Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 738

Torino Augmented Reality Contest

*How on earth could I not publicize this? LinceoVR è torinese!

http://contest.seac02.it/

Hurry up, LinceoVR Contest has already started!

Submit videos or images created using LinceoVR — if you still don't have it installed, what are you're waiting for? Download it now!

Get the most out of LinceoVR: both virtual reality and camera matching (aka augmented reality) modalities of LinceoVR are allowed. Express your creativity, there's absolutely no limit to your digital content creation! Just a few...

Fifth European Futurists Conference

http://www.european-futurists.org/wEnglisch/programm/Programm2009/programm2009.php

"Meet the top futurists at the 5th European Futurists Conference Lucerne!

"This year's conference sails under the motto «Visioning 20.20 – Escaping the Age of Stupid»."

(((Wow! Terrific motto! May your futurist dreams come true!)))

Augmented Reality: Mapping Festival 2009

*These AR video-mapping projection guys come in whole armies of the night. They're in an underground all their own. They've got their own festivals, their own music… Do they ever wear pink hoodies, I wonder?

http://cms.mappingfestival.com/2009/

Mapping Festival 2009 television promo from mappingfestival on Vimeo.

*Ask and you shall receive: "augmented glitchcore:"

Mapping Festival 2007 Zoo Performances from mappingfestival on Vimeo.

Catching up with the $8,000 personal satellite

http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/air-space/8k-personal-satellite-and-other-space-adventures

*H+, man, that's a punchy little mag. Look at them being all sensible and hard-headed about flying backyard rockets to low orbit here. Over at ARTHUR magazine, they'd be flying into low orbit by eating ketamine and floating through a keyhole.

*The orders are rolling in! If our Mojave entrepreneur ends up mining the Moon for vast riches, that's not gonna bother me any. Although I have to wonder why h...

Augmented Reality: AR graffiti

*Kinda glad this eager German graff dude isn't able to saturate my entire neighborhood — yet.

*The fact that this YouTube vid already has a quarter of a million views doesn't speak well for the dainty propriety of tomorrow's urban spaces.

http://archimedespool.wordpress.com/2008/02/02/graffiti-artist-creates-real-time-3d-paintings/

Augmented Reality: RobotVision

*Here comes another AR browser. Look, this one's American and measures in miles.

*In AR, everybody wants to be the platform and the browser, and nobody wants to be the boring old geolocative database. Look how Tim here, who is like one guy working on his weekends, can boldly fold-in the multi-billion dollar, multi-million user empires of Apple iPhone, Microsoft Bing, FlickR, and Twitter, all under his right thumb. "Ah! Krispy Kreme! My favorite! They've got some great donuts."

*That...

American Rural Gothic

*Why would they stay? People are swiftly abandoning rural life all over the planet.

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Rural-Brain-Drain/48425/

(…)

"The Harvard University sociologist William Julius Wilson famously describes how deindustrialization, joblessness, middle-class flight, depopulation, and global market shifts gave rise to the urban hyper-ghettos of the 1970s, and the same forces are now afflicting the nation's countryside. The differences are just in the details. In urban centers...

Augmented Reality: First Person User Interfaces

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/09/21/enhancing-user-interaction-with-first-person-user-interface/

*"LukeW is an internationally recognized Web thought leader." That's gotta be one of the goofiest potted biographies ever, except for the stark fact that Luke Wroblewski actually is an internationally recognized Web thought leader.

*Here the Thought Leader delivers a comprehensive overview of augmentation as a user interface, complete with real-world examples. Handy stuff. Wroblewski...

Augmented Reality: Science Fiction about Augmented Reality

http://thomaskcarpenter.com/2009/09/21/ar-reading-list/

*Oh come on, there's got to be more of it than this. Help the guy out here, lazyweb.

The City is A Battlesuit For Surviving the Future

http://io9.com/5362912/the-city-is-a-battlesuit-for-surviving-the-future

You must look at this amazing artifact out of the BERG cluster in London. I'd like to call this "the greatest design-fiction writing I've ever seen," but (a) it's not about design, (b) it's not fictional and (c) it's not even writing.

This is new. The web has broken a lot of silos between the disciplines in the past 10 years, but this is a new thing that is visibly rising out of that rubble. It's contemporary...