Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 729

Arphid Watch: Immaterials, the Ghost in the Field

*One can really wish that RFID had gently oozed out of a design lab like this, instead of being brutally and rather unsuccessfully imposed from on high by Wal-Mart and the US Defense Department.

http://www.nearfield.org/2009/10/immaterials-the-ghost-in-the-field

Immaterials: the ghost in the field from timo on Vimeo.

This video is about exploring the spatial qualities of RFID, visualised through an RFID probe, long exposure photography and animation. It features Timo Arnall of the Touch project...

Augmented Reality: Cisco's future of shopping

*Look at those production values and the sound design as one of the majors horns in.

Augmented Reality: Metaio at the Technologie Messe

http://www.flickr.com/photos/43327361@N02/sets/72157622536963392/

*Y'know…. I'm not sure I dare inquire further.

Unhuman Fashion Parade

I'd go — if I weren't leaving town tomorrow.

http://www.anarajcevic.com/

UNHUMAN [fashion parade:]

Friday, October 16, 2009. 22h

THE TUBE

Dobracina 17, 11000 Belgrade

Armor as inspiration, the eroticism of evil in the form of battle garments. Seducible, sculptural forms that meet the classic elegance of tradition and the brutal, combatant futurism of the modern age.
Utilitarian objects like shoulder and knee caps become sensual, erotic accessories. Leather coats encrusted with glittering metal...

Augmented Reality: projection-mapping by Loomo.PL

*Nothing too ultra-fancy here, but I really like the *scaling* of this. It's not in the monocle/lorgnette space of mobiles, or the desktop/laptop space of fiducial-marker AR, or the outdoor night-fallen stadium space of projection-mapping video-jockey work.

*It's just there in the room. It's Augmented roomware. Has the pleasantly decorative

feeling of a crystal chandelier, almost.

*As an interesting sidelight, it's Polish, from Warsaw.

LOOMO TEST 01 PAPERBOX from Loomo.pl on Vimeo.

B2B Brain-to-Brain Communication

*Kind of a semaphore-slow Rube Goldberg version of Gibsonian cyberspace 'trodes.

*You know what impresses me about this stunt? Not so much that they've restyled some lab guy's hair with conductive gel — it's that it's vernacular video. I'm not reading a white paper about it, they're freakin' doing it right on my screen. And now yours, too.

via @madebymany, who twittered it instead of beaming it directly into my frontal lobes

Outer-Space Electron-Beam Fab

*It's a 3-D metal-forge fabricator, and they want to put it in the International Space Station to build busted parts of the International Space Station, on the spot. Given that the ISS is slowly coming apart and heading for the depths of the Pacific in five years, fabbing a space station inside a space station might be an aw3some solution.

*Nifty high-tech touch: the thing works in a vacuum.

*Of course, there is the extreme difficulty of all those ISS patent agreements, which we detailed...

Here comes trouble…

*New paradigms… I've seen 'em come, I've seen 'em go… Sooner or later, you have to hold your nose and jump….

*On the plus side, Wave is working out just great on my Microsoft T-Mobile Sidekick. I've just moved all my mission-critical contacts and data in there. It's the first time in my long history as a computer user that I feel assured and taken care of.

Augmented Reality: Projection-mapping on snow

*They're augmenting snow. Who can't like that? Y'know what would be awesome? Augmented *falling* snow.

Modern pop celebrity

*If this hadn't been done two years ago, it would have showed Roisin

moaning into MySpace or Facebook about that miserable midnight dinner at the

chip shop.