Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 639

Showtime: Aggressive Quadrotor Maneuvers

*Obviously they're nowhere near so "aggressive" as they're gonna get.

Strap a .22 cartridge onto one of those and you've got the insurgents'

Predator.

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blog/show?id=705844:BlogPost:163944

Spime Watch: MinM

*Little smart blinkie lights are the atomic elements of ubiquity. That's what Mike Kuniavsky says, anyhow. The world needs lots more really smart cheap blinkie lights.

http://thingm.com/products/blinkm-minm.html

BLINKM MINM, A TINY SMART LED

Available from FunGizmos (US)

MinM is a tiny smart LED that's designed for wearable technologies, UAVs and handheld devices. It uses a wide angle SMD RGB LED to shrink the footprint to be 0.5 cm on a side, and less than 0.25 cm high.

Like BlinkM, its older s...

Augmented Reality: London, past and present

*Being a museum, they presumably have some particularly nifty photos.

http://www.techvert.com/london-museum-releases-cool-augmented-reality-app/

Spime Watch: Homesense

*Sounds like a great potential cross between reality-TV and a situation comedy.

Contestants, come on down!

http://www.homesenseproject.com/about-2/

"Homesense is an open research project launched in May 2010. This project is a collaboration between Tinker London and EDF R&D.

"WHAT IS IT?

"Homesense brings the open collaboration methods of online communities to physical infrastructures in the home. Instead of having products forced on them through a top-down design process, selected households...

I'm in Prague.

*Too pretty a day for blogging.

http://www.praguecollege.cz/en/home/latest-news

Augmented Reality: AR without programming in five minutes

*Gee whiz, I thought it was gonna take at least another five minutes to INVENT this.

*Given that I just now grabbed this from @kurakura on a distant continent, it's sure not gonna take five minutes to spread it around.

http://development.blog.shinobi.jp/Entry/3291/

Lucy McRae

*A real treat for design-fiction connoisseurs here.

http://lucymcrae.blogspot.com/

Augmented Reality: holographic design fiction

*It's so cute. I like practically everything about this. Nice music, the interaction design's really cute… The gestural schtick is well thought-out, I like the brief, ragged, nerdy-looking summer clothes on the actors… I'm even willing to forgive the horrid bent street-projected QWERTY keyboards.

*I like it that no one speaks, that the audience is never confronted. There's no overt persuasion. Even the credits are thematically related to the rest of the design. It's just a...

Augmented Reality: Haptic Augmented Reality

*I like my augmentations "haptic." Because you can touch 'em. And this is some haptically-augmented Italian reality from a lab in Siena in Italy.

"SIRSLab — March 25, 2010 — Haptic interfaces in Augmented Reality scenarios are an efficient way to enhance the interaction with a virtual world. We introduce a new system that involves both hands in virtual object experience. We render contemporary shape and weight of a virtual object, merged in a real world environment, using a commercial...

Augmented Reality: Augmented Russian Reality

REDMADROBOT — April 08, 2010 — REDMADROBOT создал программную часть для промо-стенда бренда Sobranie. Дополненная реальность использовалась для рисования в стиле Light Art и для навигации внутри программы стенда.

*Okay, objectively speaking, what's weirder: pretty girls drawing augmented roses in mid-air, or former Soviets hanging out in some big glossy capitalist mall?