Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 748

Disaster Tourism: see it before it disappears

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/010377.html

*Something morally horrible about this. It's like the "tours of Bedlam" to mock the mad in the 18th century.

Nokia Money

*Favela Chic banking, brought to you by Nokia.

*I'd use this in a minute if I thought it could keep the evil financial predators of Gothic High Tech at bay.

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/aug2009/gb20090827_530712.htm?campaign_id=europe_related

"Nokia is hoping to cash in on the mobile financial services market with the launch today of Nokia Money.

"The service will give users access to "basic financial services" and is aimed at the billions of people around the world who currently ha

Design Fiction about food from Philips

*This is a ten-minute design fiction from Philips, clearly designed for viral distribution on YouTube. It's got some interesting stuff about food and nutrition in it, but mostly it's fascinating to see "design fiction," as a practice, institutionalizing in this way. It's not like they're baldly asking you to buy a Philips food processor: it's not a mass-media advertisement for any product in particular, they're pulling you into the lab and speculating, they're trying to get you into their conc

Augmented Reality glitches

*We're about to see a thousand mutant flowers bloom. There are subtle and not-so-subtle troubles wherever the rubber augments the road. For designers, this is the grain-of-the-material for augmented reality work. AR works like magic, but it works like magic that's inherently glitchy and wonky. Really fun and interesting to see exactly what's wrong with it.

*Augmented Reality is going to have its own native forms of failure, decay, disjunction and corrosion, and I plan to follow 'em from the

Augmented Reality: Wikitude Drive

*"The city is there for you to use."

*Check out the soundtrack and the jazzy font choices! Still has the YouTube cinema geek verite thing going on, but looks and sounds like a real product!

At last, a hot brunette avatar to do all my websurfing for me

*I don't wanna say that my vaporware bogometer is going off with Ms Microsoft Clippy here, but what's to prevent these attractive semantic spambots from multiplying like rabbits and driving all the human beings off the Web?

Augmented Reality: storytelling and gaming

http://www.personalizemedia.com/new-playgrounds-augmented-reality-story-worlds/

"… we are now at the threshold of something pretty special. The uninhibited world of virtual design layered over real space, in real time and most importantly, connected. Social Augmented (or Mixed) Reality gaming will be big, very big. It won't all be run about, shooting or questing either, the potential here is to have meaningful and emotional journeys into the past, other peoples lives and become immersed in layer

Seating made of sawdust

http://www.core77.com/blog/object_culture/this_just_inbox_furniture_made_from_wood_shavings_and_resin_14400.asp

*If it's possible to get more Favela Chic than that gorgeous Mexican furniture made of glued teak saplings, well, this Israeli stool made of sawdust would do it.

*I'm gonna get all Geoff Manaugh here: suppose your house takes a direct hit from a cruise missile, it's blown to ashen smithereens, and you put on blue plastic gloves and *glue it all back together.* Presumably there would be

Craigslist versus conventional economics

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/08/craigslist-vs-ebay/

*I'm not buying anything off Craigslist, but you might say I'm windowshopping and there's a half-price sale on weird.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0585905/q...

Augmented Reality: London Buses Your New Eye

http://www.londonbusesiphone.com/

*It may not look like much — just a little black lozenge in a cloud — but this is your new car. (Remember your old car, the clunker that costs too much and belches pollution? Well, cars are your new cigarettes.)