This place was really cool in Washington, D.C.
Artechouse = Art + Tech + House.
Great immersive technology, art, music, dance, and light show.
Highly recommend it!
This exhibit “Lucid Motion” was by Japanese artist Daito Manabe X Rhizomatiks Research.
They also had a nice augmented reality display.
Had fun with the clan.
Hope you enjoy!
(Credit Video: Andy Blumenthal)
Well, this was quite a surprise in the hip Magen David Synagogue today.
I captured this amazing Pokemon.
I can’t say that I actually saw him davening (praying) in shule.
But he was on the way down to the kiddush (blessing and meal) after services.
No virtual apps needed for this Pokemon.
He was right there over the chulent (bean and meat stew)–Oh, that must’ve been another week.
Anyway, this Pokemon is ready to defend in the next battle of good and evil.
Thanks to Nintendo, Pokemon goes these days where the rest of our leaders are afraid to endeavor.
Hence the search for Pokemon far and wide…it’s a true craze. 😉
(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
This picture is an older version of Oculus Rift–larger, heavier, more clunky than the streamlined version coming out this April for $599.
Zuckerberg’s Facebook announced the purchase of Oculus virtual reality (VR) in March 2014.
I can’t think of another piece of consumer technology that I want to try out more than this.
Initially for immersive 3-D experiences in all sorts of entertainment, including gaming, movies, television, and more.
But soon to follow are use cases for virtual meetings, classrooms, doctor’s appointments, and anything requiring our interaction and communication.
Hush-hush is the more intimate use for things like virtual sex.
Also, there are opportunities for augmented reality where physical reality is supplemented with computer sensory input making your real-experience that much richer and informed.
With the Oculus Rift, I imagine myself immersed on a safari in Africa, flying into the reaches of space, relaxing at the most beautiful beaches, praying at the Western Wall, fighting my way through first person shooter and action adventures, and reliving biblical and other major historical events.
I don’t see VR for myself as an escape from reality, so much as being able to experience many more of life’s realities and possibilities out there.
My only fear is that as VR gets better and better, it becomes easier and easier to fall away from our challenges in the real world, and just live inside a mask with a controlled environment where our virtual choices and experiences seem all too convenient and real. 😉
(Source Photo: here with attribution to Weston High School Library)
OMG, this is awesome.
This Lily Camera Drone is “throw and go” and simply lands in your hand.
You can set it to follow you–almost like a guardian angel– or to lead you where you need to go.
Records video, sound, can do slow motion, and takes photos.
It has a tracking device.
It’s waterproof.
Awesome for extreme sports or personal surveillance.
Would like to be able to communicate with it by voice command, and also see what it sees and hear what it hears with augmented reality glasses or on a smartphone or wearable.
Finally, if only it would come with a laser to zap anybody or anything bad that may come at us–that could be reassuring.
Costs = $619 and ships in May 2016.
That was easy. 😉
I like this short video on advances in Augmented Reality by Applied Research Associates (ARA).
ARA supports DARPA’s Urban Leader Tactical Response Awareness and Visualization (ULTRA-Vis) program–to develop Augmented Reality (AR) for our soldiers.
Augmented Reality is “Virtual icons, avatars, and messages overlaid accurately on the real world.”
The purpose is to know”where you are and where objects are around you” and to “access information simply by looking at them.”
The interface is a heads-up wearable display, rather than an smartphone or tablet.
The AR integrates GPS, terrain information, commercial data, and sensors.
Further, you and others using this technology will be able to tag and share data in what I would call Social Reality (a mixture of social computing and augmented reality).
Here your world of information is augmented by other’s AR views shared with you.
AR offers an enormous opportunity to make our world far richer with information everywhere we look, rather than just when we look it up.
For it to be ultimately successful, the display will need to be worked in as an embed or overlay on our actual eyes (like a contact lens), rather than worn like Google Glass.
For the non-soldier, not every open field needs augmented reality–in fact, it would sort of spoil the natural beauty of it–but it sure won’t hurt to be able to turn it on, at will, to see which flowers are blooming and perhaps, whether there just might be a snake out there too. 😉
As I always say, I love Apple–and they still have the best darn Smartphone on the market–but they continue to disappoint with anything new.
This week, with the introduction of the iPhone 5S, Apple had the opportunity to introduce something new and exciting, but instead what did we get?
– A faster processor and Touch ID fingerprint reader.
In nutshell, since Steve Jobs untimely passing, Siri was a bombshell, actually just a big consumer product bomb.
And now with the fingerprint reader as the big newcomer add-on to the iPhone, it’s as if (sorry to say), Apple is giving us all the proverbial finger.
While the fingerprint reader is cute and a faster logon, it is really not a must-have or a game-changer.
The only thing less exciting than Touch ID is the new Yahoo logo.
In the last two years, Apple has taken a mighty innovation lead and squandered it.
Still, no one can touch their highly integrated iPhone product.
However, if much more time goes by without something meaningfully new and innovative, they will be in trouble.
Rumors of an iPhablet (iPhone/tablet) with a significantly larger screen (ranging from 4.8 to 6 inches) will be more like the Samsung Galaxy S4 with 5-inch screen rather than than iPhone 5S 4-inch screen, and would have attraction for people who like to read or watch on a larger, better display.
Of course a significantly better camera would be helpful too–need I say more?
Some interaction with wearable technology, like a Google Glass with augmented reality would also be a winner.
And a fully ruggedized smartphone, similar in concept to a Panasonic Toughbook–and up to military grade specs–that withstands drops, spills, dust, and lots of everyday field use punishment, would be way cool for the action-adventurer in all of us–and maybe then we wouldn’t need all the silly looking cases.
In the meantime, put your index finger on the home bottom, while Apple puts their middle finger up at you, the consumer.
Steve Jobs, where the heck are you? 😉
(Source Photo: here with attribution to CNET)
This is an awesome action video–5 minutes and totally worth it.
It feels like being inside a single player shooting game.
I first saw this video on Facebook posted by a colleague as a interesting advertisement for Go Pro wearable helmet cameras, often used for capturing extreme sports activities.
Now we are going from helmet cams to Google glasses.
With the new Google Glass coming out this year for $1,500–that mimics most smartphone functions including taking pictures and videos just by a simple verbal command such as “Okay Glass, record a video” or “Okay Glass, take a picture,”– things are going to get a lot dicier.
While this type of James Bond action doesn’t happen everyday for most of us, if we can capture every day events like these –it will be both awesome from a recall, sharing, entertainment, study and scientific perspectives and scary from a privacy one.
If Google Glass really works as it’s envisioned, it is going to revolutionize how we interact with the world and each other–get ready augmented reality, here we come. 😉
Many of you may have probably the seen the movie, “Children of Men,”–it is themed around a time in the future when women are infertile (because of pathology, pollution, drugs, or whatever) and the world is in chaos–for what is life without children to carry on?
Fortunately, in the movie, after 18 years, one woman does get pregnant and bears a child and there is hope in the scientific community for a resurgence of humankind.
Unfortunately, we are now in a similar period of technology, where big innovation of yesterday has come grinding to a miserable saunter.
When the biggest news leaking out of superstar innovator, Apple is the potential for an iWatch–uh, not exactly earth shattering, we know we are in innovator’s hell!
And vendors from Apple to Samsung and Sony trying to come out with some sort of voice activated television–again, who doesn’t hate the TV clicker, but really this is not going to revolutionize our entertainment center days.
With hundreds of thousands of apps available for everything from social networking, eCommerce, gaming, and more, it seems like there are more copycat apps then anything else coming out these days–where’s the real wow factor?
Microsoft can’t find it’s way in a mobile world, the mighty Intel has been supplanted by ARM with mobile chips, Marissa Mayer is trying to figure out how to remake the jump for joy, Yahoo, relevant again, as are the Vanderhook brothers and Justin Timberlake trying to do for MySpace.
With the overemphasis on the form factor making bigger and smaller sizes and shapes for computing devices, we seesaw between iPod Classics and Nanos and between iPads and Minis. But where are the great functional enhancements? Yeah, ask Siri.
Similarly in computing architecture, we have latched unto cloud computing as the next great savior of IT-mankind, ignoring the repackaging again of the mainframe into a cool new computing model again, and relegating the prior go-to architecture of distributed computing as the evil twin. Sure, we can save some bucks until the pendulum swings back toward more decentralization and agility again.
In social computing, with Facebook what can you say–it’s got a billion users, but virtually not a single one would pay a dime to use it. If not for marketers scooping up our personal information online and advertisers annoying us with their flashing and protruding pop-ups, we continue to trade privacy for connectedness, until we lose too much of ourselves to identity thieves and snooping sources, and we fall back clamoring for more protection.
In security, we are getting clobbered by cyber intrusions, cyber espionage, and cyber attacks–everyday! We can’t seem to figure out the rules of cyberspace or how to protect ourselves in it. We can’t even find enough qualified people to fight the cyber fight.
I was surprised that even magazine, Fast Company, which prides itself on finding the next great innovation out there, states this month (April 2013), “Growing uncertainty in tech is creating chaos for startups, consumers, and investors…nobody has a non-obvious new social business model that can scale.”
As in the movie, Children of Men, we are suffering from an infertility of innovation–whether from burnout, a focus on short-term profit instead of long-term R&D investments, declining scores in STEM, or a lack of leadership–we are waiting for the next pregnancy so we can have hope again, but are disappointed that so many are false positives or overhyped prophets.
One of the things, I am most excited about is Google Glass and their concept of augmented reality, but the glasses are geeky and will need to be package in a lot more eloquent solution to really be practical in our futures.
The next great thing will come–life is a great cycle–but as in the Bible with 7 fat cows and 7 skinny cows, leading to the great famine in Egypt, we are now seeing lots of skinny cows walking around and it is darn scary. 😉
(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
One of the things that I love about the Intelligence Community (IC) is that they think future and they think big.
Noah Schactman in Wired Magazine (12 December 12–great date!), gave a snapshot view of 2030 as provided by the National Intelligence Council (NIC).
Some of the predictions (or aspirations) include:
– Bioprinting such as creating 3-D printed organs (how’s that for your orchestrating your own organ transplant?)
– Retinal implants for night vision thermal imaging, seeing the distance without binoculars, or even one-upping Google Glass by providing augmented reality in your eye instead of over it
– Brain chips for superhuman thought and recall (those without remain doomed to brain farts, in comparison)
– Bioweapons where DNA is used to target and take out people by genetically engineering viruses to attack them, specifically, without leaving any markers
– People embedded in machines–reminiscent of when Ripley in the movie Alien enters in an exoskelton robotic suit to kick some Alien butt!
Other predictions include: megacities, climate change, big data clouds, aging populations, and more drones.
While some of these advances are incremental in nature–for example genetic engineering and bioweapons are incremental steps from DNA sequencing of humans.
However, other leaps are more dramatic.
An article by Stephen Levy in Wired (17 January 2013) discusses how Larry Page (one of the Google founders) strives for inventions that are magnitudes of “10x” (often actually 100x) better than the status quo, rather than just 10% improvements.
Google has many examples of leaping ahead of the competition: from its transformative search engine which has become synonymous with search itself to Gmail which came out with 100x the storage of its competitors, Translations for the entire web from/to any language, Google Fiber with broadband at 100x faster than industry speeds prototyped in Kansas City, Google Books providing a scanned and searchable archive of our global collection of books and magazines, Google+ for social media (this one, I see as just a Facebook copycat–to get on Facebook’s nerves!), Google Maps for getting around, Android their open platform operating system for mobile devices, and even self-driving cars–many of these are developed by Google X–their secret skunk work lab.
I really like Google’s concept of going for the “moon shot” rather than just tweaking technology to try and stay ahead of the competition, temporarily.
And as in space, there is so much territory to explore, Google believes it is attacking just .1% of the opportunities out there, and that the tech industry as a whole is attacking maybe 1% in aggregate–that leaves 99% or plenty of opportunity for all innovators and inventors out there.
To get to 2030 and beyond–we’re just at the tip of the innovation iceberg! 😉
I am an avid follower of everything technology and trends, but am tired of hearing about cloud, mobile, and social computing.
It’s time to get over it with the agenda of the past and get on with it with the future of technology.
In the attached graph is my Technology Forecast 2013, and here is where I see us going forward:
1) Service Provision–Cost-cutting and consolidation into the cloud is a wonderful idea and it has had it’s time, but the future will follow consumer products, where one flavor does not fit all, and we need to have globalization with a local flavor to provide for distinct customer requirements and service differentiators, as well as classified, proprietary and private systems and information.
2) Service Delivery–Mobile is here and the iPhone is supreme, but the future belongs to those that deliver services not only to remote devices, but in wearable, implantable, and even human augmentation.
3) Human Interaction–Social computing epitomized by Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and many more is a cool way in interact with others virtually, but wall posts, email, and chats are getting cliche–next up conjoining with others with capabilities such as telepathic communication, mind melding collaboration, and even virtual sex for the outlandish.
4) Robotics and Artificial Intelligence–With something like 10,000 drones flying the friendly and not-so friendly skies and even drones that autonomously land on aircraft carriers, the next robot is coming to the ground near you–drones will become (an)droids and will eventually have the AI to become part of our everyday society.
5) Service Assurance–Enough playing defense with a sprinkling of offense against our worst enemies–it’s past time to move from trying to stop-gap infiltrators and do damage control once we’ve been robbed blind, and instead move to a hunter-killer mentality and capability–the price of being a bad boy on the Internet goes way up and happens in realtime.
6) Data Analytics–Big data isn’t a solution, it’s the problem. The solution is not snapshot pretty graphics, but realtime augmented reality–where data is ingrained in everything and transparent realtime–and this becomes part of our moment-by-moment decision processes.
7) Biotechnology–Biometrics sounds real cool–and you get a free palm reading at the same time, but the real game changer here is not reading people’s bio signatures, but in creating new ones–with not only medical cures, but also new bio-technological capabilities.
8) Nanotechnology–Still emerging, quantum mechanics is helping us delve into the mysteries of the universe, with applications for new and advanced materials, but the new buzzword will be nano-dust, where atomic and molecular building blocks can be used on-the-fly to build anything, be anywhere, and then recycled into the next use.
Overall, I see us moving from mass produced, point-to-point solutions to more integrated end-to-end solutions that fit individual needs–whether through continued combinations of hardware, software, and services, man-machine interfaces/integration, and building blocks that can be shaped and reused again and again.
From my perspective, there a seeming lull in innovation, but the next big leap is around the corner.
(Source Graphic: Andy Blumenthal)
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