 |
|
Software Maker Creates Virtual Girlfriend Link Men, are you tired of the time, trouble and expense of having a girlfriend? Irritated by the difficulty of finding a new one? Eberhard Schoneburg, the chief executive of the software maker Artificial Life of Hong Kong, may have found the answer: a virtual girlfriend named Vivienne Rose who goes wherever you go, via your cellphone. Vivienne, the product of computerized voice synthesis, streaming video and text messages, is meant not only to bring business to Artificial Life (she will be available for a monthly fee of $6, not including the airtime costs paid to cell phone operators or the price of virtual chocolates and flowers). But she is also meant to be a lure for the new, higher-tech, third-generation, or 3G, cell phones.
In the interest of gender parity, Vivienne, may soon be joined by a virtual boyfriend for women and, after that, a virtual boyfriend for gay men and a virtual girlfriend for lesbians. In a FAQ about the service, Vivienne notes that subscribers can eventually marry her if they reach advanced levels of the game. "If you treat me well, who knows what I will offer you?" she says. Of course you may well end up with a virtual mother-in-law who really does call you in the middle of the night on your cell phone to ask where you are and whether you have been treating her daughter right. [ permanent link to this entry ]
Brainscore - Incorporeal Communication Link Brainscore, by Darij Kreuh and Davide Grassi, features two performers in front of a screen where computer-generated events are projected. A console allows performers to act in a virtual reality environment through their avatars. Three electrodes attached to the performer's heads transmit the brain's electric signals to an electroencefalograph, which analyses and transfers them to a computer, which in turn processes them.
An eye-movement tracking system enables the performers to control visual entities in Virtual Reality by their eye movements. Viewers watch the performance wearing polarized glasses to perceive the events in 3D as appearing between the two performers. The flow of the information moves from physical space into virtual (performers > avatars) and than back (avatars > audience). Avatars act thus as a "virtual filter" between performers and audience. Brainscore is part of the banquete_comunicación_en_evolución event, at Media Lab Madrid till February 28. [ permanent link to this entry ]
Phone in for Free Electricity Link Perhaps not immediately applicable for its stated use in activating electricity, thsi type of technology certainly has many other applications both in the domestic and retail environment. Prism Holdings of South Africa has piloted a project that allows prepaid electricity consumers to access their free basic electricity entitlement using a mobile phone, reports allAfrica.com. "The pilot saw consumers send their meter number via cellphone. The information was rerouted to the company, which then validated the user from their dabatase. A token was then generated and a unique 20-digit number was sent via SMS. The user entered this number into his meter. In the current system people have to go to a vendor to receive a prepaid electricity token, which is inconvenient and costly, especially in remote areas. The system is also open to exploitation because many vending points operate in an offline environment. The mobile solution allows users to get tokens without having to leave home." [ permanent link to this entry ]
'Cybersex' Man Given Two Years Link Here is another example of the blurring of real and virtual. The implications of occlusions such as these are both subtle and dramatic. In this instance it is pleasing to see that the judical process (and the legislation that no doubt will be forthcoming) was up to the challenge. A British court has sentenced a man for cybersex with a person of inappropriate age. The surveillance issues are compounded by this part of the judgement - the offender, The man is understood to be the first person in Scotland to be charged with sexual offences against someone in a different room. More... [ permanent link to this entry ]
Digital Water Marks Thieves Link Likened to giving household items and vehicles a DNA of their own, the fluid is credited with helping cut burglary in Britain to a 10-year low, with some cities reporting drops of up to 85 percent. A decade in the making, SmartWater is the name for a suite of forensic coding products. The first, Instant, is a property-marking fluid that, when brushed on items like office equipment or motorcycles, tags them with millions of tiny fragments, each etched with a unique SIN (SmartWater identification number) that is registered with the owner's details on a national police database and is invisible until illuminated by police officers using ultraviolet light. A second product, the Tracer, achieves a similar goal by varying the blend of chemical agents used in the liquid to produce one of a claimed 10 billion one-off binary sequences, encoded in fluid combinations themselves. Apparently, the product is practically impossible for a criminal to remove; staying on skin and clothing for months. [ permanent link to this entry ]
Augmenting Reality Link We have been talking about Augmented Reality for some time now and are pleased to see another worthy example of this technology brought to the fore. Unlike Virtual Reality, which immerses users in a new digital environment, Augmented Reality (AR) - a broad class of user interface techniques intended to enhance a person's perception of the world around them with computer generated information - aims to enhance the analog world. Georgia Institute of Technology researchers are working to meld virtual and physical reality together, which will enhance the ways people interact with and perceive the world around them. The Georgia Tech Augmented Environments Lab has developed an Augmented Reality tour that allows visitors to do just that at Atlanta's Oakland cemetery. During a recent trial run, users carried small laptops in backpacks and used game console controllers to navigate through the cemetery. As they approached specific graves they listened to the "voices" of the first person buried in Oakland, a child who lived through the Battle of Atlanta during the Civil War, and a local historian who died in 2000. The audio, with information culled from personal documents, was piped in via a wireless network. The Georgia Institute of Technology team is working on adding the appropriate ghostly images to the tour, which users will view through a head-mounted display unit. The ghosts' appearances will probably be activated by RFID tags on the graves. One of the strong pluses in developing AR material is its ability to respond in a seemingly intuitive manner to user reactions and interests. This gives users the impression that the experience has been tailored just for them. The link contains a nice slide show of the project. [ permanent link to this entry ]
Preserving Tribal Heritage With Online Games Link A member of a near-extinct Native American tribe is using the Second Life massively multiplayer online world to help preserve his heritage. Second Life resident Duuya Herbst is a real-life descendant of the Deeni people, a small tribe among about 15 others living in the northwestern United States, who were virtually wiped out by the U.S. government in the late 1800s. With no surviving pure-blood of the actual Deeni tribe alive today, he is trying to salvage the spirit of his ancestors in an online community and save a language spoken fluently by only 10 or so people on the planet... Duuya's goal is to keep the Deeni language alive (a language which was banned in early federal boarding and public schools) and to create a resilient community that can transcend IRC, SL or multiplayer games. "There is a big absence, a disconnection," he says. "I find a tribal community is something missing from today's world: a support structure." His vision for the community is essentially open-ended, and he stresses that it is not necessary to learn the Deeni language in order to join: "I'd like to think the online version [of the Deeni] would be like a 'family,' in a sense. We spend enough time within these 'worlds' with each other." [ permanent link to this entry ]
Haute Cuisine, Meet High-Tech: "Printing" Sushi Link Typically you won't find too many gimmicks posted here on News From The Future, but this one we couldn't pass up. Let's call it 'Fabbed Food'. Many of the dishes prepared by Homaro Cantu, the 28-year-old executive chef at Moto, a sushi restaurant in Chicago, often contain no fish. His sushi is prepared on a Canon i560 inkjet printer rather than a cutting board.
Cantu prepares images of maki on pieces of edible paper made of soybeans and cornstarch, using organic, food-based inks of his own concoction. He then flavors the back of the paper, which is ordinarily used to put images onto birthday cakes, with powdered soy and seaweed seasonings. What's next for Cantu and Moto? Well, part of that $240 a head for dinner is being invested in R&D with 30 patent applications in the works. Mr. Cantu is experimenting with liquid nitrogen, helium and superconductors to make foods levitate. And while many chefs speak of buying new ovens or refrigerators, he wants to invest in a three-dimensional printer to make physical prototypes of his inventions, which he now painstakingly builds by hand. The 3-D printer could function as a cooking device, creating silicone molds for pill-sized dishes flavored, say, like watermelon, bacon and eggs or even beef Bourguignon, he said, and he could also make edible molds out of cornstarch. [ permanent link to this entry ]
Surface Design Show 2005 Link
This responsive environment will react to touch and heat, triggering an array of applied technologies: - elumin8's (see what they've done for the wine tower) weaved luminescent sheets will form sensory envelopes and paths that react to movement and sound, - "Toile de Hackney", Carole Collet's latest intelligent textile, that responds to movement through thermic woven technique based on an ancient 18th Century French craft. - Smart translucent skins for buildings, developed by Vector-Foiltec (see their amazing Eden Project in Cornwall, UK), that sense the environment, reacting like the human body to light, temperature and pressure. - Abet Laminati's digitally printed sheets. - Eleksen 's textiles that map gestures and trigger spatial reactions - IFF fragrances will be impregnated into surfaces, dispersing perfumed nodes throughout The Sensory Gateway that are sensitive to movement and touch. [ permanent link to this entry ]
|
 |
