:00 AM / 3 Comments

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During my recent visit to MIT in Boston I met with Joseph Paradiso, Associate Professor and Director of the Responsive Environments Group at MIT Media Laboratory. He showed me some demos of what his lab is up to, focusing mostly on what is termed "Cross Reality". This is when sensor/actuator networks meet online virtual worlds.

Paradiso co-authored a paper that has just been released in the July-September edition of the IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine. The paper outlines and analyzes Cross Reality experiments done within Second Life, the most popular virtual world with 15 million current subscribers. In this post we'll give you a layman's overview of the paper, because we think this trend is important to the Web's future.

What is Cross Reality?

Cross Reality is about connecting "location-specific 3D animated constructs" in virtual worlds to in-building sensor installations.

The paper notes that "the convergence of shared 3D virtual worlds with popular web-based data sources to form a "Second Earth" has been broadly predicted." It's also been the topic of many a science fiction novel. So it's interesting to see the latest practical experiments in this "hyper reality."

It should be noted that there are already commercial applications. The paper points to IBM's visualization of datacenter operation and VRcontext's ProcessLife technology. The latter "uses high-fidelity 3D virtual replicas of real plants or factories to remotely browse and influence industrial processes in realtime."

Billowing Power Strips

In one of its projects, MIT created a cross reality environment called "ShadowLab," which is a Second Life map of the Media Lab's third floor animated by data collected from a network of 35 "smart, sensor-laden power strips" (a.k.a. PLUGs). MIT chose to use power strips "because they are already ubiquitous in offices and homes," plus they have power and can be connected to a network.

Virtual DataPond in the Virtual Atrium (left) and a real DataPond in the real Media Lab Atrium (right)

MIT added other features to the power strips via expansion boards - such as motion sensors, temperature sensors, and memory cards for local data logging.

Ubiquitous Sensor Portals

MIT has also created a whole portal network that maps sensors to virtual worlds, called the Ubiquitous Sensor Portal. There are 45 portals currently in the Media Lab, each one featuring a myriad of environmental sensors - such as motion, light and sound level, vibration, temperature, and humidity. They have a small touch-screen display and audio speaker, for user interaction.

The Portals also act as base stations for an 802.15.4 network inside the lab, "enabling wireless communication with a variety of wearable sensors." Each portal has an extension into Second Life, allowing people to visit the Media Lab virtually. This isn't just a one-way process either; as well as affecting virtual worlds, portal interactions can push virtual phenomena into the user's physical space.

Two views of the virtual extension of a Portal into Second Life; the first shows sensor data over time, the second streaming real-time audio/video into Second Life.

Mobile

MIT expects that handhelds and mobile devices will play an important role in future Cross Reality applications, "both as a source of data to animate their users' environments and avatars and as augmented reality terminals through which local sensor networks can be explored and programmed." The lab has already begun to experiment in this area, with a Star Trek-inspired device it calls a Tricorder (image to right) and a newer device called the "Ubicorder." Both devices provide a real time interface to sensor data.

MIT expects the mobile area of cross reality to expand rapidly "once smart phone Augmented Reality becomes better
established." ReadWriteWeb has been following this trend closely; read our recent Augmented Reality analysis here and here.

Conclusion

The projects of the Responsive Environments Group at MIT are enabling real world data, increasingly being provided by sensor/actuator networks, to be plugged into virtual and physical interfaces.

The group is still exploring both the technical and practical sides of this, so it's uncertain what it will lead to in the commercial world. But we're certain it will fuel future startup innovation in the coming year or two. Watch this space!

The Singularity

Thanks Futurelab

Will Singularity Result in Integration of the Human Nervous System and the Mobile Networks and Interfaces? So You Are Your IPhone.

by: Idris Mootee

Remember what you've read about Singularity? The technological singularity is a theoretical future point of unprecedented technological progress, caused in part by the ability of machines to improve themselves using artificial intelligence. Remember Ray Kurzweil? Inventor. Entrepreneur. Artificial Intelligence. Futurist. Author: "The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence" and "The Singularity is Near."

In 2045 the human race "breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress and longevity." Kurzweil's Law of "accelerating returns." Material progress faster than Moore's Law. The "Singularity" is that postulated point in time when technological progress, led by machine intelligences designing their own replacements at an ever-increasing rate, becomes so rapid that we mere humans can no longer comprehend or control it. It is no sci-fi,many think it is real.

Microsoft started early playing with the idea and the singularity project in now its 5th year. One focus of the project has been to throw away the past- the OS we have today (Linux, Windows) evolved from designs in the 60s and 70s when computers were limited in resources and not very networked. What could you get if you design for today’s CPU power?

Some believe that this point will eventually be reached in the real world. I think that those people are drastically underestimating the other limits to progress, such as bandwidth limits for data gathering, the difficulty of comprehension, and the inverse relationship of speed to reliability in data analysis. They're also confusing exponential growth curves (which lead to arbitrarily high growth rates) with S curves, which apply to real-world situations in which growth rates increase for a while as key limits are overcome, then slows again.

But while we're waiting for God to emerge from machines, some of the people promoting the concept of the Singularity are looking for practical ways to turn technological progress into social progress. The questions are when will artificial intelligence out-compete humans? Or when computers can have personalities? Or when I can transfer my knowledge as well as personality traits to a computer? Or will artificial intelligence eventually manifest themselves as brands and run all marketing activities (who needs an ad agency?) These are interesting questions. What other technologies and applications, which may take us to Singularity:

• Computer software endowed with heuristic algorithms (heuristic is an algorithm that is able to produce an acceptable solution to a problem in many practical scenarios, but for which there is no formal proof of its correctness). It means computer can provide answers to right and wrong without formal logic. I can see computers become political.
• Our real life is simulated by computers in a virtual world so if we die, our virtual self lives on. So if you are being murdered, they have to do it twice. It brings new meaning to what is defined as murder of the first degree. May be you can sue someone's virtual self and the real person as part of the collateral damage.
• Artificial entities generated by evolution within computer systems, need some imagination to think about what are those entities? Stephen King loves this.
• Integration of the human nervous system and computer and mobile connectivity and interfaces. You are your iPhone. Just hope it doesn't crash. Interface designers have a bright future ahead of them. Apple Care has new meanings.
• Dynamically organizing social networks so the system help you to pick, manage and organize your social life. The next Facebook?

All these ideas are disruptive and scary in some cases. But we are moving towards that direction. Many are pushing that idea and they include Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis (X Prize Foundation), and Google co-founder Larry Page. They formed a Singularity University aimed at both students and executives in various technology disciplines (including Space & Physical Sciences, Biotechnology and Bioinformatics, Nanotechnology, Neuroscience & Human Enhancement, AI, Robotics, & Cognitive Computing, Energy & Ecological Systems and Future Studies), the objective is to close the gap in understanding and applying fast-developing technologies to solve what they called humanity's grandest challenges...such as poverty, hunger, and pandemics. In another word, applying Singularity to safe the world.

I don’t think the answers to many of these problems will come from technologies alone. My biggest concern whether the top-down, capital intensive management systems will dominate the thinking and cloud the visions of people who might make other choices if they only saw the potential for them. And technology is always a double-edged sword. Same as Singularity. The future is always dangerous…and exciting.

Have a great weekend.

Original Post: http://mootee.typepad.com/innovation_playground/2009/02/will-singularity-results-in-integration-of-the-human-nervous-system-and-the-mobile-networks-and-inte.html

Tags:

• Idris Mootee
• progress
• singularity
• technology

Magic mirrors

Interactive mirror subtracting the real background and replacing it with a virtual one

In the frame of a marketing campaign for a travel agency, UbachsWisbrun/JWT, a large communication group in the Netherlands, has asked Bartpproject to develop an interactive mirror.
The installation allows each person passing by the shop window to have a taste of holiday atmosphere, thanks to an interactive experience.

A big LCD screen covered by a way mirror is placed in the shop window: when nobody is in front of it, the screen looks like a normal mirror.
As soon as a person stops in front of the screen, the real background behind him/her is subtracted, and replaced by exotic backgrounds, changing randomly.

The technology behind this installation is complex: the background is constantly changing, so in this context standard background subtraction techniques are not helpful.
We developed a stereo camera system that, by means of a triangulation algorithm, allows the detection of a foreground object.