Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 663

Augmented Reality: big screen by Sancho Plan

*Any combo of little kids and scaled-up stuff is always cute.

Big Screen Augmented Reality from The Sancho Plan on Vimeo.

Dead Media Beat: Doron Swade and Soviet Computers

*An article from sixteen years ago, but entropy requires no maintenance. "Make and take," comrade.

http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/other/CCS/res/res09.htm#f

Russian computing: back from Siberia

Doron Swade

During the Cold War scientific collaboration between the West and the Eastern-bloc countries was officially prohibited. With the recent collapse of state communism as the official ideology of the former Soviet Union the West now has unprecedented access to centres of excellence and to the...

Augmented Reality: Santander Bank in Madrid

*Those Portuguese "YDreams" guys are really hammering it with that lobby installation. You want Spanish financial robots? Hey, no hay problema!

via @futureaware

http://singularityhub.com/2010/04/09/robots-augmented-reality-and-more-video-of-the-building-of-the-future/

Laibach

*The Rolling Stones, Roxy Music… and in Slovenia, yet another version of art students dabbling with pop music and having that get totally out of hand.

GESAMTKUNST LAIBACH Fundamentals 1980–1990

Thirty years have passed since the founding of Laibach, a group whose music and performances have become part of cultural history. What many do not know, however, is that Laibach in fact began its career as a visual art group.

Images that most of us know from the paintings of the Irwin group – the...

Freedom of Creation honcho gives his pitch

*No brag, just facts, ladies and gentlemen:

http://www.freedomofcreation.com/home/pechakucha-night-with-janne-kyttanen

Swiss Army brand extension social media

*Found this in the spam folder, where most such "social media for bloggers" goes. But: Victorinox has a fragrance now? Huh? Why? I mean, I get it that smelly liquids cost nothing to make and they sell for a ton of money, but a Swiss Army cologne? What, it smells like eighteen different scents at once, depending, is that it?

*I also dig social media that thinks I'm a woman who needs to buy some scent for the father of my kids. There probably is some kind of demographic microtargeting...

The Protocube printed eco-house

*Okay, it's one of those dome-like imaginary housing schemes, where there's no corners to house the bookcase and the acoustics are weird. Also, good luck replacing those uniquely shaped windows. But man, that's a Turinese printed eco-house. I'd live in one of those in a hot second.

http://www.protocube.it/wp/?p=296&langswitch_lang=en

Augmented Reality: Citroen promotion

*It's a chic, yet rather flimsy and rattly, pop compilation of augmented-reality techniques. In other words, this really is a lot like driving a Citroen.

Augmented Reality: augmented sculpture in the round

*One wonders why they felt the need to projection-map this odd angular art-object — why not place the viewer where the object is, and use the multiple projectors to map the walls? But never mind me — it's a young art-form and everybody's a critic.

http://createdigitalmotion.com/2010/03/projection-mapping-augmented-furniture-augmented-sculpture-in-the-round/

Augmented Sculpture by GROSSE8 & LICHTFRONT / Passagen 2010 from Lichtfront on Vimeo.

(((Just found another one. These projection-mapped...

The solar-powered flight around the globe

*It's media bait, but I'm media, so what the heck. It's great.

*Solar cells are so weak compared to jet kerosene that this is sorta like a nonstop flight around the world powered only by the stray radiation from cellphone towers. But, hey, if somebody decides to build an expensive private airplane that can do that cellphone stunt in real life, I promise I'll blog that, too.

http://www.wired.co.uk/wired-magazine/archive/2010/04/features/the-solar-powered-flight-around-the-globe.aspx

*I will...