Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 749
August 26, 2009
Urban Photobioreactor
*Green design-fiction. They claim they're really gonna install a couple of these. Lemme know if you spot them in the wild.
Augmented Reality: NRU
*This one's interesting because it's an Augmented Reality app with no "reality" in it. Apparently — hard to see from the screen glare — NRU doesn't overlap any video on anything whatsoever. There's no background imagery to augment with NRU. You just lay it flat on the table and it hooks up to the cloud and builds a little graphic spiderweb of local pizza joints (or whatever).
*Featuring the inimitable video skills of Robert Scoble, ladies and gentlemen.
*I think it was Winston Churchill who on
Sydney Sunken Subtropical Squelette
*Okay, strictly speaking this is a "stuffed animal" rather than a "squelette," but the Victorian ruins were plenty skeletal, and it looks like the Australians really did it up brown.
*Thanks to Matt Ward of Australian Design Review.
"In 1866 Edward Bell designed a new water reservoir along the ridge served by what is now Oxford Street. Completed in 1878, the unusual st
Drip Table by Emiliano Godoy
*The new Drip Table is not made out of "sustainable teak" — it's patched together out of sustainable teak saplings. Lotta bits and pieces, so it must be mostly glue. Textbook Favela Chic, yet polished and classy.
http://www.godoylab.com/portfolio.htm
*The Godoy rope-and-plywood "Knit Chair" from 2004 has also got it going on.
*"Hey, I coulda made that myself!" Well, sure, but did you?
Deconstructing our Dark Age Future
*Milspeak .pdf ahoy:
http://www.carlisle.army.mil/USAWC/PARAMETERS/09summer/phillips.pdf
"The Westphalian state system will crumble, and the world will slip into a New Dark Age presaged by fragmented political authority, overlapping jurisdictions, fluid territorial boundaries, group marginalization, divided loyalties, no-go areas, and contested property rights."
(((Or maybe not. Because, as this article ingeniously argues, the Westphalian system never existed in the first place. It was mostly Ame
August 25, 2009
Augmented Reality: Augmented Traffic Views
*Even by the rough-and-ready standards of AR viral-youtube product, this one's pretty ragged. Love the eager offscreen babbling of the developer's tot in the early part of this video. It's like the Voice of the Industry.
*You don't have to be Nostradamus to predict a dust-up over "driving while augmented."
"Sneak Peak at Toronto's first Augmented Reality Application running on HTC Magic on Rogers (or any Android phone). See the Toronto/Ontario Traffic Cameras in a unique and exciting manner. Sof
Retrofuture to the Stars!
"Dark Roasted Blend" is outdoing itself with this Warsaw Pact atompunk series. This stuff is so remote from contemporary experience that it might as well come from Neptune.
http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2007/11/retro-future-to-stars.html
Kalki Koechlin, Bangalore home girl
*Everything about this woman is extremely weird, yet she's so at ease and low-key about herself and her situation that her interviewers seem stunned.
*She comes across as a time traveller, almost. I mean, in the year 2030, Hindi speaking ethnically French girls named "Kalki" who write plays about skeletal Eskimos that premiere in Bangalore… I'm not saying they'd be exactly common, but at least they'd be plausible.
http://mybangalore.com/article/0809/i-didnt-expect-dev-d-to-be-a-hit-kalki-koechlin
When geeks dress up
*Certain people evinced a skepticism when I alleged that, someday, "augmented reality" people were likely to dress as rather glamorous geeks rather than everyday common geeks.
*They can't grasp how a ferocious interest in software and electronics, anda hunger for really fussy, finely-structured clothing, could ever possibly overlap.
*Okay, read this press release. You might want to drop by the event, too. Or you might just hang out ten years until Benetton stores look unrecognizeable by contempor
Landscape and Ruins - Planning and design for the regeneration of derelict places
*It's where the Gothic High-Tech landscale professionals meet to discuss re-seeding the empty lots of derelict squelettes! And of course they're European.
http://www.eclas.org/eclas-conference-details.php?mode=next
Landscape and Ruins - Planning and design for the regeneration of derelict places
Conference Details: Date: 23-09-2009, Genova, Italy
"First Announcement and Call for Abstracts:
"Ruins have special meaning in relation to the landscape and the garden: the sense of loss, of harmony broken,
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