For the near-term future, various sorts of display glasses will be how augmented reality and virtual reality are delivered, with smart phones as the computing platform. This is close, so close I can taste it. A pair of led/oled display glasses, that look close enough to regular sunglasses to avoid the nerd factor, are probably two years away from the mass market. That is when a lot of cool stuff will come to bear. Augmented reality, with different overlays available where different sorts of data are overlaid over your normal vision. Widgets and RSS feeds available any time, accessible via voice command or a flick of a finger on your phone's touch screen and visible as a translucent box in your vision. Reality tagging, life blogging, smart alerts, always-on GPS, real time instructional guides, tours, etc, its all coming and soon. In fact, the iphone and other advanced smart phones as they exist right now could deliver virtually all of this, its just waiting for the next firmware patch that will allow third party software development on the platform and for the eyeglass displays themselves to deliver all this via hud.
Smart phones are poised about where PC's were in 1980, right at the beginning of an explosive couple of decades of growth and innovation.
Technology and the Future
Mar 18, 2008
Mar 17, 2008
Sub-vocal communications, computer interaction...
In this video, a prototype voiceless communication system is demonstrated...
Even more exciting than the obvious uses for this technology in voiceless communication, is the implications the demonstrator mentions regarding how this could enhance augmented reality systems. You sub-vocalize a question or key word search phrase and get data back from the Internet. The power of this for enhancing intelligence is stunning.
Imagine this scenario. The year is 2018 and you are sitting in one of those mind- numbingly boring meetings. The data overlays in your eyeglass displays are showing reports and graphs prepared by the presenter as well as personal and business information about each of the attendees. Suddenly, an idea occurs to you. You spend a few seconds sub-vocalizing commands to your smart phone(5th gen iphone?, 3rd gen android platform?) to search for a series of documents and related blog postings, while also chatting voicelessly with colleagues in a different department to bounce your idea off them. By the time you open your mouth 30 seconds later to voice your brilliant idea you have done the background research and networking that might have taken 30 minutes(after the meeting) to do a decade earlier. This is just one small example of the type of Intelligence Enhancement we're talking about here.
Even more exciting than the obvious uses for this technology in voiceless communication, is the implications the demonstrator mentions regarding how this could enhance augmented reality systems. You sub-vocalize a question or key word search phrase and get data back from the Internet. The power of this for enhancing intelligence is stunning.
Imagine this scenario. The year is 2018 and you are sitting in one of those mind- numbingly boring meetings. The data overlays in your eyeglass displays are showing reports and graphs prepared by the presenter as well as personal and business information about each of the attendees. Suddenly, an idea occurs to you. You spend a few seconds sub-vocalizing commands to your smart phone(5th gen iphone?, 3rd gen android platform?) to search for a series of documents and related blog postings, while also chatting voicelessly with colleagues in a different department to bounce your idea off them. By the time you open your mouth 30 seconds later to voice your brilliant idea you have done the background research and networking that might have taken 30 minutes(after the meeting) to do a decade earlier. This is just one small example of the type of Intelligence Enhancement we're talking about here.
Mar 11, 2008
Towards nanobots...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7288426.stm
This looks like the first big step towards moving from nanoparticles to true nanobots.
"A tiny chemical "brain" which could one day act as a remote control for swarms of nano-machines has been invented.
This looks like the first big step towards moving from nanoparticles to true nanobots.
"A tiny chemical "brain" which could one day act as a remote control for swarms of nano-machines has been invented.
The molecular device - just two billionths of a metre across - was able to control eight of the microscopic machines simultaneously in a test."
"The machine is made from 17 molecules of the chemical duroquinone. Each one is known as a "logic device".
Mar 7, 2008
Mind Reading
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/mar/06/medicalresearch
These researchers are talking about a practical, realistic, path towards actual reading of minds via technology. In fact they have demonstrated an early version of that already. In another part of the article the scientists make an estimate of 30 to 50 years for how they expect it to take this technology to mature. Want to bet their estimate is too conservative? I'd guess the real time is half their estimate, if not less.
"The software matched their observed brain activity with the predicted activity from the decoder. When using a set of 120 images, the software got it right nine out of 10 times. With 1,000 images, the accuracy was eight out of 10. For 120 images, if the software were to simply make random predictions, its success rate would be just 0.8%.
The team estimate that if they used 1bn images (roughly the number on Google) it would have a success rate of 20%. With that many images, Gallant said, the software is close to doing true image reconstruction - working out what you are seeing from scratch. "There is no reason we shouldn't be able to solve this problem ... That's what we are working on now."
Gallant said it might be possible in future to apply the technology to visual memories or dreams"These researchers are talking about a practical, realistic, path towards actual reading of minds via technology. In fact they have demonstrated an early version of that already. In another part of the article the scientists make an estimate of 30 to 50 years for how they expect it to take this technology to mature. Want to bet their estimate is too conservative? I'd guess the real time is half their estimate, if not less.
Mar 4, 2008
Towards practical augmented reality...
Hmm, lets take this technology...
Showcased at CeBIT, the Otello search engine simply uses images as input; in other words, handset owners just snap a picture of anything -- a landmark, DVD case, unidentified flying object, etc. -- and Otello then "returns information relevant to the picture to the mobile phone."
...and let it mature for another five years, now combine it with a similarly refined and expanded version of this sort of technology...
Apparently consisting of a "a single-chip computer and a couple of infrared sensors," the system, dubbed the Kome Kami Switch (or Temple Switch), lets you perform basic tasks like skipping tracks on an iPod with the blink of an eye, and is supposedly fine-tuned enough to be able to distinguish natural blinking from a deliberate wink
...mount both into a refined, and less dorky looking, set of video display glasses
...and you get the ability to look at an object, blink, and have data about it streaming into your display glasses. Combine this with some data overlaid from google maps, widgets, RSS feeds, access to the computing cloud and natural language search...and we've got true mobile computing, true augmented reality, true intelligence enhancement. Throw on a microphone and a video camera and this thing would be a lifelogging device and memory aid as well. I first imagined such a system about 8 years ago and it felt a long ways away back then. Now it feels like it is coming within the next 5 years, perhaps more like 2 or 3 years. I can't wait to get my hands on this when its commercially available.
edit : About an hour after this post I came across this article describing a prototype "smart goggles" system being demonstrated. Interesting times we're headed for.
Showcased at CeBIT, the Otello search engine simply uses images as input; in other words, handset owners just snap a picture of anything -- a landmark, DVD case, unidentified flying object, etc. -- and Otello then "returns information relevant to the picture to the mobile phone."
...and let it mature for another five years, now combine it with a similarly refined and expanded version of this sort of technology...
Apparently consisting of a "a single-chip computer and a couple of infrared sensors," the system, dubbed the Kome Kami Switch (or Temple Switch), lets you perform basic tasks like skipping tracks on an iPod with the blink of an eye, and is supposedly fine-tuned enough to be able to distinguish natural blinking from a deliberate wink
...mount both into a refined, and less dorky looking, set of video display glasses
...and you get the ability to look at an object, blink, and have data about it streaming into your display glasses. Combine this with some data overlaid from google maps, widgets, RSS feeds, access to the computing cloud and natural language search...and we've got true mobile computing, true augmented reality, true intelligence enhancement. Throw on a microphone and a video camera and this thing would be a lifelogging device and memory aid as well. I first imagined such a system about 8 years ago and it felt a long ways away back then. Now it feels like it is coming within the next 5 years, perhaps more like 2 or 3 years. I can't wait to get my hands on this when its commercially available.
edit : About an hour after this post I came across this article describing a prototype "smart goggles" system being demonstrated. Interesting times we're headed for.
Virtual Actors coming soon....
So, we're now to the point where a consumer-grade graphics card for under $500 can render a virtually photo-realistic moving 3d model of a human in realtime.
Can we be that far from virtual actors appearing in live action movies? You can start to imagine "live action" movies being made entirely on computer as this "virtual model" technology improves and is integrated with improving AI. The implications of this for gaming are obvious as well, which I posted about in my other blog.
Can we be that far from virtual actors appearing in live action movies? You can start to imagine "live action" movies being made entirely on computer as this "virtual model" technology improves and is integrated with improving AI. The implications of this for gaming are obvious as well, which I posted about in my other blog.
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