Google Glass solves the need to take your phone out of your pocket at the expense of wearing it on your face.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Glass and why it elicits such a polarizing response from people and this is what I’ve come up with.
The future is already here, I'm just trying to aggregate it.
From MySpace to now. 10 years of Web 2.0 #Web2isDead
(via RW10: A Decade Of Spotting The Future Taking Form – ReadWrite)
Fiction and the future of tech are so interconnected as to make you wonder if there really is any difference.
I went to Google to interview some of the people who are working on its search engine. And what I heard floored me. “The Star Trek computer is not just a metaphor that we use to explain to others what we’re building,” Singhal told me. “It is the ideal that we’re aiming to build—the ideal version done realistically.” He added that the search team does refer to Star Trek internally when they’re discussing how to improve the search engine. “It comes up often,” Singhal said. “For instance, we might say, ‘Captain Kirk never pulled out a keyboard to ask a question.’ So in that way it becomes one of the design principles—we see that because the Star Trek computer actively relies on speech, if we want to do that we need to work to push the barrier of speech recognition and machine understanding.”
(via Google has a single towering obsession: It wants to build the Star Trek computer. - Slate Magazine)
Microsoft boldly imagines the future as a place where technology and the real world blend together seamlessly. Many of the items featured such as wearable gadgets and flexible glass are almost a reality for consumers. The video is a few years old but still gets me excited every time I watch.
Projects like these help inspire the next generation of dreamers and fuel innovation. Great job Microsoft!
I dance around the edges of genre and what is conventionally termed “literary” writing, although that distinction is increasingly meaningless. “Literature” tends to follow the Virginia Woolf mode: the ordinary mind on an ordinary day. It’s about depicting the human experience with as little in the way of distraction as possible. Sometimes you can even see the layers of life being peeled away to expose the essence of humanity. And, with the greatest of respect, that is a mystical perspective on what it means to be a person, which belongs to another century. It’s an inheritance of Romanticism.
Humans exist in the interaction of the interior and the exterior worlds. Technology and science and fantasy and possibility and so on are all part of that. Stripping them away is a delusion, a quest for an authenticity which does not exist. Any writing which refuses to engage with science and technology runs the risk of exiling itself to a fictional 1992. Look: if you live in a world where you can print human organs on a polymer frame but you won’t acknowledge the existence of email in your fiction, what are you really doing? You’re not talking about the ordinary day. And someone who doesn’t use email in professional life is not an ordinary person any more.
Talking to the Free Word about the Kitschies, and Angelmaker. (via harkaway)
Something that bugs me about most fiction is when the author just ignores the existence of any technology beyond the telephone.
Multi-input user interfaces has been on my mind a lot lately. I think this is really on the right track. We need to start thinking about what the ideal interfaces for users are and not what they ideal interfaces for the devices are.
Gesture-based control has been incorporated into Microsoft’s Kinect, Samsung’s Smart TV platform, and products from startups like Leap Motion and SoftKinect (not to mention in cinema fantasyland ). Three dimensional display interfaces, meanwhile, have been brewing at the University of Iowa (home to “Leonar3Do” ), in the Kickstarter gaming sensation Oculus Rift.
Lee’s SpaceTop weaves these two threads together, joining 3-D interface with 3-D gesture controls, a smart convergence that will likely become more common. In his talk, Lee said SpaceTop and ZeroN, which he also demonstrated, are part of a broader shift toward interfaces we can grab with our hands. Humans seem to prefer collaborating via physical interfaces; think of a scale model, map, or whiteboard. People also like interacting in multiple modalities; think of reading a book, underlining words and scribbling in the margins in pencil, and taking separate notes on a pad.
(via This Amazing 3-D Desktop Was Born at Microsoft | Wired Business | Wired.com)
Stretchy battery drawn to three times its size
A really important advancement for wearable computing but I think we really need to create a material that is chargeable and itself flexible.
The new idea in Nature Communicationsuses small “islands” of energy-storing materials dotted on a stretchy polymer.
The study also suggests the batteries can be recharged wirelessly.
In a sense, the battery is a latecomer to the push toward flexible, stretchable electronics. A number of applications have been envisioned for flexible devices, from implantable health monitors to roll-up displays.
Day156: More tech disruption as Kingston launch a 1TB flash drive.
(Source: dreadfuldailydoodles)
It feels like a lot of the work we put into building the PC industry and the Internet and now the smartphone industry, a lot of that work got us to the point where we have the Internet in everyone’s hands,” he said. “It seems like now the game is really beginning, and we’re going to see what the great killer apps and the great Internet franchise businesses are that are going to be built. That was the conversation that everyone was having in 1999. We were all just early. Back then there were only 50 million people using the Internet versus two billion, and now and we’re on our way to five billion smartphones. Now we have the chance to build the businesses that we thought we were going to build in 1999.
Marc Andreessen Says Now’s the Time to Build Companies Like It’s 1999
Mark Vanderbeeken: The English Language Innovation Bias
As an American living in London but working mostly with teams across Europe and Africa I totally see this problem and I sympathize. There is a huge English language bias, especially in tech and it’s really, really bad on the Internet. I even know of several tech blogs in other countries that write only in English because that’s the best way they can help their local communities.
My personal hope is that translation software gets to the point where it doesn’t matter what language something is written in the content is presented in the language the reader needs and that it actually makes sense. We have a way to go until then and as the author points out, until then, non-English speakers are going to have to publish in English.
