Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 640

Augmented Reality: StarkHUD 2020 design fiction

*Is it possible that the IRON MAN special-effects crew actually hangs out with Julian Bleecker? Are they clustered around the guy's website like geeks at a comics stand? This IRON MAN video is completely, and almost comically, illustrative of Bleecker's ideas of sci-fi movie design-fictions as "diegetic prototypes."

*It's especially good that it's pseudo-Japanese, too. Nice hoax-like headfake there. Very Yes-Men. And of course it's all augmented-reality.

*I wonder, though, if these...

Augmented Reality: Augmented Italian Wine

*Put yourself in my position. How can I not blog this?

Indian television as Indian culture

*Hey wait… an Indian TV critic of Indian TV who is actually funny? Have I finally fallen off the edge of the Bollywood table here? No… that guy is genuinely funny. Satirically hilarious, even.

"Anand Ramachandran is a writer, comics creator and videogame designer who works when he isn't playing some game with an 'of' in its name. He blogs here and tweets here."

http://in.news.yahoo.com/264/20100508/1709/top-indian-television_1.html

"Sat, May 8 03:16 PM

"People keep complaining about how...

Augmented Reality: Augmented Tuscan Reality

*I admit it: I just plain like it because it's augmented Italian reality. Sue me.

*Here's the English version, which you'll have to admit sounds considerably less exciting.

Augmented Reality: the Turin Augmented Reality Project

*Okay, it's just a college project over at the local Politecnico, but indulge me here: this is augmented Turinese reality. Nothing to shake the earth technically, but just look how Turinese that stuff is.

Realtà aumentata, ragazzi!

The Braun Lectron System

*There are those who think that industrial design is merely decorative rather than technologically visionary, but check this out. An instructive kids toy from the mid-1960s

that's all about today's mix-and-mash-up, componentized, maker-style electronics.

*If you know about Dieter Rams, you know there was no more mainstream design figure than that guy. Rams was not any kind of fringe visionary, but a very solid, commercially successful designer of consumer electrical devices like shavers and ...

Showtime: Turux by Lia, 1997-2001

*Four years of art-coding by Lia, the single-named demigoddess of Austrian computational aesthetics.

Turux from Lia on Vimeo.

Archive of selected works of Turux

Original Shockwave Files can be seen at

(((Lia sells art-prints, too. I'd really like to see the kind of set-design — you know, in a movie, a TV show, whatever — that could carry off a Lia print as a natural part of a domestic environment. I mean, like, there's a huge glossy Lia print the size of a sofa...

These duct-taped Dutch cyborgs are making my weekend.

*I really didn't think it was gonna get any weirder today, but, uhm..

http://www.flickr.com/photos/planetart/sets/72157623949160683/

."PLANETART presents artistic research related to the concept of the Technological Singularity. This concept concerns the exponential growth of technology today and predicts an explosion of artificial intelligence within decades. The increasing impact of genetics, robotics and nano-technology will contribute to this development and will soon cause a breaking...

Bangladeshi InfoLadies

*An invasion of Martian tripods would probably be less transformative.

*Wish I could say I got this from an actual Bangladeshi InfoLady, but no,

it showed up on Twitter. Can't remember who. Way WAY too much going on today.

http://southasia.oneworld.net/fromthegrassroots/info-ladies-make-life-easier-in-bangladesh/

(…)

In the sweltering post-monsoon heat that transforms the flooded nation into an open-air sauna, the 24-year-old looks immaculate as she negotiates her way through paddy fields...

Spime Watch: Meta Products

*"Developments around the Internet of Things." Holy mackerel, they've got a ton of this stuff.

"Meta Products are the next generation consumer products. These products consist of both a physical and a web part. By combining the offline and the online world, they make the web just a little bit more meaningful to all of us."

http://www.booreiland.nl/blog/